Tycoon's War

When they were just half a mile from the city, the bells of its six churches began to ring out a rapid peal. Some Americans feared that the alarm was being sounded, but it turned out that this was a peal to celebrate an unexpected Legitimista victory two days before—in northern Nicaragua, a Legitimista army under Colonel Tomás Martinez had driven the Democratico army of the late General Munoz from the town of Pueblo Nuevo.

There was no sign of military activity in Granada as the column pushed on. The Nicaraguan state flag, of horizontal blue stripes separated by white stripes, could be seen hanging from the tall spire of the Parochial Church in the Granadine Plaza. Apart from the massive stone churches, some palatial private homes of wealthy Granadinos, and a few public buildings around the plaza, the city’s buildings were all single-storied—because of the danger of collapse during Nicaragua’s occasional earthquakes.

The city’s white-painted adobe mud walls glowed in the light of day as Colonel Hornsby and the advance guard reached huts on the northern outskirts of Granada. Farther inside the city limits, barricades could be seen in place across the wide, boulevard that led toward the city center. Hornsby ordered his men to throw off their bedrolls and coats, then led them forward at the jog. Soon they were charging the barricade, letting out bloodcurdling yells. Several fired on the run, gunning down sentries where they stood. After quickly taking the barricade, Hornsby and his men doubled on up the street. Behind them, Walker brought up the force’s main body.

Granada had been established by the Spanish in 1523. With its lakeside location, long boulevards, vast central plaza, and grand churches and public buildings in a mixture of Moorish and Spanish styles featuring graceful arches and shady arcades, Granada, a city of twenty-five thousand people and national capital of Nicaragua ever since the country left the Central American Federation in 1838, was considered the most beautiful metropolis in all

of Central America. But Walker’s men had no time to admire the scenery or appreciate the architecture as they dashed toward the plaza.

Hornsby’s tall, gaunt figure stood out as he led the charge through the suburbs. One barricade after another was rushed, with the Legitimistas manning them fleeing back up the broad street toward the plaza. It was only as some of the invaders diverted a block east to the convent next door to the San Francisco Church, Granada’s first house of worship, which was being used as a quartel by the Legitimista garrison, that any resistance was encountered—muskets popped from the convent windows. “But these were few and straggling.”² The quartel was quickly captured.

A victorious shout up ahead told Walker that the city’s main plaza had been gained. As Walker himself, sword in hand, reached the broad Granadine Plaza, he saw puffs of smoke to his left from Legitimista muskets being fired from the gallery of Government House. During Spanish occupation, this had been the house of the captain general of Nicaragua. While Walker was an obvious target for the marksmen at Government House, he wasn’t hit. But beside him, Colonel Valle’s unarmed drummer boy dropped down dead. Americans returned fire, then rushed Government House. Battering in doors, they thronged inside and roughly made prisoners of the few Legitimista troops defending the building. That was the extent of organized Legitimista resistance in the city.

Walker’s troops fanned out through the streets extending from the plaza, looking for Legitimista troops. They found these streets deserted. All the doors and shutters of the city had been rapidly closed when the first shots were heard. Here and there, the flag of one foreign country or another could be seen draped from a window to indicate that the residents were neutral foreign nationals. A few Legitimista prisoners were taken in the suburbs without a fight, but most of the defenders abandoned their capital, leaving behind stockpiles of weapons and ammunition in the city arsenal and gunpowder mill.

The proud city of Granada, which had resisted General Jerez’s siege for months in 1854, had fallen to William Walker’s small force in minutes. Three Legitimista soldiers were killed in the assault, while Colonel Valle’s drummer boy was the only Democratico casualty. The Americans of the Falange came through unscathed. In the coming weeks, when the story that Colonel William Walker and fewer than one hundred Americans had taken Granada in ten near bloodless minutes on October 12 reached the United States—news transmitted to the East and West Coasts via the Nicaragua Line’s ocean steamers—it would be headline news across the country. Editorial writers would praise Walker and his men to the skies. To the press, this was proof of the courage, constancy of purpose, and ingenuity of Americans and their superiority as soldiers. As one U.S. journal put it when discussing the war in Nicaragua eighteen months later, these were “the peculiar forces of character which distinguish us above other nations.”³

Cornelius Vanderbilt, reading these same reports and editorials in New York, would have had mixed feelings. On the one hand, the long-term future of Transit Company operations was made more secure by this extension of American influence in Nicaragua via Walker and his troops. That would have suited the Commodore, who was intent on covertly regaining control of the Transit Company. At the same time, Walker’s actions had the capacity to soothe the fears of potential Transit Route travelers who were worried about being caught in the middle of a civil war, meaning that in the immediate term, Transit business was likely to stabilize and even to pick up. That did not suit the Commodore. While the company’s fortunes were seen by the marketplace as waning, more shares would be disposed of by shareholders, further depressing the share price and allowing Vanderbilt to increase his shareholding for a song.

For the moment, Vanderbilt would have been perfectly happy for the Nicaraguan Transit Route to be thought of as a dicey proposition. Vanderbilt would not have thanked Walker for creating a contrary view. But for the moment, too, unaware of Walker’s ultimate intentions regarding the Transit Route, Vanderbilt would not have taken the adventurer’s actions personally. Vanderbilt’s benign view of Walker, like the situation in Nicaragua, was soon to change, dramatically.

Once Grenada was secured, Walker strolled to the American embassy. The U.S. minister—ambassadors at that time were called “ministers” to the host countries—was fifty-three-year-old John Hill Wheeler, a native of North Carolina. A stout, pompous man with thick gray hair and a handlebar mustache, Wheeler had sheltered one hundred American women and children at the embassy while the city was under assault. Once he knew that Americans were in charge in the city, he became one of the first residents to reopen his door. Walker politely presented the ambassador with his compliments and assured the frightened women and children filling Wheeler’s house and central courtyard that no harm would come to them.

Returning to the plaza, Walker spotted Democratico soldiers slinking away carrying goods looted in the city. Incensed, Walker drew his sword and arrested them. Colonel Valle subsequently agreed to enforce a looting ban among his troops, but he explained to Walker that this went against the past Legitimista habit of looting captured Democratico cities and towns, and many of Valle’s men had felt they were entitled to reciprocate. Valle was overjoyed that Granada had been taken, and taken so easily—after all the sacrifice of the previous year’s failed Democratico siege, which had cost Valle both a brother and a leg. He alone had known Walker’s secret plan to take the city via the lake, revealed to him at Realejo. He never divulged that secret to anyone, although, as he boarded the Vesta at Realejo to accompany Walker on the mission to the south, he had promised his daughters he would bring them back gifts from Granada.

As leading Legitimista politicians presented themselves to Walker at Government House during the morning, Valle, who nursed a bitter hatred for the Legitimistas, demanded that all opposition leaders be shot. But Walker knew that other Legitimista leaders around the country would not come to terms if they believed the American’s policy was, like theirs, one of executing any enemy who came into his hands. Walker would not sanction executions. He merely placed some Legitimista leaders under house arrest and put others on parole, accepting their word that they would not attempt to escape.

Meanwhile, Walker freed a hundred political prisoners from Granada’s city prison. With some of them under sentence of death, these prisoners had been forced by the Legitimistas to labor in Granada’s streets in chains. Most were Nicaraguans, but one was a U.S. citizen. Every one of them gratefully volunteered to join the fight for the Democraticos and was provided with arms captured from the Granada arsenal. Walker’s command had grown to 450 men.

Walker rose early on October 13, the day after his capture of Granada, and immediately went to work, appointing a local resident, Don Fermin Ferrer, as the new prefect of Granada, answerable to him. Wealthy, with a grand townhouse in the city and a large cattle property in the Chontales district in the country’s central north, Ferrer had a reputation for being a fair and honest man. Walker also employed the services of another Granada resident, Don Carlos Thomas, a multilingual importer and exporter, to help him write, in Spanish, a proclamations through which Walker would rule Granada for the time being.

The next day, a Sunday, Walker and a number of his officers attended 8:00 A.M. Mass at Granada’s Roman Catholic cathedral. This move was as much political in its motivation as it was spiritual. The conservative Legitimistas were known as the Church Party—because they supported and were in turn supported by the Catholic Church in Nicaragua. Not only did the little nation’s church leaders have the power to influence the hearts and minds of the people, but they were also among the country’s major landowners—large tracts of property were held by the church itself, and individual priests also owned farms and plantations; several even had gold mines in the mountainous east. To Walker, the long-term control of Nicaragua depended on the cooperation of the Catholic Church, so he embarked on a policy of making himself amenable to the church hierarchy.

Despite having been christened a Protestant, Walker quickly won the support of the Catholic curate of Granada, Father Agustin Vijil, who delivered a sermon at the Granada Mass of October 14 in which he pointed out “the necessity to the country of a force strong enough to curb” the civil war.⁴ The force, by inference, with the American officers sitting in front of him, was that led by Colonel Walker. What’s more, Walker would later reveal, Father Vijil “warmly cooperated” with him in his efforts to bring about peace and “made his counsel valuable to the negotiations which followed.”⁵

Walker did not plan to occupy Granada for long. He was already looking at the next step in a campaign mapped out before he even set foot in Nicaragua. Granada played no part in that plan. Unbeknownst to Cornelius Vanderbilt and everyone else connected with the Transit Company at the time, control of the Transit Route was Walker’s objective, and always had been, as his second contract with Provisional Director Castellon revealed. Walker later admitted that the Transit Route was “intrinsically more important to the Americans than the occupation of a town forty or fifty miles from” it. He regarded possession of the Legitimista capital “merely as a means of getting good terms from (General) Corral.”⁶ At this point, the municipal authorities of Granada offered Walker the presidency of the republic. He declined the offer but agreed to accept the post of commander in chief of the Army of the Republic of Nicaragua “to maintain order within the State,” should a new government of national unity be formed with representatives from all political persuasions.⁷

The Granada city authorities dispatched two emissaries to Rivas to meet with General Corral and discuss a peace treaty. The emissaries were authorized to say that Colonel Walker proposed that General Corral should play a prominent part in a new government of national unity and that Walker himself only sought the post of commander in chief of the new national army. At the same time, Walker put the lake steamer La Virgen at the disposal of the U.S. ambassador, John Wheeler, who volunteered to go also to Corral and urge a peaceful solution to the civil war. Wheeler was subsequently detained by the Legitimistas at Rivas, before escaping back to Granada two days later. Meanwhile, at the town of Nandaime, just to the south of Granada, the city’s emissaries met up with General Corral, who was on the march with his troops. The emissaries soon sent a message to Walker at Granada—General Corral refused to negotiate with them.

Next morning, Walker received a note from Corral himself, complaining that Democratico skirmishers had fired on his camp while he was meeting with the emissaries. Walker realized that while Corral was reluctant to deal with the Democraticos, he was trying to keep open the lines of communication with the American colonel. Walker responded with a note saying that as there was no armistice in place, he and his troops would continue to vigorously conduct the war against the Legitimistas. Corral replied, this time stating that no peace was possible based on the principles of the Democraticos. Walker did not respond.