16

COURTS-MARTIAL AND FIRING SQUADS

TO MEET THE COSTA RICAN THREAT, WALKER HAD ORDERED HIS TROOPS in the north to withdraw to Granada, and with the sun sinking below the hills, the First Rifle Battalion marched into Granada from León. General Walker heard them arrive. He was at the Vieja house on the plaza, lying in his bed, bathed in sweat. The sound of tramping feet wafted in through the open window, whose shutters had been thrown back to admit the cooling evening breeze off Lake Nicaragua. Walker was burning up. He couldn’t move. He had to ask his doctor what day it was. Saturday, March 22, said Surgeon General Israel Moses. The doctor looked worried, for the general, who seemingly had been immune to the epidemics claiming the lives of so many of his men, had suddenly come down with yellow fever. And yellow fever has a 50 percent mortality rate—it was even odds whether Walker would survive.

That same day, one of the lake steamers reached Granada, and fifty new recruits came ashore, scrambling over the new jetty being built beside the ruined old fort and forming up in front of their company commander. They had come from New Orleans on the last sailing of the Prometheus before word reached the United States that the Transit Company’s charter had been annulled. And with the new arrivals came Parker H. French, the inimitable one-armed ambassador rejected by Secretary of State Marcy. After leaving his secretary Dillingham in Manhattan, French had made his way to New Orleans, where, apparently using a false name, he’d managed to find a berth on the Prometheus.

French brazenly proceeded to Government House, planning to report to General Walker. With Walker gravely ill across the plaza, one of the general’s senior officers dealt with French. Word of French’s ejection from Washington had preceded him to Granada—as had, finally, the story of the Overland Express debacle of 1850. One of Walker’s men, Horace Bell, would say that when French presented himself at the “National Palace,” as Bell called Government House in Granada, he was roughly taken by the shoulders, faced about, and kicked out of the country.¹

 

 

By the evening of the next day, Sunday, Walker, shaking, pale, and weak, his aching head feeling as if it was being crushed, willed himself to sit up. His aides, Captain Dewitt Clinton and the Cuban F. A. Laine, then helped him to the dining table. A note was put in the general’s hands. From Major Brewster at Rivas, it delivered to Walker the first gut-wrenching news of the disaster at Santa Rosa. The news had been conveyed by a mounted survivor of the brief battle, who had ridden hard for three days to reach Rivas. Other survivors from the Corps of Observation would straggle into Rivas for days and weeks to come, many in tattered clothing, some without boots, a few without weapons.

Against Dr. Moses’ advice, an agitated Walker decided to take one of the lake steamers down to La Virgen to seek more information from Santa Rosa survivors at Rivas. In the night, the steamer plowed south, taking Walker and members of his staff down the lake. By Monday’s dawn, the steamboat was tying up to the long jetty that now extended well out into Virgin Bay, and Walker went ashore and headed for Rivas.

Dr. Moses’ prescribed treatment for yellow fever was a series of cold baths to reduce the general’s temperature. “The news of the stragglers from Santa Rosa was a better tonic than a cold bath,” Walker would later note. “The necessity for mental and moral action has a wonderful effect in driving the reluctant body to perform.”² Though still suffering from the fever, Walker issued fresh orders. The majority of his army was to concentrate at Rivas. President Rivas was to transfer the seat of government northwest to León. There, Walker hoped, Democratico leaders such as Maximo Jerez would rejoin the Rivas government now that the country was under attack by a Legitimista army. Before Rivas departed Granada, he signed a proclamation drawn up by Walker declaring martial law in the southern and eastern provinces, making General Walker’s word law there.

As Walker was establishing his new headquarters in a building on the plaza in Rivas, Louis Schlessinger walked in. Overcoming their surprise, Walker’s staff officers closed around him. Schlessinger was full of excuses for the Santa Rosa debacle, blaming the inexperience of the men under him and accusing them of lacking “disciplined courage.” And he boldly proposed to organize a new force for the occupation of Guanacaste.³

By this time, several of Schlessinger’s officers had also returned to Rivas, and all, particularly Cal O’Neal, whom Walker trusted implicitly, were scathing in their criticism of Schlessinger. Some even implied he had taken money from the Costa Ricans, feeling certain that the enemy knew of the filibuster column’s advance and had been lying in wait for the filibusters. Walker couldn’t believe it of Schlessinger. “Such conduct was not suited to his timid nature,” he would later say. “Had he sold his men, he would never have returned to Nicaragua.”⁴ Despite this, Walker ordered his arrest; Schlessinger was charged with neglect of duty, ignorance of his duties as a commanding officer, and cowardice in the face of the enemy. Until the court met, Walker set him free on his parole.

Within days, Schlessinger slipped out of Rivas and disappeared. The New York Times reported on his desertion, commenting, “It is supposed that he went over to the Costa Ricans, having sold himself to them before the battle.” ⁵ Schlessinger was tried in his absence. The court-martial found him guilty on all charges, including an additional charge of desertion, sentencing him to death by firing squad. A subsequent standing order issued by Walker called for Schlessinger to be shot on sight.

Louis Schlessinger’s story appeared in the press around the world, and in September, French journalist Alfred Assolant revealed that Schlessinger had never been an officer in Lajos Kossuth’s revolutionary army. In fact, Schlessinger was not even Hungarian. An Austrian, he had been a corporal serving in the Austrian army in Hungary at the time of the Kossuth uprising, having started out as a drummer boy. To escape punishment for an infringement, Corporal Schlessinger had deserted from the Austrian army and joined Kossuth’s rank and file.

 

 

On the afternoon of Tuesday, March 25, five days after the Battle of Santa Rosa, fifteen of the eighteen filibuster prisoners were herded into a sun-scorched courtyard in the Costa Rican town of Liberia. General Mora had withdrawn to Liberia with his wounded and his prisoners, and there he had been joined by his brother, the president, and the three thousand men of the main body of the Costa Rican army.

During the morning, there was a court-martial in the town, at which all eighteen prisoners had been tried for invading Costa Rica under arms. All were found guilty, with fifteen sentenced to death. Two filibusters, Phillip Toohey, an American, and Theodore Heinung, a Prussian, had their sentences commuted by President Mora. Shortly after the Costa Rican declaration of war on March 1, the president had issued a decree proclaiming that any man found bearing arms against the Costa Rican government would face the death penalty. It appears that Toohey and Heinung may have been unarmed when captured; they were carted off to prison in San José. A third man was also spared—with the aid of his pad of pen-and-ink sketches, George Forrester Williams was able to convince the court that he was an unarmed newspaper correspondent. Williams would be taken north with the advancing Costa Rican army and released on Nicaraguan soil—President Mora wanted newspaperman Williams to tell America all about how the Yankee filibusters had been routed at Santa Rosa by the Costa Ricans.⁶

As 4:00 P.M. approached, the fifteen condemned men were lined up against a long, bleak adobe wall. All were unwashed; their clothes were grimy and smelly. Several wore rough, bloodied bandages. A company of Costa Rican riflemen formed up in front of them and busily loaded their weapons. The chaplain of the Costa Rican army, Father Calvo Francisco, conversed briefly with several Irish Catholics in the line of haggard prisoners, then withdrew. Father Francisco spoke a little English, and he had earlier conversed with the prisoners and learned their names and where they were from. While they were all branded filibusteros Yanquis, only three of the condemned men were actually citizens of the United States—Isaac Rosey, John Guillin, and Theodore Lindecker.⁷

The remainder had migrated to the United States to make new lives for themselves, only to be attracted to Nicaragua by visions of adventure. Five of them were Irish; when questioned by the priest, these sons of Erin had declared that they were members of the green Erin brigade. The Costa Ricans subsequently came to believe that the “Green Erin Brigade” was a unit in Walker’s army. Of the other condemned men, two were Greek, one German, one Prussian, one French, one Romanian, and one Panamanian.⁸ Most had only arrived in Granada on March 9 as part of the Goicuria enlistment. Meeting with a firing squad just three weeks later was certainly not what they had in mind when they signed up in New Orleans to colonize Nicaragua.

Precisely at 4:00 P.M., an officer called out a command. The men of the firing squad raised their weapons to their shoulders and took aim at preselected targets. The condemned filibusters, staring at the business end of scores of muskets, called out final farewells to each other. The officer barked another command. The muskets boomed as one. Blood splattered the adobe. And the ill-fated filibusters crumpled to the ground.

 

 

News of the defeat at Santa Rosa was a blow to the morale of Walker’s men. It led to heavy drinking and arguments about matters of honor. At the northern town of Matagalpa, where the company of Captain Jack Dunnigan was garrisoned, Lieutenant Kelley and Private Murphy had both fallen in love with the same beautiful chica, a local girl, and fueled by liquor, they fought a duel over her in the town’s main plaza.

With their comrades and the townspeople watching from the sidelines, Kelley and Murphy faced off. Murphy held a six-shot dragoon pistol at his side, Kelley, a five-shooter. As Captain Dunnigan was giving the pair instructions, Kelley, the younger of the two, raised his pistol and drew a bead on Murphy.

“Hold on now, Lieutenant Kelley,” called Private Murphy, an Irishman, “till the captain says the word, me boy!”⁹

On Dunnigan’s command, both men raised their pistols and fired. Kelley was struck in the foot and limped from the field of battle.

In Granada, Lieutenant James Jamison saw another duel take place. One of Walker’s aides, Captain Dewitt Clinton, took exception to some comment from Captain McArdle, a native of Albany, New York, and issued a challenge. On March 28, they met to satisfy honor. Sixty paces from the combatants, Jamison was among the numerous onlookers as Clinton and McArdle stood back to back and then took fifteen paces prior to turning. On the command from the referee to fire, Clinton fired harmlessly into the air. In the same spirit, McArdle casually pointed his pistol to one side and fired. McArdle’s bullet thumped into the ground at Jamison’s feet.

In another duel at Granada witnessed by Jamison, two lieutenants faced each other on the lake beach on the city’s eastern fringe. Both had taken the agreed number of paces and waited, with pistols at their sides, for the referee’s word to fire. Just then, a horseman, Lieutenant Morgan, who was another aide to General Walker, galloped up. It was no secret that Walker opposed dueling among his officers—it only robbed him of good men.

“Gentlemen,” called Lieutenant Morgan, “General Walker’s compliments, and he directs me to say that the duel may continue, but that he wishes to inform you that the survivor will be shot.” On that basis, the two lieutenants put up their pistols, shook hands, and walked away. ¹⁰

On the night of March 28, drinking by the troops in the capital was excessive, and a number of Walker’s men became very drunk. Brandy was the favorite filibuster tipple, or wine when the brandy ran out. When neither was available, the Americans resorted to the local guaro, which was more potent than either brandy or wine and could be had from Nicaraguan farmers for a few American dimes per bottle. In a Granada billiard hall that evening, the usually reserved Lieutenant Colonel Edward Sanders and the tetchy Major John Markham, infected by the prevailing gloom, drank more than usual. Both were intoxicated when they exchanged cross words, and before anyone could intervene, they were exchanging bullets with Colt six-shooters across billiard tables. Remarkably, neither they nor any bystanders were injured. The same could not be said for the billiard tables.

At morning parade the next day, many men were worse for wear as they attempted to form neat ranks in front of their general. Walker, who was still so ill from yellow fever he could barely sit astride his horse to take parade, was furious to see that his own brother, Captain Norvell Walker, was blind drunk. To make an example of him and to show that he had no favorites, Walker summarily withdrew Norvell’s commission and dismissed him from the Army of the Republic of Nicaragua.