Tycoon's War

Canas proposed the later exchange of Costa Ricans who survived with “more than twenty prisoners who are in our power, and whose names I will send you, in a detailed list.”² No such list was ever received, and there was no evidence the Costa Ricans spared any American prisoners. When the ARN reoccupied La Virgen and San Jan del Sur in early May, Walker instructed his doctors to do what they could for the Costa Rican cholera sufferers. For the time being, Walker wisely kept out of Rivas, the center of the outbreak. When he later reoccupied the city, he had Don Francesco Ugarte tracked down and arrested for betraying the wounded American soldiers on April 11. Found hiding in the village of Obraje, Ugarte was in short order tried, convicted, and hanged.

In Walker’s estimation, only 500 of the 3500 Costa Rican troops who invaded Nicaragua returned home alive; combat and cholera between them took 3000 lives.³ But the Costa Rican calamity hadn’t ended there. The survivors took cholera back to Costa Rica with them, and it swiftly spread through the little nation, killing men, women, and children. By the time the epidemic had run its course, 10,000 Costa Ricans had perished, out of a population of just 112,000. The epidemic even claimed the life of Juan Rafael Mora’s vice president, Francisco Oreamuno.

In the United States, news of Walker’s military reverse at Rivas briefly dented his reputation as the unstoppable “gray-eyed man of destiny”—as Walker’s own newspaper, El Nicaraguense, called him. The astonishing news that the Costa Ricans had been driven out of Nicaragua within weeks by a disastrous cholera epidemic was greeted in the United States with both astonishment and joy. Walker was given credit by many for luring the Costa Ricans into Nicaragua so they could be destroyed by the disease. Some of his supporters now considered him a genius. His opponents, like President Mora and Cornelius Vanderbilt, would have considered him merely lucky.

Meanwhile, Walker’s army had grown—two hundred recruits had escaped the D.A.’s attention on April 8 and come down from New York on the Orizaba’s maiden voyage. The new arrivals more than canceled out Walker’s losses at Rivas—fifty-eight killed, sixty-two wounded, and thirteen missing.⁴ But the three hundred through passengers on that same Orizaba sailing were stranded in Nicaragua for a month, for Morgan and Garrison had yet to organize a steamer between San Juan del Sur and San Francisco. And a number of those passengers, forced to sit at La Virgen for four weeks, came down with cholera; some died there. To the relief of the frustrated surviving passengers, a Morgan and Garrison steamer, the Sierra Nevada, dropped anchor on May 19 and took them on board for the last leg of their trip to California. Understandably, those passengers were far from pleased about their enforced stay in cholera-ridden Nicaragua. Neither was William Walker. After all the promises from Morgan and Garrison, the businessmen had failed to keep up their end of the bargain.

It turned out that Morgan and Garrison had been banking on acquiring the Transit Company’s San Francisco-based Sierra Nevada from Cornelius Vanderbilt. Garrison had put up the loan for Vanderbilt to build the ship back in 1851. And when the mortgage came due at the end of March 1856, Garrison had foreclosed. This had forced the auction of the ship, and Garrison had put in the winning bid, outwitting Vanderbilt’s son-in-law James Cross, who had been sent to San Francisco to prevent this very sort of thing from happening. This maneuver had cheaply secured the Sierra Nevada for the Morgan and Garrison Line, and she was now sailing under their colors. But the means of acquiring her, while clever, had cost time, and lives. Even worse for Walker, when these passengers arrived in San Francisco and told their harrowing tale, ARN enlistment inquiries at Parker Crittenden’s office, not surprisingly, dried up for months.

With the Costa Ricans knocked out of the short war, other opponents seized Walker’s attention—most important, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Walker had belatedly realized that Vanderbilt, until recently his tacit supporter, was now out to destroy him for taking away his Transit charter. When the Orizaba arrived at Greytown on April 17, Vanderbilt’s agent Hosea Birdsall slipped ashore while the ship was waiting for the river steamers to arrive and take off her passengers. As British Ambassador Crampton had promised Vanderbilt, a British warship, the Eurydice, was stationed at Greytown. Birdsall informed her commander, Captain John W. Tarleton, that there were five hundred filibuster recruits aboard the Orizaba and showed him an April 8 letter from Thomas Lord, vice president of the Accessory Transit Company in New York, authorizing Birdsall to seek the aid of the British navy in the recovery of Transit Company assets in Nicaragua.

Captain Tarleton subsequently sent the Orizaba’s Captain Tinklepaugh a note, announcing that he would not permit his passengers to go up the San Juan River and telling him to off-load them at some other port. The tough-as-nails Tinklepaugh, supported by Colonel Hornsby and James Walker, who were among his passengers, sent a written reply to the British officer containing an implied threat that the U.S. Navy would again be asked to bring its guns to Greytown if the British navy interfered with the Transit. Rattled by this and not wanting to damage his career by causing another Prometheus incident, Captain Tarleton looked over the Orizaba’s waybill and questioned Tinklepaugh’s passengers. After two Americans vowed and declared that they were genuine migrants to Nicaragua, Tarleton backed down, giving Tinklepaugh permission to land his passengers, to the frustration of Vanderbilt’s agent Birdsall.⁵

This victory for Walker was soon followed by another. Birdsall proceeded to attempt to secure the assets on Punta Arenas, the point across the bay from Greytown, and gave his letter of authorization from Thomas Lord to Joseph N. Scott, Morgan and Garrison’s manager in Nicaragua. Scott not only ignored Birdsall but also sent the Lord letter to William Walker, who would later quote verbatim from it.⁶ Birdsall, a very ineffective secret agent, was forced to return to New York without having done the slightest good for Vanderbilt in Nicaragua. The Commodore would have to devise another way to foil Walker.

Walker, meanwhile, turned his eye to the political sphere. During May, a supposedly national election for the Nicaraguan parliament and presidency had been held. With the war being prosecuted in the south against the Costa Ricans, the election had involved just the north of the country, with the presidential vote evenly spread among Maximo Jerez, Patricio Rivas, and Mariano Salazar. Following the election, Walker advised that “the irregularity in the voting” and the fact that “the Republic was so disturbed” meant that he “considered the election as invalid,” a view that, according to Walker, all parties endorsed.⁷

On May 30, after receiving reports that all was not right with President Rivas and his colleagues at León, Walker rode there accompanied by two hundred riflemen and forty Mounted Rangers. At León, Walker received an enthusiastic welcome from both the common people and President Rivas. That night, there was a lively public reception, where local musicians strummed guitars and sang songs in praise of American valor. But Walker sensed discord among members of the government. Maximo Jerez, who had rejoined Rivas’s cabinet, had a cloud over his face, while another minister, Mariano Salazar, made Walker feel uneasy. When Walker shared his concern with Rivas, the president put his colleagues’ odd behavior down to rumors that Guatemala and El Salvador were raising armies to invade Nicaragua. But something more suspicious seemed afoot; just what, Walker could not deduce.

News then arrived that Father Vijil, who, at Walker’s urging, had been sent to Washington, D.C., to replace the disgraced Parker French as Nicaraguan ambassador to the United States, had received a cordial welcome from Secretary of State Marcy and had been presented to President Franklin Pierce on May 14. When Walker began to discuss the possibility of Vijil coming home, with Jerez replacing him, Jerez became agitated. Then, on June 10, when Walker proposed that the cabinet authorize a new general election, Rivas and Jerez opposed the idea. After Walker insisted, the cabinet endorsed the new election, setting an election date for later that month.

On his way back to the capital, Walker made a halt at the hill town of Masaya. And there, silently, reverently, he stood beside a grave at the Campo Seco, Masaya’s cemetery. It was the grave of his youngest brother, James. After James’s arrival in Nicaragua in April, Walker had commissioned him a lieutenant and sent him to Company A of the ARN’s newly formed Second Light Infantry Battalion, then stationed in Masaya. Once in Nicaragua, James had conciliated his elder brothers, convincing William to reconcile with black sheep, Norvell, and give him back his commission and his command. Intelligent and energetic, young James had proven such a success he was soon promoted to captain and given command of Company A. But in May, James had come down with cholera; he died on May 15. “Had his life been spared,” the Nashville Gazette was to lament when it published news of James Walker’s death, “he would doubtless have been of essential service in the great struggle for the republican liberty in Nicaragua.”⁸

As Walker lingered sadly there in Masaya, a dispatch from the north caught up with him. Colonel Natzmer, his military commander at León, warned that President Rivas and Minister Jerez had suddenly withdrawn farther north to Chinandega and that Jerez, as war minister, had ordered Natzmer to remove his troops from parts of León. Suspecting that Rivas and Jerez were about to move against him, Walker promptly ordered all his troops to withdraw into the southern half of the country. Once back in Granada, Walker published a decree dissolving President Rivas’s provisional government and appointing Fermin Ferrer acting president. As leading Nicaraguans who supported Walker, including Don José Maria “Chelon” Valle and Don Mateo Pineda, hurried south to join him, Walker added his own name to the ballot paper for the upcoming election.

The three-day election began on Sunday, June 29, but only in the southern provinces occupied by Walker’s troops—who, as nominal Nicaraguan citizens, were also entitled to vote. In response, Rivas canceled the election in the northern provinces, declaring William Walker an enemy of the Nicaraguan people. The election in the south went forward, involving 23,000 of the nation’s 35,000 eligible male middle-class voters.⁹ According to results published in El Nicaraguense, Rivas received 867 votes; Salazar, 2,087; Ferrer, 4,447; and Walker, 15,835.¹⁰ A clear winner, William Walker had emulated fellow Tennesseean Sam Houston; he was president of his own country.

On election day, Legitimista leader and former president of Nicaragua, José Maria Estrada, had slipped back across the border from Honduras, where he had been given sanctuary by President “Butcher” Guardiola. At the town of Somotillo in the northern mountains, Estrada established an alternative Nicaraguan government, in opposition to both Walker and the Democraticos under Rivas. He also set about raising an army, appointing as his general Tomás Martinez, the former Nicaraguan Legitimista colonel and governor of Rivas who had fled to Costa Rica after being linked with Ponciano Corral’s treason. Within a day of Walker’s election as president of Nicaragua, former President Rivas, at Chinandega, called on all Nicaraguan men aged between fifteen and sixty to take up arms and drive the Americans from Nicaragua. At the same time, Rivas wrote to the governments of El Salvador and Guatemala, urging them to speedily send the troops they had previously promised for the overthrow of William Walker.

June proved to be a promising month for Walker—not only was he elected president of Nicaragua, but the Morgan and Garrison Transit operation was at last looking professional. Earlier in the month, the New York Daily Times had described it as “neither as permanent nor extensive as it is desirable it should be.”¹¹ But in late June, three Morgan and Garrison steamers had set sail for Nicaragua. On July 6, all three arrived at the same time and landed hundreds of American recruits to bolster Walker’s army—the Sierra Nevada from San Francisco, and, arriving the same day at Greytown, a ship each from New York and New Orleans. With the Orizaba sent around Cape Horn to join the Sierra Nevada on the Pacific route, two Morgan steamers taken from Mexican Gulf service, the Tennessee and the Calhoun, had commenced the New York run, while Morgan’s SS Texas would sail from New Orleans once a month. ¹²

When Major Waters and one hundred Rangers reconnoitered as far as León on July 8, they found the city barricaded and occupied by General Mariano Paredes and the five-hundred-man advance guard of a Guatemalan army sent in answer to Rivas’s call for help. Five hundred Salvadoran troops led by General Ramon Belloso landed from the sea on Nicaragua’s northwest coast that same day. They quickly marched south to link up with the Guatemalans in León.

Even as foreign troops occupied parts of northern Nicaragua, on Saturday, July 12, in the La Merced Church in Granada, thirty-three-year-old William Walker knelt on a cushion in front of a crucifix and took the oath of office as president and chief executive of the Independent Republic of Nicaragua, an oath administered by Fermin Ferrer. Invited guests filled the church, while outside, Walker’s army and the people of Granada waited. As Walker emerged into the sunlight and made his way to Government House, thousands of enthusiastic Granadinos and people from as far away as Masaya erupted in applause and cheers. They wore their Sunday best. The women’s dresses were all the colors of the rainbow. Children waved the lone-star flag.

Dressed simply in his black campaign coat, baggy trousers, and black felt hat as he celebrated his inauguration, Walker was described by a New York Tribune correspondent in the crowd as looking like “a grocery keeper from one of the poorer localities of the Sixth Ward.”¹⁴

Walker had previously assigned fifty Cubans who had arrived with Domingo de Goicuria to serve as the Presidential Guard of President Rivas. Now reconstituted as the Cuban Guard and wearing Spanish-style uniforms and shako headwear provided by Goicuria, the Cubans formed a phalanx around the new president as he addressed the crowd.

Some of Walker’s critics expected him to announce that Nicaragua would now be annexed to the United States of America, to become the next U.S. state, in the same way that Texas had been incorporated into the United States in 1845. The British certainly believed something of this nature was on the agenda, and that the U.S. government was conspiring with Walker to achieve it. British prime minister and former foreign minister Lord Palmerston would write to his foreign minister, Lord Clarendon, that the Americans were “such rogues, and such disagreeable rogues,” he feared that “by the indirect agency of such men as Walker and his followers some independent North American State would now be established in Central America, in alliance with the United States if not in Union with them; in short Texas over again.”¹⁵

But when Walker made his inaugural address, he surprised his critics and some of his supporters. “Nicaragua,” he declared, as his lone-star flag fluttered from the spire of Granada’s Parochial Church behind him, “will control her own destiny at any cost, and will deny the rights of other powers, either neighboring or distant, to occupy or dispose of any part of her territory.”¹⁶

Walker’s military band played, his artillery boomed out a twenty-one-gun presidential salute. The people cheered. His soldiers gave him three deepthroated huzzahs. The bells of the city’s six churches rang out. Skyrockets screamed into the azure sky. But now, the new ruler of Nicaragua had to cement his rocky throne.

That evening, there was an inauguration banquet at Government House. Among the fifty guests were U.S. Ambassador John Wheeler, foreign consuls, and Catholic clergy. Walker’s senior officers, including three generals, were present. Now that he was president, he had made himself a major general, which allowed him to reward Charles Hornsby, Edward Sanders, and Domingo de Goicuria with the rank of brigadier general. His senior Nicaraguan supporters were there—among them loyal old Chelon Valle and the three men whose cabinet appointments Walker would announce within two days—Fermin Ferrer as minister for foreign relations, Mateo Pineda as minister for war, and Manuel Carrascosa as minister of hacienda and public credit.

Walker was not a drinker, so the wines used for the numerous toasts that evening were all light. Walker himself proposed a toast to President Pierce of the United States. And then, as the night became merrier, one of Walker’s officers stood, raised his glass, and, with a broad grin, proposed: “To Uncle Billy.”

On July 18, the remaining units of General Paredes’s Guatemalan army marched into León from the north. That same day, senior military representatives from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador met at the council house on León’s plaza with Patricio Rivas and other Nicaraguan Democratico leaders. In that meeting, the generals and colonels signed a concordant in which all parties recognized Rivas as the legitimate president of Nicaragua and which pledged their countries to an alliance that would not rest until Walker and his Yankees had been ejected from Central America.

From now on, the Central American states and parties participating in the coalition against Walker would be known to friend and foe alike as “the Allies.” It was the first time in two decades that the countries of Central America had stopped fighting each other and come together in a joint cause. Thanks to William Walker. Thanks also to Cornelius Vanderbilt, for it had been his money that helped arm the troops from Guatemala and El Salvador—money received by those countries’ ambassadors in Washington. Not only had the Allies gone to war with Walker, but more important, Vanderbilt, who had more money than all the Central American governments put together, had gone to war with Walker. For Vanderbilt, this was not business; this was personal.

A week after Walker’s inauguration, there was another function at Granada’s Government House. This gala evening was attended by Granada’s elite. The centers of attraction were two American guests of the new president. Elderly General William F. Cazneau was a former general with the army of the Republic of Texas who had participated in the defeat of Santa Anna’s Mexican army in 1836. He’d also had the grim task of burying the moldering American dead—legendary Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie among them—after Santa Anna’s siege of the Alamo. Cazneau had also been present at the inauguration of Sam Houston as president of Texas. The general was now American commissioner to the Dominican Republic and was associated with Nicaragua’s director of migration, Joseph Fabens, in various business ventures in the Caribbean.

Cazneau was accompanied by his equally renowned wife, Jane. Under the pseudonym Cora Montgomery, she had been one of the most influential U.S. journalists for decades. In an article in the United States Democratic Review some years earlier, she had proposed the concept of Manifest Destiny—that it was U.S. destiny to expand its borders to the Pacific and elsewhere, a position later adopted by U.S. politicians on both sides of the aisle. Fifty-one-year-old Jane was all for U.S. annexation of Cuba and the Central American states, and over the past year, she had written articles in various American journals, praising William Walker to the skies. Now she had come to deliver the praise personally—and to offer the new president of Nicaragua policy advice.

Walker was able to tell his guests that he was introducing new measures that would enable the rapid Americanization of Nicaragua. Already, he had decreed that English was now a language of equal value to Spanish in Nicaraguan courts of law. And he was moving to set the republic’s government on a sound financial footing by issuing millions of dollars’ worth of government bonds in the United States, backed by Nicaraguan land. He was abolishing existing high tariffs on imported goods such as cloth, tools, farm implements, and wine—a move designed to encourage American colonists—and in their place would levy a licensing tax on retailers and manufacturers.

More important, Walker had ordered the confiscation of property owned by “enemies of the Republic” and of people who assisted those enemies, appointing William Rogers to the posts of undersecretary of property and commissioner for confiscations. Already, Walker was drafting a list that would before long contain the names of thirty-two leading Nicaraguan families and cover fifty-six ranches and twenty-one town houses. Confiscations would begin in August, followed by property auctions to be advertised in the press in New York, New Orleans, and San Francisco. When put under the hammer in September, the properties would be valued at $753,000.¹⁸ Another fifty-seven families would be added to the list after the initial confiscations.

The highlight of the July 19 gala at Government House was a speech by Ambassador Wheeler, who read the gathering a letter from Secretary Marcy in Washington: “I am directed by the President of the United States to notify you that I am instructed to establish relations with this State.”¹⁹ After applause resounded around Government House’s executive chamber, the stout ambassador continued. “The government of the United States hopes to unite cordially with you in the fixed purpose of preventing any foreign power that may attempt to impede Nicaragua’s progress by any interference whatever. The great voice of my nation has spoken. Its words must not be unheeded.”²⁰

As President Walker shook the hand of the ambassador and received the congratulations of his guests, he knew that Wheeler had deliberately misinterpreted Marcy’s instructions. Once President Rivas had moved to León, away from Walker’s direct influence, Marcy had intended that the Rivas government be recognized, not Walker’s new regime—of which he would not learn for some weeks yet. But Marcy had made the mistake of not defining in his letter which Nicaraguan government the United States was recognizing, and Wheeler capitalized on that error to make it appear that Walker had U.S. backing.

Marcy would be livid when he learned of this and would again urge President Pierce to authorize Wheeler’s recall. But “Wheeler had a warm friend in the President,” a colleague of Wheeler’s would later write. “And his earnest and long tried friend, the Hon James C. Dobbin, was Secretary of the Navy.” With friends like these, “he was in no danger of being recalled.”²¹

A vast crowd had gathered in the Granadine Plaza. It was Sunday, August 3, and the city was to witness another execution by firing squad. This time, the victim was to be Democratico leader Mariano Salazar, a minister in Patricio Rivas’s opposition government in the north

Salazar had been captured at sea, ironically by a vessel he had previously part-owned. That vessel was the schooner San José, the same vessel used by Walker and the Originals to escape from San Juan del Sur the previous year after the First Battle of Rivas. Walker had confiscated the San Jose, renamed her the Granada, armed her with two cannon, and appointed Lieutenant Callender Irvine Fayssoux to be her commander. Thirty-six-year-old Fayssoux, a dashingly handsome, bearded native of Missouri, had served in the navy of the Republic of Texas and had been with Lopez in 1850 during his failed Cuban revolution. Only arriving in Nicaragua recently, Fayssoux had worked briefly but efficiently as Walker’s secretary.

The crowd watched as the white-shirted Democratico minister was placed on a chair in front of a church wall and his firing squad lined up in front of him. According to Walker, the Granadinos had no love for Salazar, regarding him as “the author of most of the misfortunes they had undergone during the civil war.”²² Salazar had personally put up money to equip Democratico units that had subsequently looted the shops of Granada and burned the Jalteva Church during the siege of 1854. Walker would say that the Granadinos “regarded it as a special providence that he should be taken by a schooner he had once owned.”²³ Salazar’s fate had been sealed after he’d been found carrying Allied dispatches when captured en route to Guatemala by Fayssoux.

Once Patricio Rivas learned of Salazar’s capture, he had arrested Dr. Joseph Livingston, an American resident of León and former U.S. consul who had aided Walker when he’d first arrived in Nicaragua. Rivas had announced that if Salazar was released, Livingston would also be set free. In response, Ambassador Wheeler had sent a strongly worded letter to General Belloso, Allied commander in chief at León, warning that if as much as a hair on Livingston’s head was harmed, a severe reaction could be expected from the U.S. government. As for Salazar, Wheeler had said, he was a general of an illegal faction opposed to the legitimate government of Nicaragua. Rivas, bluffed by Wheeler and fearful of U.S. government retribution, spared his American hostage and deported him.

In the Granadine Plaza, a fusillade rang out. The bullet-riddled body of Mariano Salazar slumped to the ground. Granadinos cheered. A doctor moved forward to certify death. With the day’s entertainment concluded, the crowd began to disperse. In that crowd were two men, an American and an Englishman, whom circumstance had thrown together. Tall, dark-haired, with a long face and a jutting jaw, Sylvanus H. Spencer was a New Yorker of around thirty years of age who until recently had been an employee of the Accessory Transit Company as master of the San Juan River steamer Machuca.²⁴ But Spencer had fallen out with the new Morgan and Garrison management and was out of a job. His colleague, and the elder of the pair, was Englishman William Robert Clifford Webster. In May, Webster had set up in business at Granada as a migration agent, hoping to profit from the wave of immigrants coming to Nicaragua from the United States. But he hadn’t found favor with either President Walker or Ambassador Wheeler. It is unclear whether Walker and Wheeler were aware that to this point in his career, Webster had left “a trail of forgery, swindling and defrauding,” using a variety of names, including Clifford, Waters, Brown, and Simpson.²⁵ But either way, their lack of patronage meant that Webster’s latest business venture had failed.

Both Spencer and Webster were running out of money, and both were very interested in the news that the Allies had assembled an army at León, an army that could march on Granada any day. Spencer and Webster had been discussing a way they might profit from their local knowledge. Neither man had any love for William Walker—after all, both were out of work because of him. They believed they had a way to bring about the downfall of President Walker. The trick was finding someone prepared to pay them to turn that idea into reality, and pay them well.

The pair would have thought about going to the Allies with their idea. But they knew that the Central Americans didn’t like gringos; besides, they didn’t have any money. Spencer and Webster would have thought about talking to the British government. It was common knowledge, reinforced for both men during visits to Greytown, that the British wanted Walker out of Nicaragua. If the British weren’t interested in their plan, there was always the U.S. government. But the pair knew better than to approach U.S. ambassador Wheeler—he was clearly in William Walker’s corner. Spencer and Webster would have to go to the United States.

Of course, there was always the possibility that before long, the Allied armies would attack Granada, defeat the filibusters, and put Walker in front of a firing squad here in this very plaza. In which case Spencer and Webster’s idea would be worthless. But few people in Granada believed that the Central Americans could defeat Walker’s Yankee soldiers. By this time, Allied troops had been in León for four weeks. Perhaps they would never garner the courage to advance south; that seemed to be the belief of the Granadinos. It was possible that the Allies would just sit there in the north, posturing and arguing among themselves, until Walker had enough fresh American recruits to take the offensive and drive the invaders back across the northern frontier. As Spencer and Webster ambled away from the execution scene, they discussed their options. If, after a few more weeks had passed, the Allies had not made a move, Spencer and Webster would make their own.

Within days of Salazar’s execution, the Morgan and Garrison steamer Texas arrived at Greytown after leaving New Orleans at the end of July. Because of April’s Nicaraguan cholera scare, there were only a few recruits for Walker aboard, but one particular passenger was about to change the complexion of Walker’s administration.

Pierre Soule had represented Louisiana in the U.S. Senate and been U.S. ambassador to Spain. A handsome and charismatic man, he’d been born in France and spoke many languages, including Castilian, the language of Spanish nobility. “His fine head and noble air made a deep impression on the people of the country,” Walker would say.²⁶ James Jamison, promoted to captain and company commander since the retreat from Rivas and the death of Captain Breckenridge from his Rivas wound, met the former senator in Granada and was greatly impressed by him. Soule was, said Jamison, “the most fascinating person I ever saw.”²⁷

Soule also charmed the Granadinos. They called him “Your Excellency” and listened to him “with mingled delight and reverence.”²⁸ But sitting across the desk from President Walker in his Granada office, Soule, an impressively large man of fifty-five, clean-shaven and square-faced, with thick silver hair, held no punches. Officially, he had come to Nicaragua to discuss the raising of five hundred thousand dollars in the United States via the sale of Nicaraguan government bonds. As a result of an agreement Soule reached with Walker, a presidential decree would set up a commission to oversee the issue and sale of the bonds. But that was only part of Soule’s mission.

Soule, although French-born, was very much a Southerner in mind-set and a firm advocate of slavery. He fervently counseled Walker to introduce slavery into Nicaragua. Under the constitution of the federated states of Central America, dating back to 1826, slavery had been abolished. When Nicaragua left the federation in 1838, its Constituent Assembly had endorsed the slavery ban. But, said Soule, the slave-owning elite of America’s South would only invest in Nicaragua if they could use slave labor to cheaply work their properties. Soule himself would buy La Merced, one of the largest confiscated rural properties on offer at the September auction, with plans to plant it with cotton. But, he now warned Walker, he would only invest further in Nicaragua if Walker legalized slavery once more, allowing Soule to bring in slaves. Other Southerners thought the same way, said Soule. And without Southern investment, he assured the new Nicaraguan head of state, the Walker presidency was doomed.