Tycoon's War

Walker still had an ideological problem with slavery and consoled himself that he had not actually reinstated it in Nicaragua with his decree. He would write: “It was generally supposed that the latter reestablished slavery in Nicaragua. Whether this be a strictly legal deduction may be doubted; but the repeal of the prohibition certainly prepared the way for the introduction of slavery.”² But Walker outsmarted himself. While he had merely created the appearance of slavery’s reintroduction, his opponents, especially those in surrounding countries, seized on the Slavery Decree as proof that William Walker had come to enslave the peoples of Central America.

Despite this apparent concession by Walker to supporters in the United States, Domingo de Goicuria had found, in talks with financiers in both New Orleans and New York about the purchase of Nicaraguan bonds, that the money men failed to see either Nicaragua or the government of William Walker as secure investments. Time and again, Goicuria had been politely shown the door. So, not wishing to fail Walker, Goicuria had conceived a grand plan, one that would make his president and Cornelius Vanderbilt partners. It was a plan conceived in naïve ignorance of the fact that Vanderbilt was intent on destroying Walker as a matter of principle.

Without consulting his president back in Granada, the Cuban had come to West Fourth Street to propose that Commodore Vanderbilt loan William Walker’s government a quarter of a million dollars. This would reduce the government bond sales target by half and would encourage other investors to follow the Commodore’s lead. The idea made good business sense to Goicuria, because, in return for the loan, Vanderbilt would have his Transit Route rights across Nicaragua restored by Walker. Under Goicuria’s plan, the day that Vanderbilt resumed shipping services to Nicaragua, he would pay $100,000 to Walker’s government, with the remaining $150,000 payable within twelve months.³

Vanderbilt nodded. Oh, yes, indeedy, he could be quite amenable to Goicuria’s very interesting proposition. Then, to see how far he could manipulate the gullible Cuban, Vanderbilt told Goicuria he’d heard that a New York businessman by the name of George Law had recently purchased thousands of obsolete muskets from the U.S. Army, employing an English arms expert, Charles Frederick Henningsen, to rebore them to take the Minié rifle round, before selling them at a handsome profit. Vanderbilt didn’t tell Goicuria that he’d learned this while buying arms for the opponents of Walker or that Law was “Live Oak George,” one of the Commodore’s greatest competitors. Vanderbilt proposed that if Goicuria approached Law, without mentioning the Commodore, and purchased the weapons for Walker, Vanderbilt would put up the money for the acquisition—supposedly to prove to Walker that he was genuinely interested in Goicuria’s loan scheme. In reality, Vanderbilt was using Goicuria. Were Goicuria to obtain Law’s weapons, Vanderbilt would send them to the Allies.

Unaware that Vanderbilt was playing him for a fool, Goicuria rushed away to write immediately to Walker, seeking approval of his Vanderbilt loan scheme, at the same time planning to surprise Walker by later sending him thousands of free Minié rifles, courtesy of the nice Mr. Vanderbilt.

William Walker looked around the Jalteva Plaza outside the gutted remains of Granada’s Jalteva Church, a burned-out relic of the civil war, as his troops industriously filled ammunition pouches and checked their weapons in preparation for the march against the Allied army. The enemy was near, having advanced to occupy Masaya, just twenty-five miles to the west of Granada. It was a little before midday on Saturday, October 11, and Walker was finally going on the offensive.

As General Belloso’s combined army advanced south in late September and early October, Walker’s troops had pulled out of one town after another ahead of them. The Allies had briefly occupied Managua on September 24, pausing just long enough to put Walker-appointed Prefect Herrera, brother of the late Captain Herrera, in front of a firing squad and to lodge Colonel Estrada’s San Jacinto wounded, including Sergeant Andres Castro, in a hospital. ⁴ As the Allies advanced, Walker’s garrison at Masaya had left in such a hurry it had abandoned a field gun in the middle of the road, allowing the Allies to add it to their arsenal. At Nindiri, three miles from Masaya, Belloso’s main force had linked up with General Martinez’s Army of the Septentrion. As many as twenty-three hundred Allied troops now occupied Masaya.

With the Morgan and Garrison line now operating efficiently, Walker had received numerous new recruits over the past few months. During the same period, he’d suffered his first large-scale desertions. In July, twenty-three men who had arrived from New Orleans with their own weapons and saddles turned from Rangers to outlaws, raiding French gold mines in the rugged east, until, on August 8, Legitimistas under Captain Damaso Calo shot down twenty-one of them on a mountain road. Then there was the case of the two hundred German recruits from New York—within two weeks of their arrival in Nicaragua, only a handful were still marching for Walker; the rest, finding the soldiering life not to their liking, had slipped away in the night. Despite the desertions, Walker had 1,200 men fit for duty, 135 of them officers. With 200 men at Rivas and San Juan del Sur guarding the Transit and leaving another 200 to garrison Granada under General Birkett D. Fry, 800 men were available for an assault on Masaya.⁵

At noon, as Walker’s army marched out of Granada past waving Granadinos, pride of place in the column was taken by two twelve-pound mountain howitzers recently received from New York along with four hundred Minié rifles, courtesy of a surprise benefactor—“Live Oak” George Law, Cornelius Vanderbilt’s fierce competitor. After Law had been approached by Domingo de Goicuria with an offer to buy his Minié rifles, Law had agreed and Goicuria had arranged to send them to Central America aboard the El Dorado. At the last minute, Law had discovered that Goicuria intended paying with Vanderbilt’s money. Law had not only backed out of the deal but also sent some of his rifles to Walker, as a gift, to spite the Commodore.⁷

Law had additionally given twenty-five thousand dollars to arms expert Charles Henningsen to purchase heavy ordnance for Walker.⁸ The howitzers were a product of that largesse. To avoid the attention of New York authorities, they’d been sent to Granada disguised, without their gun carriages. Walker himself was unaware of the extent of the problems his agents in New York were having with the district attorney’s office and had blamed the lack of carriages on bungling by his Manhattan representatives. It took carpenters in Granada a week to fashion carriages of a sort for the two guns, but now Walker was ready to blast the Allies out of Masaya.

The lumbering guns and an inclining mountain road turned the march into a crawl. It was 9:00 P.M. before Walker’s eight hundred men completed the trek to Masaya. In darkness, the Americans occupied high ground on either side of the road to the east of the town. Ahead, the Allies had built adobe barricades across all roads leading into the town. Pickets exchanged the occasional shot with Allied cavalry scouts, but otherwise, the night passed without incident.

As the sun edged over the horizon behind them, Captain James Jamison and the men of two light infantry companies were dug in around the pair of howitzers, which were primed and loaded. As soon as the light improved, artillery commander Captain Schwartz commenced firing. With impressive detonations, the two big guns let fly, and twelve-pound shells lobbed over the outskirts of the town and then plummeted earthward to explode in the Plazuela San Sebastian, a small square on the eastern side of Masaya, scattering startled Allied troops.

Several more rounds were pumped into the little plaza before Captain Thomas Dolan and fifty black-shirted riflemen rose up and charged the nearest barricade on the city outskirts. Dolan’s men only saw the bare heels of withdrawing soldiers in white. Hurdling the barricade, the Americans pounded along the street toward the San Sebastian square. Reaching the plaza, Dolan’s men found that Allied troops had left behind a hearty uneaten breakfast, which the Americans happily gulped down.

General Belloso pulled all his troops back to Masaya’s main plaza, with the streets leading to it having been barricaded. So Walker called for Captain Hesse. A civil engineer in private life, Hesse had formed a small unit of miners and sappers, and as Walker’s troops occupied buildings in the eastern part of town, Hesse’s sappers attacked the adobe walls of houses on both sides of the main street with picks and crowbars. Slowly, laboriously, they burrowed through the walls, allowing riflemen to pour through the openings to the next houses, where digging began all over again. It is probable that Hesse or another of Walker’s senior officers had been in General Zachary Taylor’s forces ten years earlier, when the U.S. Army had used the same technique of bombard and burrow to take the town of Monterey from the Mexican Army during the Mexican War. Schwartz’s howitzers again lobbed shells into the main plaza, but this time, the artillery captain’s fuses were too short and most shells exploded spectacularly but uselessly in the air. After several hours, one of his howitzers fell off its temporary carriage and was rendered useless.

With the streets leading up to the main plaza absolute death traps and best avoided, Captain Jamison carefully moved his company into the town and assigned his best shots to sniping positions. In the early afternoon, Colonel Markham ordered Jamison’s men to fall back to less exposed positions. When Jamison patted one of his marksmen on the back and told him to withdraw, the kneeling American rifleman, who had rested his weapon on a portico railing and was sighting along the rifle’s barrel, did not move. Looking closer, Jamison saw a neat bullet hole in the man’s forehead; the American sniper was dead.

With the steeples of the churches of Granada in the distance, Colonel José Zavala ordered the seven hundred troops strung out along the Rivas road behind him to move to the attack. Colonel Zavala had been in charge of his country’s troops in Nicaragua ever since General Paredes fell ill. With Paredes still in his sickbed back at León, Zavala had camped with five hundred of his Guatemalans and four hundred Nicaraguan Legitimista troops at the village of Diriomo, halfway between Masaya and Nandaime, on the road leading from Granada to Rivas. General Belloso had placed Zavala’s troops there to prevent Walker from escaping south and to prevent filibuster reinforcements from reaching Walker from Rivas and San Juan del Sur. But Zavala, who had been arguing with Belloso for months, had other ideas.

There was an American named Harper serving with Zavala as a scout. In April, Harper had come to Nicaragua from San Francisco expecting a commission from Walker, but Walker had recognized him as a man with a criminal record in California and had rejected him. In response, Harper had switched sides. He had been urging Zavala to make a surprise attack on Granada while Walker was occupied at Masaya, and without consulting General Belloso at Masaya, Zavala had ordered seven hundred of his troops to march, leaving a two-hundred-man rear guard to follow along later.

In Granada, just as the Granadinos and Walker’s garrison were sitting down to lunch, Zavala’s troops reached the southern outskirts of the city and surged toward the Granadine Plaza. Cries of alarm rang throughout the city, and General Fry’s troops and civil officials rushed to take up defensive positions. John B. Lawless, an Irish-born U.S. citizen, had a hide-exporting business in the southern suburbs. A longtime resident of the city, he had been on friendly terms with the Legitimistas for years and had several times interceded with General Walker on their behalf. Lawless was certain he would not be harmed by the Allied troops and refused to leave his premises. He was standing in his doorway unfolding a U.S. flag when Allied troops dashed up, grabbed him, and hauled him away. Lawless was taken to the ruined Jalteva Church, stood against a wall, and executed by firing squad. For good measure, his body was repeatedly bayoneted.

Elsewhere, the Reverend William Ferguson, a Methodist minister, and the American Bible Society’s Reverend D. H. Wheeler were dragged from their wives and children and hustled to the Jalteva. They, too, were put against a wall and shot. The bodies of all three Americans were then stripped naked and tossed into the Jalteva Plaza. The message was clear—the Central American troops hated Yankees. At the home of Father Rossiter, chaplain to the ARN, an Englishman whose family had recently arrived in Granada from New York was just sitting down to lunch with his wife and young children. Guatemalan soldiers appeared at the open window; one put his musket through the window and fired. The ball missed the Englishman but instantly killed his six-year-old son.

At Granada’s hospital, which was filled with Americans and Granadinos wasting away with yellow fellow, Dr. Douglas Wilkins and his medical attendants, the twelve Germans of the ARN band, took up arms and defended the building from doors and windows. Father Rossiter was also at the hospital, and he astonished everybody by grabbing up a rifle and joining the defense.

A detachment sent by General Fry to protect the American embassy had just taken up positions when Zavala’s troops arrived and occupied houses across the street. The Guatemalans poured fire into the embassy, taking particular pleasure in riddling the Stars and Stripes fluttering outside.

Government House was defended by Walker’s senior civil servants, including Paymaster General Jones, Judge Thomas Bayse, and Acting Recorder Major Angus Gillis—the latter being the father of the Rangers’ Lieutenant Gillis killed during the Second Battle of Rivas; the elder Gillis came to Nicaragua to join Walker’s army after hearing of his son’s death. Meanwhile, as editor Juan Tabor and his staff defended the office of the El Nicaraguense, Tabor, while firing from a window, was hit and collapsed with a shattered thigh. Elsewhere, Major Theodore Potter, now serving with the ordnance department after being wounded at Second Rivas, dived from building to building to direct the defense, then took charge at the Principal, the guardhouse on the plaza, near the cathedral. Meanwhile, Captain Swingle of the artillery seemed to be everywhere.

By nightfall, Walker’s sappers had pushed to within a line of houses surrounding Masaya’s main plaza. But those houses were occupied by General Belloso and fourteen hundred Salvadoran and Nicaraguan troops. A courier from Granada now reached Walker, bringing news of Colonel Zavala’s attempt to take his capital behind his back. Walker promptly dispatched his chief aide, Lieutenant Colonel F. A. Laine, together with Colonel Thomas Fisher and a company of Mounted Rangers, to provide Fry with what immediate help they could. As for the remainder of the force laying siege to Masaya, Walker ordered it to prepare to withdraw at dawn and march back to Granada to relieve their comrades.

Dew was forming on the ground as Laine, Fisher, and the Rangers set off. Taking a shortcut, they ran into a large enemy detachment in the darkness. Turning aside, they slid down a lane toward Diriomo and barreled straight into more Allied troops—Colonel Zavala’s two-hundred-man rear guard marching to join the attack on Granada. Again the Americans evaded the enemy, only to ride into another, smaller party of foot soldiers blocking their way. This time, Fisher decided to fight his way through.

Fisher’s Rangers were equipped with the new Sharps rifle—designed by Christian Sharps, it was the first breech-loading rifle to see service in Central America. Sharps’ rifle was nine inches shorter than a musket and six inches shorter than other rifles, making it much easier to handle. But the real innovation of the Sharps rifle was the powder cartridge made of paper that was inserted into a chamber in the weapon’s breech. After the cartridge was loaded, the breech block was pulled back. This clipped the end off the cartridge, exposing the powder to a Maynard Tape Primer. The hammer was then dragged back and cocked. The trigger, when pulled, released the hammer, which set off the primer, which ignited the powder.

No one had told Fisher’s Rangers that they should keep their paper cartridges dry. All their cartridges had been made damp by the night’s dew, and when the Americans attempted to fire at the enemy in their path, they merely heard dull, embarrassing clicks. It was suddenly every man for himself. Horsemen dived off in all directions. A desperate hand-to-hand struggle ensued. Most of the Americans made good their escape, but Walker’s aide Laine, in his flashy Cuban Guard uniform, attracted more attention than the others—surrounded, he was savagely dragged from his horse.

A little after 9:00 A.M. the next day, having marched since dawn to reach Granada, James Jamison and his men flattened themselves against the ground on the city’s western outskirts. Solid shot whooshed overhead, fired by an enemy field gun at a hastily erected barricade ahead. In the far distance, Jamison could see the lone-star flag of William Walker’s republic still flying from the steeple of the Parochial Church, the highest point in Granada, indicating that General Fry and his defenders had held out through the night.

A boom from the rear signaled that Captain Schwartz’s one effective howitzer, sited on the road, had been brought into action. Its very first shell dropped squarely onto the enemy gun emplacement. In a burst of orange flame, black smoke, and lethal shrapnel, the direct hit shattered the barricade and killed many of the men manning the cannon, bringing a cheer from the waiting ARN troops. Colonel Markham, sword in hand, jumped up and called his troops to charge. With a roar, Jamison and the men of the First Infantry rose up and followed Markham at the run, swiftly capturing the gun position. Now General Walker, astride his horse as usual, ordered the rest of the army to hurry to Birkett Fry’s aid.

Colonel Markham yelled to Jamison to secure the San Francisco Convent north of the plaza. Built in 1778 for the Franciscan Order, next door to the San Francisco Church, the building was the ARN’s principal quartel in the city. It had been captured from Fry’s troops by the Guatemalans during the night, but when Jamison and his light infantrymen swarmed in through one of the convent’s side doors, they surprised scores of resting Guatemalan troops inside. Thirty Guatemalans were shot dead as they attempted to escape through a breach in the convent’s rear wall caused by a past earthquake; their bodies littered the rubble at the breach. Other Guatemalans threw up their hands to surrender.

Among the captives were Colonel Valderraman, Colonel Zavala’s deputy, and his adjutant, Captain Allende. Jamison accepted their surrender; they were luckier than other Guatemalans and Nicaraguan Legitimistas who came out of buildings elsewhere in the city with hands raised—many were gunned down by Americans whose blood had been boiling ever since seeing the bodies of the murdered American clergymen lying in the Jalteva Plaza.

Even though Colonel Zavala was reinforced by his rear guard, his augmented force of nine hundred men was routed by the unexpected return of Walker’s eight hundred men from Masaya. The fighting was over within fifteen minutes. Zavala and the bulk of his force escaped, fleeing west to join General Belloso at Masaya, but they left more than two hundred of their comrades behind in Granada, dead or captured. Walker had lost twenty-five dead and eighty-five wounded, some in the aborted attack on Masaya but most in the defense of Granada.

Now Walker allowed himself a brief respite. Jamison and several other officers, including Markham, were just making themselves comfortable in a house on the plaza when Walker strolled in. Without a word, the general clambered into a hammock and fell fast asleep. Like their general, Walker’s men could breathe easily, for the moment. They had secured their capital. But the Allies still held Masaya in force.

Word reached Granada that Walker’s aide, Laine the Cuban, had been executed by Allied firing squad. In reprisal, Walker ordered the execution of the captured Guatemalan officers, Colonel Valderraman and Captain Allende. For a week, they’d been treated as the honored guests of Walker’s officers at Granada. Jamison described them as “men of wealth, superior education, and polished manners.” Valderraman and Allende had nightly joined the Americans to feast, drink, laugh, and dance the hours away, even paying their own way, gaining “the friendship and affection of the American officers.”¹⁰

The two Guatemalan officers were marched under escort through the Granadine Plaza to the bullet-scarred wall outside the cathedral. In the watching crowd, Jamison looked sadly at “the dauntless men who had been such delightful companions” as they were placed side by side in front of the wall.¹¹ Valderraman and Allende declined to be seated and refused blindfolds. Allende calmly smoked a cigarette. When a line of rifles came up, both men looked with a steady gaze down the barrels. At the command the rifles barked. The lifeless bodies of Valderraman and Allende crumpled to the ground. No one cheered their deaths.

Feeling numb, Jamison walked away. “In all my life I recall nothing that impressed upon me more vividly than did this incident, the sorrow and bitterness of war.”¹² After the deaths of the two likable prisoners of war, Jamison’s enthusiasm for the war clearly waned. In his memoirs, he would not mention any further Nicaragua actions in which he was personally involved; it is likely that, disillusioned, Jamison deserted Walker after the execution of Valderraman and Allende.

With the odds mounting against Walker, Jamison would not be the last of his previously faithful followers to doubt the future prospects of their general’s enterprise and give up the fight. But it would take more than a few desertions to defeat Walker. While new recruits continued to arrive in their hundreds, Walker was a long way from beaten, as his chief adversary, Cornelius Vanderbilt, in New York, was well aware.