Tycoon's War

Easy chairs were set before the fire, and directly in front of the visitors, there was a long table, at which Cornelius Vanderbilt sat writing. Vanderbilt kept just two things in the table’s single drawer, a box of cigars and a checkbook. ² Wardell the clerk withdrew, closing the doors and leaving Spencer and Webster standing in front of the table with hats in hand, like schoolboys hauled before the principal. Vanderbilt didn’t acknowledge them. “He [was] writing, and his eyes [were] fixed on the paper. . . . In a few minutes the countenance [rose], and you [met] its expansive and penetrating glance.” Then, to the relief of the pair, “he smile[d] in a pleasant and whole-souled manner.”³

The Commodore conducted his guests to the easy chairs. He knew of Spencer, a New Yorker who skippered the Machuca when the Transit Company ran the Nicaraguan Transit Route. Spencer was a son of John Canfield Spencer, a one-time U.S. secretary of war who’d died only the previous year, and younger brother of Midshipman Philip Spencer, who was hanged without trial for mutiny aboard the USS Somers in 1849.⁴ Raised in a well-to-do family and provided with a good education, Spencer was the black sheep of the family who went in search of adventure in his early twenties. He’d been one of the adventurers who sailed from New York in 1850 with Parker H. French to take part in the ill-fated Overland Express expedition, before going on to work for the Transit Company in Nicaragua.

Spencer had inherited a parcel of Transit Company stock from his late father, and, as he now informed Vanderbilt, he hated William Walker desperately for what he had done to the company and its stock market value.⁵ Spencer’s companion, William Webster, was more of an unknown. The Englishman presented himself as a gentleman and claimed to be from a good family and to be well-connected in Britain and Germany. It seems that not even his new partner Spencer knew that Webster had a history as a fraudster.

Telling Vanderbilt that he and Webster had conceived a surefire way to destroy Walker’s government in Nicaragua, Spencer said that if the Transit Route could be shut off, Walker could be starved into submission. Vanderbilt was well aware of that. It had been tried before, he said; he himself had used Hosea Birdsall in a failed bid to close off the San Juan River, while the Costa Ricans had tried it with 250 troops and similarly failed. Spencer was undaunted, explaining that securing the Transit Route at La Virgen and San Juan del Sur should be easy enough, if the Costa Ricans could be encouraged to return to the war and again invade southwestern Nicaragua. The San Juan River, however, was a trickier proposition, but even more important because it was Walker’s door to the Atlantic states.

This was not new to Vanderbilt, and seeing the Commodore shift impatiently in his chair, Spencer went on to say that the Costa Ricans had the right idea when they attempted to come down the Sarapiqui River behind Walker. But they’d been too clumsy in the way they had gone about it. Spencer had a better idea. After five years working river steamers on the San Juan, Spencer could speak Spanish and knew the region like the back of his hand. He would personally guide a Costa Rican military expedition along the San Carlos River, which entered the San Juan farther west than the Sarapiqui did, above Hipp’s Point, for a surprise attack that seized the river and its steamers—if only Vanderbilt would provide the Costa Ricans with money and arms for the operation. And, Webster piped up, the Costa Ricans also lacked professional, experienced officers. But he was acquainted with an Englishman, a former senior officer with the British army in India and a man with years of experience leading native troops, who was perfect for the job and prepared to join them in the venture.

Vanderbilt quickly appreciated that if this latest scheme worked, Walker would be done for and Vanderbilt would come out of their war victorious. The Commodore had never met Walker. Some would say he actually admired what Walker did in taking charge in Nicaragua.⁶ Walker’s mistake was messing with Vanderbilt’s property. How different the two men were. When Walker was twelve years old, he was a child prodigy just beginning college in Nashville. When Vanderbilt was twelve, his father won a contract to salvage the cargo of a vessel aground near Sandy Hook, and young Cornelius had been given three wagons and their drivers and told to get the job done. The transfer at Sandy Hook went well enough, as did the homeward journey over the Jersey sands. But when the wagons reached South Amboy, where the ferry left for home on Staten Island, Cornelius had spent all the money his father gave him and didn’t have the six-dollar ferry fare. Cornelius had thought fast. Borrowing six dollars from the local innkeeper, he left one of his six horses behind as security. The next day, Cornelius returned with the six dollars and retrieved the horse.

Vanderbilt was such a wheeler-dealer that at age fifteen, when he wanted to buy his first trading vessel, a hundred-dollar flat-bottomed sailing barge, he did a deal with his mother, Phebe Hand Vanderbilt. If he plowed an eight-acre lot on the family farm at Staten Island that was so stony it had never been plowed before, and in time for his sixteenth birthday twenty-six days later, Phebe would pay him one hundred dollars. Vanderbilt had brought in all the boys of the neighborhood on the promise of free rides on his new boat. They helped him plow the lot, with time to spare.⁷

In the same way he’d wheeled-and-dealed since he was a twelve-year-old, Vanderbilt would look twice at any scheme that made him a winner in his war with Walker. His secret negotiations with Domingo de Goicuria had fallen in a heap. A month after approaching Vanderbilt with his loan proposal, the Cuban had received President William Walker’s response: “You will please not trouble yourself further about the Transit Company,” Walker had told Goicuria, revoking the Cuban’s commission as a brigadier general in his army and terminating his mission to the United States and Europe.⁸ As a consequence, Walker’s proposal for “African apprentices” was never delivered to the French.

A bitter Goicuria was pressed by New York newspapers to explain his claims of influence with Walker. Soon, parts of Walker’s correspondence with Goicuria were published in the press. Edmund Randolph, who was then in New York, had in response published a notice in the Herald: “In the Transit business Don Domingo de Goicuria is an intruder, with a dishonest and treacherous intent.”⁹ Randolph had even offered to fight Goicuria in a duel, specifying pistols at six paces. Goicuria, who protested that he had not betrayed Walker, had agreed to the duel, only to call it off—because, he said, it was impossible to agree on “distance and mode.”¹⁰ In the end, combat between the pair had been restricted to the newspaper pages. It is possible that Goicuria did not release the Walker correspondence to the press. Goicuria had shown his letters from Walker to Vanderbilt. It is likely that Vanderbilt had his clerk copy them and then Vanderbilt passed the letters on to the newspapers.

Now, Spencer and Webster were offering Vanderbilt his next-best option, perhaps his last option. So the Commodore made Spencer and Webster a counterproposition. He would authorize them to recover Transit Company steamers on the San Juan River and its tributaries and to close the river to communication by Walker. To facilitate that recovery, he would provide them with arms and ammunition for the Costa Rican army. However, he would not give Spencer or Webster a penny. If they succeeded in engineering Walker’s removal, then, once Walker and his filibusters had left Nicaragua, Spencer and Webster could come back to Vanderbilt in this very office, and each receive fifty thousand dollars in cold, hard cash. Without hesitation, Spencer and Webster agreed, and the three men shook hands on the deal.

November 2 is known in Catholic Central America as the Day of the Dead. It was on this day that General José Canas chose to cross the La Flor and invade Nicaragua with a new Costa Rican force. Sylvanus Spencer and William Webster were still on their way to Costa Rica when the invasion began. When they arrived in San José, they would find that despite the previous year’s devastating cholera epidemic, President Mora not only had ambitions to kick Walker and his filibusters out of Nicaragua but also wanted to annex southern Nicaragua for Costa Rica to control the Transit Route and the planned Nicaragua canal. Mora was raising more troops in San José, but, fearful that his Central American allies would occupy the Transit Route before he could, he sent Canas’s force to seize and hold the Transit west of Lake Nicaragua.

For more than a year, General Canas had trained his battalion in Guanacaste. Of his four hundred men, three hundred were barefoot Costa Ricans. The balance were mounted Nicaraguan Legitimista volunteers, many the sons of well-to-do Rivas families. Canas named this unit the Vanguard Division of Costa Rica, hoping to make the filibusters think it much larger than it was. He needed every advantage, for most of his troops had no combat experience and his officers were painfully young—battalion commander Tomás Guardia was just twenty-four, while Guardia’s younger brother and adjutant, Faustino, was nineteen. Both were the sons of the governor of Puntarenas, Rudesindo Guardia.

Canas, marching for San Juan del Sur, had orders from Mora to cut the Transit Route, the “highway of filibusterism,” as the Allies called it, and then take Rivas.¹¹ With the main Allied army now at Masaya, Walker, at Granada, would then be sandwiched between the two forces.

In the late afternoon of November 11, Walker surveyed the enemy positions. Near the Half Way House, General Canas had barricaded the Transit Road ahead of the Puente Grande, a bridge over a ravine, and dug in hundreds of men on high ground. The previous day, General Hornsby, with 250 men and a howitzer, had failed to dislodge Canas. Disgusted by Hornsby’s temerity, Walker had suggested that his subordinate take extended leave in the United States, and then Walker himself set off on a lake steamer with 250 men to augment Hornsby’s force and expel Canas from the Transit. Overnight, the Costa Ricans, after beating off Hornsby’s attack, had been reinforced by 300 Nicaraguans from the Allied army at Masaya, men led by none other than “Madregil”—Colonel Felix Ramirez, the Democratico officer who deserted Walker at the First Battle of Rivas the previous year.

Walker watched his new artillery commander, Charles Frederick Henningsen, supervise the loading of a howitzer. Henningsen was the arms expert employed by George Law in New York City, and he had recently arrived with more rifles and the missing gun carriages for the howitzers. Walker had promptly made Henningsen a brigadier general and put him in charge of ordnance and training.

Forty-one-year-old Henningsen, born in England of Swedish parents, was a vastly experienced professional soldier. Tall, slim, with a neat mustache and complementary beard, he’d fought with the Carlist forces in Spain, rising to the rank of colonel. He had served in the Russian army and, in the Hungarian Revolution, commanded Kossuth’s last stronghold, Comorn, where the mendacious Louis Schlessinger had claimed to have also fought for Kossuth. Arriving in the United States, Henningsen had married a rich Southern widow. After his years in Spain, Henningsen spoke fluent Spanish. He knew how to lead and was a weapons expert. How Walker must have wished he’d had Henningsen’s services much earlier. Already, in the month that Henningsen had been in Nicaragua, he had vastly improved the shooting of Walker’s gunners, showing them how to accurately gauge their fall of shot.

At Puente Grande, having boldly brought a howitzer to within musket range, Henningsen proceeded to rain death onto the enemy lines along the hillside. Accurate enemy rifle fire eventually forced the crew to pull the howitzer back, but it had done its job, distracting the enemy to allow several of Walker’s units to outflank Canas undetected. Captain Ewbanks was then sent forward with infantry that quickly took the barricade in front of the bridge, wiping out its defenders. Meanwhile, troops under Colonel Natzmer were cutting through thick undergrowth behind the enemy on the hillside. That undergrowth was so thick that the company of Captain Tom Green, recently promoted commander of the Sarapiqui River episode in February, became lost for a time. But the noise made by Natzmer’s men alerted Canas, who ordered a general retreat toward the coast before he was surrounded.

Mounted Rangers led by General Henningsen gave chase. A Costa Rican rear guard made several stands, but Henningsen led a mounted charge that eventually scattered them. Putnam’s Monthly would remark that “Henningsen is the only man of Walker’s crew who has shown any military ability.” ¹² Canas’s force was divided by Henningsen’s fierce pursuit. Ramirez’s Nicaraguans fled south to Costa Rica, throwing away weapons and knapsacks as they went, to speed their flight. Most of Canas’s better-disciplined troops headed north, up the coastal track, with their general. Canas, far from daunted, planned to occupy Rivas.

On the morning of November 15, General Sanders’s advance guard launched Walker’s second attempt to take Masaya. They ran straight into eight hundred men of the Second Guatemalan Division led by Lieutenant Colonel Joaquim Cabrera, who had reached Masaya from Guatemala in darkness at 12:30 that morning. The Allies were ready and waiting for the filibusters, for unbeknownst to Walker, General Belloso had a spy in the filibuster camp and knew that the Americans were coming. Cabrera’s division arrived just in time for the battle.

The Guatemalans were positioned in huts in a plantain plantation beside the Granada road, and it was only by using a howitzer at close quarters that Sanders was able to force them to withdraw. When Walker arrived with the main ARN force after dark, he found Sanders’s men encamped and drinking heavily. Before long, all Walker’s men were drinking. Moving around his camp in the night, he discovered officers who were exhausted, dispirited, and uncaring; the prospect of another grinding, bloody, and probably pointless street battle in Masaya was not popular. Many of Walker’s men were soon blind drunk. Walker himself did not sleep a wink that night, personally doing the rounds of the sentries. Never in his entire time in Nicaragua, he would later write, did he “find it so difficult as on that night to have (my) orders executed.”¹³

Twenty-two-year-old Jack Harris from Connecticut was marched out into the Plazuela San Sebastian by Allied soldiers and pushed up against a wall. Captured amid the plantain trees outside Masaya the previous afternoon during General Sanders’s assault, Harris had been locked up overnight. Just after dawn, he and his captors had been amazed to hear martial music coming from the filibuster lines—General Walker had brought his army band with him and ordered them to play stirring tunes to put some spirit back into his hungover troops.

Harris, seeing a firing squad form up in front of him, was convinced that he had just minutes left to live. But then there was a terrifying screech, and a nearby house on the square exploded. Seconds later, there was another screech, as a howitzer shell looped in from south of the town. With a spray of adobe and red roof tiles, another building was shattered by a direct hit. Panicking Allied soldiers ran for their lives; the firing squad dissolved before Jack Harris’s eyes. Amazed to be still alive, he crouched down, as shells continued to bombard the little square. The Allied troops quickly withdrew toward the center of town, and as quickly as it began, the bombardment lifted. As Harris picked himself up, Major Caycee and hundreds of men of the ARN’s Second Rifles poured into the square from outside the town. Harris then spotted General Walker himself, riding into the town with his staff. Harris was among friends again. He would live for many more years to tell the tale of how General Walker saved him from a Central American firing squad with only moments to spare. ¹⁴

In the light of a candle, Colonel Zavala, the Guatemalan commander at Masaya, sat writing a battle report to General Mariano Paredes at León. All was quiet in Masaya. At 7:00 P.M., Walker’s troops had ceased firing. At one point during the day, General Belloso had sent one hundred men from his own bodyguard with Colonel Cabrera and three hundred other Guatemalans in an attempt to assault the San Sebastian square from the rear, but accurate Yankee rifle fire had forced them to retire. As had happened during the first battle for Masaya the previous month, the struggle for the city had become stalemated. Neither side could dislodge the other.

Zavala wrote that the Allies controlled eight city blocks around the plaza, and he reported that Guatemalan units had suffered twelve dead and twenty-five wounded, while General Martinez’s Nicaraguans had similar losses. Zavala could not speak for the Salvadorans—he wasn’t talking to them. An estimated eight hundred Yankees were burrowing toward the plaza, and to protect his rear, Walker had set fire to many houses in the town’s Monimbo district. Zavala expected that under cover of night, Walker would dig trenches toward Allied lines.¹⁵

At five o’clock in the afternoon of November 19, General Paredes was riding to Masaya with his aide Colonel Serapio Cruz and a detachment of lancers. Anxious to get into the fight after receiving Colonel Zavala’s battle report, Paredes had dragged himself from his sickbed. Three miles short of Masaya, he was met by a dispatch rider bearing a message from Zavala that informed him that the second battle for Masaya was over. Again, Walker had withdrawn in darkness after realizing that victory was impossible.

When Paredes reached Masaya, he surveyed the ruined Monimbo district; 150 houses had been destroyed by fires set by the filibusters. The San Sebastian Church, where Walker had housed his wounded, had been looted and badly damaged. Paredes was shown thirty filibuster graves dug in the earthen floors of several houses.

Meanwhile, Allied commander in chief General Belloso was writing to his war minister back in El Salvador, claiming a great victory. He reported total Allied casualties in the Second Battle of Masaya of 43 killed and 82 wounded, while he estimated that Walker had suffered 150 casualties—the actual number was 100. He also reported that, according to his spy in Granada, Colonel Fisher and Captain Green were among Walker’s dead, along with Walker’s judge advocate and a surgeon, and that Colonel Natzmer had been seriously wounded. ¹⁶ None of this was true—the spy was either poorly placed or sending Belloso misinformation.

Late in the afternoon of November 23, Walker’s armed schooner Granada cleared the harbor at San Juan del Sur and made for an approaching brig. As soon as the Granada’s captain, Lieutenant Fayssoux, who had been expecting the Costa Ricans to attempt to land reinforcements from the sea in a fresh attempt to take the Transit Route, saw the brig raise Costa Rican colors, he ordered his twenty-six crewmen to clear the deck for action.

The brig was the Once de Abril—the Eleventh of April—named for the Second Battle of Rivas, which the Costa Ricans considered a great victory. Her four nine-pound cannon commenced firing when the Granada was at several hundred yards’ range, and numerous infantrymen on board opened up with their muskets. By 6:00 P.M., Fayssoux had dropped anchor four hundred yards from the brig, close enough for his two six-pound carronades to be within range but too far distant for enemy small arms to be a threat. Several enemy rounds hit the Granada, but despite the hits the casualties, and the fading light, Fayssoux kept up a steady, accurate bombardment, causing numerous casualties on the brig’s crowded decks and starting a fire.

At 8:00 P.M., the Granada fired a round that pierced the Once de Abril’s magazine. With a deafening roar, the brig blew up, sending a sheet of flame high into the night sky. The ship sank within minutes. Fayssoux lowered a boat, and by 10:00 P.M., its crew had pulled forty-eight Costa Ricans from the water, including the brig’s master, Captain Antonio Valle Riestra, who, like many of the survivors, was badly burned. Sixty-six Costa Ricans had been killed. On the Granada, one crewman had been killed and eight wounded. Walker rewarded Fayssoux for this unlikely naval victory by promoting him to captain and giving him the grand Hacienda Rosario at Rivas.

Another twelve of the horribly burned men would die from their burns, taking the Costa Rican death toll from the battle to seventy-eight. Lieutenant Fayssoux later allowed the survivors to return home. The story would quickly spread throughout Central America that the Granada sank the Once de Abril using a rocket-powered secret weapon.

The same day that William Walker’s little navy sank the Costa Rican warship, Sylvanus Spencer and William Webster met with President Mora in San José, passing over a letter of introduction from the Costa Rican ambassador in Washington, Dr. Felipe Molina. Webster had told Molina that he was a wealthy English businessman with influential contacts in the United States and Britain who wanted to acquire the contract to build the Nicaragua canal. No mention was made of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Ambassador Molina enthusiastically recommended Webster and his partner Spencer to his president.

After Don Juanito Mora—dark-haired, with thick sideburns, a high forehead, small mouth and chin, and intense eyes—greeted the pair coolly, Webster informed him that he and Spencer had a plan to help Costa Rica destroy William Walker and annex southern Nicaragua. In return, they and their partners in the Land Transport Company, a new entity they would register in Costa Rica, desired the rights to the trans-Nicaragua canal.

Mora had already received advice from a variety of quarters on how to deal with Walker—from his own people, from the governments of the other Central American states, and even from a general sent to him by the Spanish government in the summer of 1856. General Morales de Rada had fought and defeated Lopez and his filibusters in Cuba, and for that reason, President Mora had given him a hearing. But in the end, General Rada had not appreciated the situation in Nicaragua, had not appreciated the importance of the Transit Route, and had not offered anything new. Webster and Spencer, on the other hand, sounded as if they were thinking along the same lines as Mora; he asked them to elaborate.

Spencer said that, if given a small force of Costa Rican soldiers, he would personally guide them down the San Carlos River to the San Juan, to launch a surprise attack in the filibusters’ rear. When Mora impatiently responded by saying this had been tried before, on the Sarapiqui, without success, Spencer said that the Sarapiqui operation failed because General Alfaro’s men had exhausted themselves cutting a path through the jungle and made so much noise that the filibusters had heard them coming. Spencer proposed to float down the San Carlos and then down the San Juan on log rafts carrying the men, equipment, and stores of the expedition, propelled by the natural flow of the two waterways toward the sea. All that the men on the rafts would have to do was go along for the ride. On hearing this, Mora became much more attentive.

Webster said that as a gesture of the pair’s goodwill, a colleague would shortly arrive in San José with a shipment of Minié rifles and ammunition to equip the San Carlos River expedition. That colleague was another Englishman, George F. Cauty, who had served as an officer with the army of the East India Company in India. The world’s largest private army, its thousands of native Indian soldiers were commanded by British officers who attended the East India Company’s officer training college in England prior to taking up their commands on the Indian subcontinent. Like his father before him, Cauty had spent years soldiering in India. He had seen action in a bloody war with the fearsome Sikhs, which had resulted in the British capture of the Punjab in 1849, and in an 1852 campaign in Burma, where the company’s troops had defeated the Burmese.

Mora was a man who made rapid decisions. This pair was offering him what he wanted, even supplying weapons for the venture. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, the president sealed an agreement with Webster and Spencer and issued orders for preparations to be made to ensure that the San Carlos River expedition was launched prior to Christmas. Mora was quite unaware that in doing so, he was acting as a pawn of Cornelius Vanderbilt. Thanks to the Costa Rican president, Vanderbilt’s latest offensive against William Walker quickly took shape.