William Walker

William Walker made himself president of Nicaragua with fifty-eight men, legalised slavery there, and was shot by a Honduran firing squad at thirty-six. He qualified as a doctor at nineteen, then as a lawyer, then edited a newspaper in New Orleans, and turned to filibustering - private war waged by American adventurers against Latin American states. His first attempt, an invasion of Mexican Baja California in 1853, collapsed; he was tried in San Francisco for violating neutrality laws and acquitted in eight minutes by a sympathetic jury. In 1855 he sailed for Nicaragua at the invitation of one side in its civil war, took Granada, and by 1856 had himself installed as president; the United States recognised his government. He reinstated slavery, which had been abolished in 1824, and made English an official language, hoping for annexation by the American South. He made the mistake of seizing Cornelius Vanderbilt's transit company, and Vanderbilt financed the coalition of Central American states that drove him out in 1857. He tried twice more, was handed to Honduran authorities by a British naval officer on the last attempt, and was executed at Trujillo. At the second battle of Rivas in April 1856 his men were driven out when a Costa Rican drummer boy, Juan Santamaria, set fire to the building they held, and he became a national hero in Costa Rica for it. Cholera destroyed much of Walker's army in that campaign more thoroughly than the fighting did. He surrendered to a United States naval officer in 1857 and was received in New Orleans as a hero, and wrote The War in Nicaragua to raise money for another attempt. He converted to Catholicism in 1859, hoping to make himself acceptable in the region. Central American states still mark the war that removed him.

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