William Walker (May 8, 1824 – September 12, 1860) was an American journalist and mercenary. In the era of the expansion of the United States, driven by the doctrine of manifest destiny, Walker organized unauthorized military expeditions into Mexico and Central America with the intention of establishing colonies. Such an enterprise was known at the time as "filibustering".
After settling in California, motivated by an earlier filibustering project of Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon, Walker attempted in 1853–54 to take Baja California and Sonora. He declared those territories to be an independent Republic of Sonora, but he was soon driven back to California by the Mexican forces. Walker then went to Nicaragua in 1855 as leader of a mercenary army employed by the Nicaraguan Democratic Party in its civil war against the Legitimists. He took control of the Nicaraguan government and in July 1856 set himself up as the country's president.
Walker's regime was recognized as the legitimate government of Nicaragua by US President Franklin Pierce, and it initially enjoyed the support of some important sectors within Nicaraguan society. As ruler of Nicaragua, Walker relegalized slavery, with the goal of creating a new society of dominant White people and subordinate Black and Indigenous laborers. However, he never succeeded in implementing slavery. He also threatened the independence of neighboring Central American republics. Walker antagonized the powerful Wall Street tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt by expropriating Vanderbilt's Accessory Transit Company, which operated one of the main routes for the transport of passengers going from New York City to San Francisco. The British Empire saw Walker as a threat to its interests in the possible construction of a Nicaragua Canal. A military coalition led by the allied forces of Central America defeated Walker and forced him to resign the presidency of Nicaragua on May 1, 1857.
Walker tried to relaunch his filibustering project and sought renewed support from pro-slavery forces in the Southern United States on the eve of the American Civil War. In 1860, he published a book titled The War in Nicaragua, which promoted his efforts to conquer Central America in order to expand slavery geographically. That year, he returned to Central America, where the British Royal Navy arrested him and handed him to the government of Honduras, which executed him.
William Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824 to James Walker and his wife Mary Norvell. His father was a Scottish settler. His mother was the daughter of Lipscomb Norvell, an American Revolutionary War officer from Virginia. One of Walker's maternal uncles was John Norvell, a U.S. Senator from Michigan and founder of The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Walker graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of 14. In 1843, at the age of 19, he received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. Walker then continued his medical studies at Edinburgh and Heidelberg. He practiced medicine briefly in Philadelphia, but soon moved to New Orleans where he studied law privately. In New Orleans, he developed a romantic attraction for a deaf woman, Helen Martin, and learned sign language to communicate with her. While the precise nature of their relationship is uncertain, Martin's subsequent death from yellow fever led Walker to develop "a daring ambition and a reckless disregard of life".
Walker practiced law for a short time, then quit to become co-owner and editor of The Daily Crescent newspaper in March 1849. The Crescent was a liberal, anti-slavery newspaper. In October 1849, Walker attended the Memphis Railroad Convention with fellow Crescent editor J.C. Larue, which explored possible routes for a transcontinental railroad connecting the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Ocean. Multiple proposals at the convention argued for a route in Central America, including across Nicaragua. Walker and Larue were accused in November, 1849 of assaulting E.J. Gomez, the owner of a rival newspaper, La Patria, over a claim made in that paper about The Daily Crescent. After selling his stake in the paper, Walker left for San Francisco in July, 1850.
In San Francisco, Walker worked as editor of the San Francisco Herald and fought three duels; he was wounded in two of them. In the early 1850s, many military expeditions that sought to create colonies in Mexico and Central America, called filibusters, were developing in San Francisco. Also known as freebooting, this practice was supported by the Southern expansionist secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle.
Walker gained national attention by dueling with law clerk William Hicks Graham on January 12, 1851. Walker criticized Graham and his colleagues in the Herald, which prompted Graham to challenge Walker to a duel. Graham was a notorious gunman; Walker had experience dueling with single-shot pistols, but his duel with Graham was fought with revolvers. Walker was wounded; Graham was arrested but was quickly released. The duel was recorded in The Daily Alta California.
Growing up in Tennessee, Walker's family did not own slaves and they did not advocate the institution; in his early period as a journalist he was an abolitionist. However, when he became a filibuster he became convinced the plantation slave system of the southern US required export to Latin America in order to survive, which became an essential civic goal.
Historian Dan La Botz suggests Walker may have been convinced of this by his friend Edmund Randolph, a lawyer from Virginia.
In the summer of 1853, Walker traveled to Guaymas in Mexico, seeking a grant from the Mexican government to establish a colony. He proposed that his colony would serve as a fortified frontier, protecting U.S. soil from Indian raids. Mexico refused, and Walker returned to San Francisco determined to obtain his colony regardless of Mexico's position. He began recruiting American supporters of slavery and of the Manifest Destiny doctrine, mostly inhabitants of Tennessee and Kentucky. Walker's plans then expanded from forming a buffer colony to establishing an independent Republic of Sonora, which might eventually take its place as a part of the Union (as the Republic of Texas had done in 1845). He funded his project by "selling scrips which were redeemable in lands of Sonora".
On October 15, 1853, Walker set out with forty-five men to conquer the Mexican territories of Baja California Territory and Sonora State. He succeeded in capturing La Paz, the capital of sparsely populated Baja California, which he declared the capital of a new "Republic of Lower California" (declared November 3, 1853), with himself as president and his former law partner, Henry P. Watkins, as vice president. Walker then put the region under the laws of the American state of Louisiana, which made slavery legal. Whether Walker at this stage intended to tie his filibustering expedition to the cause of slavery is a matter of dispute.
In his writings about this time, Walker advocated white paternalism, justifying his forays into Mexico on the grounds that Indian, mestizo, and African peoples of Latin America require white dominance to civilize them.
Fearful of attacks by Mexico, Walker moved his headquarters twice over the next three months, first to Cabo San Lucas, and then further north to Ensenada to maintain a more secure base of operations. Although he never gained control of Sonora, he pronounced Baja California part of the larger Republic of Sonora. Lack of supplies, severe aridity of Baja California and strong resistance by the Mexican government quickly forced Walker to retreat.
Back in California, Walker was indicted by a federal grand jury for waging an illegal war in violation of the Neutrality Act of 1794. However, in the era of Manifest Destiny, Walker's filibustering project had popular support in the southern and western U.S. Walker was tried before Judge I. S. K. Ogier in the US District Court for the Southern District of California. Although two of Walker's associates had already been convicted of similar charges and Judge Ogier summarized the evidence against Walker for the jury, the jury deliberated for only eight minutes before acquitting Walker.