FILIBUSTERS AND FINANCIERS.*
Wrimisss WALKER is dimly remembered as the American adventurer who set Nicaragua in a blaze in the middle of the last century. The son of a Scotsman who had settled at Nashville, Tennessee, he was trained for the medical profession in Pennsylvania and in France. But, like many other young men, he was lured to California in the "Forty-nine," and turned journalist, lawyer, politician, and filibuster. At the mature age of, twenty-nine he, with a following of forty-five desperadoes, set up a new Republic in Lower California. Two years later the "grey-eyed man of destiny" led his "fifty-six Immortals" to Nicaragua, plunged into the civil war which was and is endemic in that State, and soon made himself President. His friends at home thought that he intended to bring Nicaragua, like Texas, under the Star- Spangled Banner and to strengthen the South by adding another slave State. He did, in fact, restore slavery in Nicaragua, but his latest biographer makes it perfectly clear that Walker aimed at nothing less than the dictatorship of Central America, typified in his flag with the legend "Five or None." The four neighbouring Republics combined against him and drove him out after a desperate struggle. Returning home, he tried again and again to raid Nicaragua ; his last attempt, by way of Honduras, ended in his being taken and shot in 1860. Presi. dent Buchanan would not recognize him, and the British authorities did their best to hinder his operations and helped to intercept him on his last expedition. But Walker's great enemy was his own country- man, Cornelius Vanderbilt. Professor Scroggs says many unkind things about our efforts to keep this firebrand out of Central America, but he has to admit that Walker's ruin was compassed in Wall Street and not in Whitehall. Vanderbilt's monopoly of the transit trade across Nicaragua—then the easiest route from New York to California— was coveted by the rival financiers who backed Walker, and the trade route was obstructed by the war which Walker brought about. Vander. hilt had his revenge ; it was his money and his agents that brought the "grey-eyed man of destiny" down. Professor Scroggs confesses that Walker, although bravo, was a bad general and a worse statesman ; he was as arbitrary and cruel as the native dictators, though he did not massacre wounded prisoners. Moreover, he failed in an enterprise that could only be justified by its success. But we cannot help feeling sorry for the man. He had at any rate a romantic: ideal, and with his few hundred American followers he might have come nearer to it, had he not been balked by a fellow-American for commercial reasons, The interaction of Wall Street finance and the revolutions of Latin America, by no means unknown to-day, is well illustrated in this carefully written book.
Previous page
