The people of Las Pozas certainly thought of their survival. They fled! The Indigenous want no part of the "filibusters in overthrowing their Spanish oppressors." Creole planters, in the meantime, verbalized support for Lopez. That is, until he arrived! Then they refused to join the fight!
On August 13 th , Lopez and his men were attacked. As the general urged them to fight on, the remaining men had to make their way on soil that was a bloody, "sticky mess."
After thirty minutes, some thirty to thirty-five of Lopez's men added their footprints to the "sticky mess" as the dead or the wounded. As for the Spanish, one hundred and eighty soldiers were dead, but, as Johnson explains, their force at the start of the battle numbered "close to eight hundred."
It wasn't good for Lopez who promptly left his wounded behind. He continued on.
Following the direction of an enslaved Black guide, Lopez and his remaining men entered the woods. Johnson suggests that it's possible the guide did a little misdirecting of the North Americans. Arriving at Cafetal de Frias, Lopez walks among his dead with no idea that "he was already dead" himself. Controlling the narrative flow of the news, are the Spaniards, declining in Empire, but pros at effectively killing their monster with words.
World, take note: the "general was a hopeless interloper." And it seemed so, for Lopez and his men were forced to roast his horse named Roast. It would be their last meal.
The next day, the Spanish cavalry surrounded Lopez and his men and began picking them off, "one by one." August 28 th was Lopez's day to be captured. And he is.
On September 1, 1851, it's reported that a collar is placed around his neck, cutting off his airflow and crushing his windpipe. "It would take the general several agonizing minutes to die."
As Johnson explains, "Lopez's inglorious surrenderindeed, his entire filibuster careermarked a rupture in the received history of the United States, the South, and the Mississippi Valley: a rupture in the idea of Manifest Destiny that was no less difficult for the philosophers of filibusterism to repair for being the bungled work of a quixotic fool."
Nonetheless, William Walker offers a mass for Lopez's "soul." The great destiny of America is still there for the taking! To Central Americaagain!
Jefferson's dream is, after all, a "Southern dream of Caribbean empire."
In the era of "Negro Fever," an American becomes president of Nicaragua. At least, temporarily, William Walker is president of Nicaragua.
**
Walker wastes no time: he appeals to the discontent of the nonslaveholding white Southerner, as Johnson suggests, finding themselves in the margins of the America Empire narrative, too close to the enslaved Blacks. Because "Negro Fever" was drawing higher prices than ever before, "slave prices were 'raging far above their legitimate level"" A Black, Johnson explains, who would have been purchased "for $400 in 1828 now," with thirty years on him, "sells for $800." The higher prices of human labor cost increased in the Cotton Kingdom as cotton sold "'ten and one-half cents'" higher than it had two or three years before.
The nonslaveholding white population didn't miss how further down they were being pushed by the enterprise in the Mississippi Valley.
By the 1850s, writes Johnson, "Deep South slaveholders were riding the slaves-cotton-slaves-cotton cycle to new levels of prosperity." Everyone could and did, he adds, see the visible signs of success in the Mississippi Valley. Certainly, the nonslaveholding class.
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