In pursuit of his interpretation of Jefferson's vision of American Empire, William Walker sees himself as the embodiment of that American vision, a vision he inserts, as did DeBow, that prefigures white nonslaveholders.
The thirty-three year old Walker begins with fundraising for his army, promising to not only pay good money but also to distribute "land grants" at the end of the battle. Fifty-eight men, called Fifty-six Immortals, since, as Johnson explains, one receives a court martial for cowardice and another goes missing, took up Walker's call to invade Nicaragua.
Walker's destination is Lake Nicaragua. The way he saw it, with hard work and ingenuity, the Lake could connect the Pacific on the West and the Atlantic on the East with trade from the Mississippi Valley. Once in Nicaragua, Walker calls for unification, nodding to his Conservative rival, Patrice Rivas. But not waiting for an answer, Walker declares "Rivas a traitor" and calls for another "an election." And so it happens that "in June 1856, eighteen months after his bootless surrender to the U. S. Army in California, William Walker was elected president of Nicaragua."
Walker's filibuster government initiates the looting of Nicaragua. His government "(re)legalize[s] slavery." He also ("re)open[s] the African slave trade," establishing, "an international market in flesh" to fund the enterprise in Nicaragua.
Black humanity, along with gold and silver, went up the Lake and, packed, all, aboard ships headed toward the US, and the Cotton Kingdom in the Mississippi Valley.
American tycoon, Cornelius Vanderbilt, saw enough and took it upon himself to give Walker the boot! After losing "control of Lake Nicaragua and the San Juan River," Walker is forced to surrender on May 1, 1857, to "a US Navy ship waiting just off the western coast of Nicaragua."
Walker's "cruelty and indifference" toward his men, writes Johnson, preceded him. His image as a brutal man didn't wane. And when word reached the US about the men he left behind, their bodies washing up in Northern ports "in the most pitiable condition," he should have been history.
On the contrary, Walker continued his crusade, moving his operation to New Orleans and making trips around the South in an effort "to raise money for his next" and last tripback to Nicaragua!
The lesson for the contrary: pursuit of liberty and Empire can't be a one-man show.
**
The South's identification as the slaveholding land of white supremacy, despite the existence of nonslaveholders, nonetheless, created a need for both slaveholders and nonslaveholders "to seek solutions outside the boundaries of their region and of the United States." The focus shifted to Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central America, a landscape hosting the interests of Europeans. And who granted the English, French, and Spanish the right to capitalize on the wealth and free labor? Hinton Rowan Helper in his tract, "The Impending Crisis of the South, takes up the cause by, once again, reminding Americans to unify in fear of an undead Black population. No surprise, Helper specifically appeals to the nonslaveholding class.
In a crisis , Helper argues, white men take up arms; they fight for what has been stolen from them, denied them; they fight to possess the wealth and power that is rightfully theirs. Helper begins by redefining "the South," detaching it from its identification with the institution of slavery and the interests of the slaveholders. Nonslaveholding white men are the South's "rightful exclusive owners." Either the South us a land of slaveholding rich white men or it's the land of white supremacy where "white inequalityblack slaveswas forcibly excised." For Helper, the South couldn't be both!
He counted on the nonslaveholding class hatred of Blacks to follow the ideology of white supremacy.
In subsequent years, Walker writes, The War in Nicaragua , a book, Johnson explains, that was no more than "a piece of agitprop designed to convince Southerners that the solution to their problems lay in Nicaragua." It advocated the rise of nonslaveholding white man in search of their manhood. You'll find your manhood in Nicaragua! Never mind the presence of "Indians and Negroes," governed, Walker claimed, by the "mongrel," that is, the union of European and Indigenous people in the country. Want to be a slave, stay home!
The misdirected kept coming, wondering even now in 2021, why they encounter the monsterreflecting, for anyone with eyes to see, their irrationality, greed, indifference, and cruelty back to them!
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