Part 1 Manifest Destiny’s Underworld, Filibustering in Antebellum America... Narciso López’s Predecessors ... Harry Maury’s America

Manifest Destiny’s Underworld

Filibustering in Antebellum America

By Robert E. May

Chapter 1

Narciso López’s Predecessors

Around the Moro’s grim façade 

The soul of Lopez wanders 

And Crittenden—a glorious shade! 

Beside him walks and ponders. 

O, God of Peace! that such as these, 

Like dogs, should be garotted— 

Choked out of life by Spanish beasts, 

Fierce, bloody and besotted. 

—Democratic Review, December 1854

Were one to trace American filibustering to the date that the term came first into use, then it started either in 1850 or in 1851. Still fumbling as late as 1849 for the right label to pin on private military expeditions, U.S. citizens employed a variety of phrases including “Aaron Burr scheme” and “buffalo hunt,” none of which gained lasting currency.1 The Venezuelan native Narciso López’s attempts to overthrow Spanish rule of Cuba in May 1850 and again in August 1851, however, jolted Americans into refining their terminology. 

In both instances, López landed on the island with hundreds of men whom he had recruited in the United States. Spanish troops repulsed his 1850 expeditionary force shortly after its arrival on the steamer Creole at Cárdenas on Cuba’s northern coast. López’s army occupied the Cárdenas railroad station and captured the town’s military garrison, but absorbed over fifty casualties in one day of fighting. Forced to reembark and flee to the United States when Spanish reinforcements precluded his intended advance toward Matanzas (and, ultimately, Havana) and threatened to trap him, López was lucky to escape alive. The Creole reached Key West, Florida, barely ahead of a pursuing Spanish warship. 

López would not be so fortunate the next year, after his forces came on shore at a tiny coastal village about sixty miles west of Havana. Within three weeks, Spanish troops crushed the invaders, killing many of them in battle, capturing survivors, and then executing some of the prisoners. Colonel William Crittenden, the nephew of U.S. attorney general John J. Crittenden of Kentucky, and fifty of his men were shot by a firing squad on August 17. On September 1, Spanish officials had López garroted on a plaza of the Punta— a small fort on the western shore of Havana’s well-protected harbor entrance, roughly opposite one of the island’s best-known landmarks, a larger fortification known to Americans as Morro Castle. 

According to reports reaching American newspapers, huge audiences of onlookers cheered during the executions of the invaders. Some accounts described spectators as mutilating the bodies of Crittenden and his men after their deaths. One State Department informant in Havana even claimed that the Crittenden party’s executioners had shot to maim rather than kill, and that the knife-wielding mob had taken the responsibility of finishing the men off.2 

Although these expeditions occurred during a national crisis over slavery in California and other issues that threatened to destroy the Union, Americans found their attention drawn to López’s daring endeavors. In rapt, often horrified fascination, Americans waited impatiently for reliable accounts of his fate. In one of his several diary entries about the invaders, for instance, the New York lawyer George Templeton Strong remarked, “No certain news yet about Lopez and his gang.” Similarly, on the very day that López was executed, U.S. Senator Sam Houston of Texas expressed frustration that no news had arrived from Cuba, telling a correspondent that he feared disaster. Even Senator Henry Clay, then at the middle of efforts to find a legislative solution to save the Union, could hardly overlook the Cuban business. His son, serving as U.S. chargé d’affaires in Portugal at the time of López’s first foray, alerted him that “news of the Cuba invasion” was causing a “sensation” in Lisbon. By that time, Clay had already implored the Senate not to be “diverted” from the “grave” California question by the Cuban matter. 

Once reliable information actually arrived, Americans became so transfixed by the story in Cuba that they sometimes relegated to secondary importance the sectional crisis and the “Compromise of 1850” that temporarily resolved the difficulty. “The Cuban invasion is now the only staple of home news,” an observer in New Orleans maintained shortly after the failure of López’s 1850 attempt. “How the recent Cuban Excitement has overlaid all other subjects,” observed another Southerner during the López frenzy. Clay, meanwhile, worried that dis-unionists would use Cuban affairs to obscure their own intentions.3 

Few Americans kept closer watch on the filibusters than did U.S. government officials, as the invasions seriously endangered U.S. relations with Spain and other European powers. Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in his journal that telegrams from Savannah were reaching President Millard Fillmore “every hour” with “news of the Cuban invaders.” Fillmore’s second annual message to Congress, submitted in December 1851, gave approximately twice as much attention to the Cuban invasions as to the North-South crisis over slavery.4

In seeking a term that would characterize not only López’s expeditions but also other invasion plots, Americans fastened on filibuster—a modification of the French word flibustier and the Spanish filibustero, which were themselves derivatives of an old Dutch term for freebooter. Thus, when hearing about López’s execution, Strong exclaimed, “If this little band of militant philanthropists and self-consecrated missionaries of Republican scum has been exterminated, it will be long before filibusterism recovers from the shock.” Anticipating the same fate for adventurers invading Mexico, the correspondent of a New Orleans newspaper in Rio Grande City, Texas, observed that such “filibusters” might want to give confession to a priest at Mexican army headquarters on the border.5 

The term filibustering entered circulation so suddenly that in September 1851 a religious journal in Boston actually took note of its advent, cautioning to no effect that this “vulgarism” might become accepted language if the  press kept utilizing it. But rather than discard the word, commentators started exploring its etymological links to possible sources such as Cape Finisterre in northwestern Spain, flibot (Spanish for a light boat), and other conceivable forerunners. Soon the term became so salient in everyday American speech and text that Harper’s New Monthly Magazine could pronounce that filibustering was destined to “occupy an important place in our vocabulary.”6 

Dating U.S. filibustering from the coining of the word, however, would be misleading, since filibustering expeditions occurred during the earliest years of the Republic. In fact, the first federal impeachment trial in U.S. history hinged on William Blount’s filibustering plot during John Adams’s administration. In July 1797, Blount, one of Tennessee’s first two U.S. senators, drew an impeachment charge by the U.S. House of Representatives after the administration received correspondence indicating that he was planning to invade territory beyond U.S. boundaries. Though unable to refute the evidence, Blount (and his counsels) contended that Senate members were not impeachable civil officers, and he escaped conviction when the Senate passed a resolution that it lacked authority over his case.7 

Most of the early Republic’s pioneering filibusters including Blount chose as their destinations neighboring Spanish colonies in North America—especially New Spain’s provinces of East and West Florida, Texas, and Louisiana.8 However, in 1806 Francisco de Miranda targeted Spanish holdings further south. That year, he led some two hundred recruits on an expedition from New York port to his native Venezuela. Some adventurers, moreover, looked northward to British Canada. The Vermonter Ira Allen turned up in Paris in 1796, seeking arms and the collaboration of French expeditionary troops for an invasion that would liberate Canada and convert it into an independent democratic republic called United Columbia. Allen’s New Englanders would march northward from Missisquoi Bay on Lake Champlain while French forces attacked Quebec by an invasion up the St. Lawrence River. Allen’s plot collapsed after a British warship intercepted his shipment of 15,000 muskets and 21 cannon back across the Atlantic. Still, he spent years trying to revive his filibuster, and submitted revised plans to unreceptive French officials as late as December 1799.9 

Little mystery attaches to the filibusters’ concentration on Spain’s North American provinces. Nearby Americans held long-standing grievances against Spanish officials. Spain’s authorities closed the lower Mississippi River Valley to U.S. trade between 1784 and 1788, and they imposed tariffs on American imports and exports through New Orleans between 1788 and 1795. After the United States and Spain signed the Treaty of San Lorenzo (“Pinckney’s Treaty”) of 1795, the governor of West Florida required nearly prohibitive 12 percent duties from Americans shipping goods via the Mobile River. Borderlands Americans also resented Spain’s failure to resolve disputed land claims in the area, and they accused Spanish authorities of instigating Indian attacks against them. Most important, Spain’s North American holdings, particularly the Floridas, seemed to lack enough troops and loyal subjects to repel American invasions. 

Spanish habitations in turn-of-the-century East Florida barely extended beyond a corridor of land in the northeastern corner of today’s state of Florida. Pensacola, the capital of West Florida, represented the only sizable Spanish settlement on the peninsula’s Gulf side. Although both provinces, and Louisiana, fell under the administrative authority of the captains general of Cuba, they never received sufficient garrisons to deter filibustering. Spanish troops in all East Florida at the time of one American filibuster totaled a mere 408 men. Nowhere in North America did Spanish officials maintain a regular schedule of border patrols.10 

Conditions became especially ripe for filibusters after revolution broke out throughout Spain’s colonial empire in the Americas. Between 1810 and 1824, rebellions overthrew Spanish authority everywhere in the Western Hemisphere except for Cuba and Puerto Rico. The revolts occurred after the invasion of Spain in 1808 by the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte—an invasion that brought years of turmoil to Spain and distracted Spanish authorities from colonial affairs across the Atlantic. Capitalizing on this opportunity, U.S. filibusters converged on Spanish domains, frequently as affiliates of Latin American revolutionaries. The U.S. army officer Augustus W. Magee, for example, in 1812 led the vanguard of the Mexican insurgent José Bernardo Maximiliano Gutiérrez de Lara’s Republican Army of the North across the Sabine River into Texas. Americans who filibustered with the Scotsman Gregor McGregor and “Commodore” Luis-Michel Aury to Amelia Island in East Florida in 1817 likewise joined leaders who claimed revolutionary credentials.11 

Some early U.S. filibusters hoped to annex liberated colonies to their own country. James Long’s unsuccessful 1819 expedition to Texas, organized primarily in Mississippi and Louisiana, grew out of southwestern irritation at news of the recently negotiated Adams-Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain, which, though it acquired Florida, surrendered American claims to Texas. George Mathews, one of the most elderly filibusters in U.S. history, similarly had expansionist intentions.12 

Mathews’s escapade began as a collaboration with President James Madison on the eve of the War of 1812. Worried that Spain, allied with Great Britain against Napoleon in Europe, might cede its remaining holdings in Florida to Great Britain, a far stronger military power, the president asked Congress to authorize a temporary U.S. occupation of any part of Florida designated for such a transfer. Congress in January 1811 granted Madison’s request. Later that month Mathews, a former governor of Georgia then seventy-two years of age, received an appointment from the Department of State as one of two commissioners empowered to investigate conditions in East Florida: the commissioners could negotiate East Florida’s annexation to the United States should the Spanish provincial governor be receptive; they could occupy the province, with the assistance of U.S. ground and naval forces, if they found that Spain was ceding it to Britain. 

Mathews discovered no willingness on the part of Spanish officials to treat for Florida’s cession to the United States; nor did he uncover evidence of a pending cession to Britain. But rather than give up his mission, Mathews converted it into a filibuster. Commanding a mixed force of borderland Georgians, Americans residing in Florida, and even a few of Florida’s Spaniards, Mathews and his filibusters, in a campaign beginning in March 1812, captured Fernandina on Amelia Island, took other settlements in northern East Florida, and besieged the capital of St. Augustine. Meanwhile, Mathews established a puppet government for East Florida whose sole purpose was to cede itself—that is, the entire province of East Florida—to Mathews as an agent of the U.S. government. What had been effected by arms, in other words, could be presented to world opinion as peaceful annexation: a willing people (the inhabitants of the new “Republic of Florida”), according to a draft treaty that Mathews forwarded to the Department of State on March 21, voluntarily chose to cast their lot as a territory in the American Union!13 

As with later expeditions, volunteers in these first U.S. filibusters did not necessarily follow the same sirens as their commanders. Recruiters realized that it took promises of land, good pay, pensions, political appointments, and other rewards to convince men to serve in such dangerous affairs. Then, too, some filibusters hoped to strike it rich from privateering or smuggling operations connected to their expeditions. The adventurers who in 1816–17 captured Galveston and Fernandina, previously centers of privateering, smuggling, and even piracy, continued such endeavors after their takeovers—all in the name, supposedly, of the Latin American revolutions.14 

Whatever their intentions, U.S. filibusters engaged in criminal behavior. Private military expeditions in peacetime naturally risk retaliatory attacks by  invaded countries. Responding to the danger that filibusters might draw nations into unnecessary wars, theorists of international law, long before the American Revolution, established the principle that sovereign states must stop persons from using their jurisdictions to mount expeditions against the territory of countries with which their own nations are at peace. 

America’s founding fathers (many of them lawyers by profession) had versed themselves in the Swiss author Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1758) as well as the tracts of Hugo Grotius and other codifiers of international law, and had followed its precepts about private military invasions. Although no supranational organization then existed to rule on or enforce international law, it made sense for early American leaders to outlaw filibustering, not only because of their intentions to found a country based on law, but also because they were sensitive to their new nation’s relatively limited military power. Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution empowered Congress to penalize “offences against the Law of Nations.” Under this mandate, the nation’s lawmakers responded with “neutrality” enactments in 1794, 1797, 1800, 1807, 1817, 1818, and 1838 to repress filibustering expeditions and other infringements of international law.15 

The Neutrality Law of 1818, which superseded all previous legislation, became the bane of American filibusters. Its Article 6 provided for the imprisonment to a maximum of three years and fines of as much as three thousand dollars (a far more considerable sum then than today) for persons who, within U.S. jurisdiction, began or aided “any military expedition or enterprise . . . against the territory or dominions of any foreign prince or state, or of any colony, district, or people, with whom the United States are at peace.”16 

Despite this legislation, it would be a mistake to assume that American leaders, many of them avid territorial expansionists, shared an unwavering commitment to eradicate private expeditions. To be sure, one can cite instances aplenty when federal officials intervened against filibusters. Most early U.S. presidents issued proclamations against filibustering activities. Cabinet members summoned governors, district attorneys, marshals, and military officers to interdict pending expeditions, and even tipped off Spanish officials about filibuster movements so that defensive military preparations might be made in targeted colonies. From time to time, federal authorities prosecuted filibusters for violating the neutrality laws. Yet there were occasions when federal authorities found it convenient to overlook, or even assist, filibuster plots in the expectation that they might eventuate in U.S. territorial growth.17 

No filibuster of the early Republic benefited more from federal complicity than did East Florida’s intrepid invader George Mathews. His Patriots capitalized on the cooperation of U.S. army and naval officers even though those very officers were unsure whether the Madison administration expected them to provide Mathews with direct military support. Fernandina might never have surrendered to Mathews’s forces had not the gunboats of Commodore Hugh Campbell of the U.S. Navy aimed their artillery at the town. Subsequently, U.S. army troops occupied Picolata, a Spanish settlement on the St. John’s River, on Mathews’s behalf, and participated, along with U.S. naval forces, in the filibusters’ siege of St. Augustine— even fighting a bloodless engagement against its defenders. 

Though in April 1812 the Madison administration disavowed the invaders on the rationale that Mathews had violated his instructions, U.S. troops persisted in East Florida as late as the spring of 1813. For some time, a U.S. marine captain governed Fernandina, imposing taxes, establishing closing times for grog shops, and making other administrative decisions, all under the fiction that Mathews had the authority to accept the cession by the Patriots of East Florida to the United States. Further, between November 1812 and February 1813, the Madison administration mobilized regular, volunteer, and militia troops on the Georgia-Florida frontier, in the expectation of following up Mathews’s initiative with a full-scale campaign to conquer all of Spanish Florida. The cancellation of this plan because of congressional opposition, and the final disintegration of Mathews’s movement in 1814, should not obscure the considerable aid previously rendered the filibusters by the U.S. government.18 

Besides, just a few years later, the U.S. government capitalized on LuisMichel Aury’s filibuster to get permanent possession of Amelia Island. On the pretext that Aury’s privateering risked dragging the United States into disputes with foreign countries, the Monroe administration in 1817 directed U.S. army and naval officers to seize the island. Federal forces held possession from their late December takeover (which the filibusters only resisted verbally) until 1821, when the island became part of the American domain by virtue of ratification of the Adams-Onís Treaty. Ironically, Spanish leaders might have approved Florida’s transfer earlier, had they not been irritated by apparently unfounded reports that the Monroe administration had sponsored James Long’s filibuster into Texas two years earlier.19 

With Latin America independence assured by the mid-1820s, U.S. filibustering entered a period of dormancy, only to revive in the mid-1830s when new revolutionary stirrings erupted in adjacent lands. The Texas Revolution of 1835 began as an uprising against Mexican rule by Anglos and some Tejanos already living in Mexico’s state of Texas-Coahuila. However, so many private American military companies hastened to Texas, once word of the uprising arrived in the United States, that the Texas Revolution became transformed into the most successful filibuster in American history. More than three of every four soldiers in Texan rebel armies from January to March 1836 crossed the border after October 1835. A second wave of American expeditionists, including the Mississippi militia officer and recent governor John A. Quitman, set out for Texas starting in April 1836 in reaction to news that Mexican commanders had executed rebels who surrendered at the Alamo and Goliad, instead of treating them as prisoners of war. 

After chairing a meeting in his hometown of Natchez that passed resolutions to avenge the Alamo, Quitman declared that he would lead men to Texas within days, and that persons wishing to go should show up at the appointed time with a mount, a shoulder arm, and pistols. Quitman and some seventeen followers left Natchez on April 5 amid considerable fanfare and crossed the Sabine River into Texas on April 9. By April 12, the little party was deploying at Nacogdoches, which Quitman heard was in danger of attack from a 3,000 man force of Mexicans and allied Indians. “Each of my Natchez boys swears he is good for ten Mexicans,” Quitman noted proudly in his journal that day. “If I must die early, let me die with these brave fellows and for such a cause.” It simply is hard to imagine the Texans winning and then maintaining their independence without the assistance of such volunteer companies from the United States.20 

President Andrew Jackson went through the motions of trying to stop the filibusters. He announced in his December 1835 message to Congress that he opposed the expeditionists, and he had cabinet members put U.S. district attorneys and army officers on alert to halt the exodus of volunteers. However, federal border authorities, probably because they favored the rebels, perhaps because they were overwhelmed by the sheer number of lawbreakers, allowed the crossings to proceed virtually unmolested, and Jackson never intervened to reverse these lapses. Quitman, who skirted around one U.S. army garrison on his way west rather than test the government’s will, nonetheless assumed that government authorities were on the filibusters’ side. “There is no necessity for ‘bearding the lion in his den,’ and incurring risk of detention,” he mused, “though I doubt not the officers sympathize with us.” By his leniency, Old Hickory set a precedent of presidential impotence against filibustering that would be remembered. “Perhaps the President did not mean any more than Gen. Jackson did by his Proclamation against the volunteers in Texas,” a filibuster suggested almost twenty years later, as his associates went ahead with planning an invasion of Cuba despite Franklin Pierce’s recent proclamation against illegal expeditions.21 

Filibusters likewise played a conspicuous role in the Patriot uprisings that broke out in the provinces of Lower and Upper Canada (today, Quebec and Ontario) during 1837, though with noticeably less success. Americans started filibustering into the Canadas when the revolutionaries, after military setbacks, fled to Rochester, Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Burlington, and other points across the U.S. boundary. Enticed into joining the Patriots by promises of Canadian land, silver dollars, and other rewards, hundreds (and eventually several thousands) of borderlands residents, many of them insecure, young laborers dependent on seasonal employment, went off fighting for Canadian freedom. 

In December 1837 Rensselaer Van Rensselaer of Albany, New York, the son of a general in the War of 1812, led twenty-four men across the Niagara River to Navy Island, near the Canadian shore, as a vanguard for the intended return to Canada of William Lyon Mackenzie and other refugee revolutionaries on American soil. Hoping to rally Canadians before their arrival, the filibusters raised the flag for a provisional government of Upper Canada, and Mackenzie released a proclamation dated Navy Island, December 13, promising Canadians religious freedom, political democracy, and economic progress while offering American and Canadian volunteers alike three hundred acres of land. By the day after Christmas, 523 adventurers had gathered on the island.22 

The filibusters received a tactical setback but a recruiting boost when on December 29 loyalist Canadians, commanded by a British militia officer, seized the Caroline—an American steamboat taking supplies and recruits to Navy Island. After capturing the vessel near Fort Schlosser on the U.S. side of the river, the raiding party set it on fire, towed it to mid-river, and abandoned it just above Niagara Falls. Borderland Americans rallied to the filibuster cause after news circulated that the vessel had been attacked while at anchor in U.S. territory and that an American had been killed during the capture. False reports that the raiders had left the Caroline by the falls with helpless Americans stranded on board further inflamed the situation. Mackenzie’s force on Navy Island grew to about eight hundred men, causing concern in Washington. 

Determined to keep the peace with Britain, a far more powerful nation than Mexico, President Martin Van Buren not only issued a proclamation against the invaders on January 5, 1838, but also had his cabinet members instruct customs officials, district attorneys, and marshals to take preventive action. Further, the president wisely sent one of the U.S. Army’s ranking generals and shrewdest strategists, the War of 1812 hero Winfield Scott, to pacify the border. Scott, an insufferable egotist, nonetheless had already demonstrated considerable tact in dealing with potentially explosive domestic problems. In 1841 he would become commanding general of the entire army.23 

Federal intervention proved decisive. U.S. authorities interrupted Mackenzie’s timing by taking him briefly into custody on January 4, 1838. Scott’s threat to confiscate vessels in the filibusters’ service dampened the willingness of nearby shipowners to hire out vessels for the Navy Island operation. As a result, the filibusters ran short on supplies. Once frigid weather set in, they gave up, withdrawing from the island on January 14. Meanwhile, to the west, Van Rensselaer’s second-in-command Thomas Jefferson Sutherland failed in a planned filibuster from Detroit against Toronto. His men disbanded after their ship ran aground in the Detroit River and they came under attack by Canadian militia.24 

Rather than desist, however, the Patriots and allied Americans regrouped and unleashed coordinated attacks against the whole U.S.-Canadian border from Vermont to Michigan. On February 22, 1838, Van Rensselaer and several hundred men occupied Hickory Island in Canadian territory, preparatory to an intended assault on Kingston (at the junction of the St. Lawrence River with Lake Ontario). This invasion failed when most of the volunteers, learning of approaching Canadian militia, backed out of continuing the campaign. On February 24, some one hundred fifty adventurers crossed the iced-over Detroit River to take Fighting Island, holding it for about two days before being driven back by gunfire from the Canadian shore. On February 28, five to six hundred filibusters commanded by the Canadian physician Robert Nelson crossed Vermont’s northwestern border armed with cannons on sleighs and muskets looted from the Vermont state arsenal at Elizabethtown, and established a short-lived Independent Republic of Lower Canada. Intimidated by advancing British forces, the filibusters recrossed the boundary and surrendered on March 1 to U.S. army Colonel John E. Wool. That same day and the next, filibusters around Detroit attempted unsuccessfully to take Pelée Island in Lake Erie.25 

Repeated failures caused the movement to go underground. Over the next several months, to avoid detection by either U.S. or British authorities, American Patriot sympathizers formed secret societies to plan future operations: the Canadian Refugee Relief Association; the Frères Chasseurs, or Brother Hunters; and the Sons of Liberty. Two similar groups were founded in 1839. Eventually these organizations merged into what became known as Patriot Hunters or Hunters’ Lodges. 

Invasions soon resumed. On May 29, 1838, members of the Canadian Refugee Relief Association, dressed as Indians, avenged the Caroline by burning the Canadian vessel Sir Robert Peel while she was at Wells Island on Lake Ontario. In June several hundred filibusters crossed the Niagara River. They established an encampment on the Canadian side, destroyed property, and suffered four men killed before surrendering to British regulars and Canadian militia. The Sons of Liberty planned a summertime attack on the Michigan state arsenal preparatory to a campaign against Windsor, but aborted that operation because authorities at the arsenal were under alert.26 

Pre–Civil War filibustering to Canada climaxed that fall. In early November filibusters connected with Nelson’s “Republic of Lower Canada” were prevented from a boundary crossing by U.S. army patrols and the seizure of their chartered sloop by U.S. customs officials. However, on November 11, four hundred filibusters began their campaign to take Prescott and nearby Fort Wellington on the Canadian side of the St. Lawrence River. Although part of the force was diverted to recruit reinforcements, 150 or so invaders took possession of a windmill and other buildings below Prescott on November 12, raised their flag, and captured an American steamship and an American ferryboat. They received 110 reinforcements before seizure of their vessels by a U.S. marshal aided by federal troops cut off help from the American side. The filibusters, consequently, had little chance of victory in their “Battle of the Windmill”—an affair that ended with 20 Patriots dead, 157 taken prisoner, and the rest in flight. 

Undaunted by this disaster, the former Ohio militia brigadier general Lucius Bierce commanded 135 Hunters in a December 3–4 crossing of the Detroit River for an attack on Windsor. These invaders burned barracks, a couple of houses and a steamer, killed a few defenders, and issued the obligatory proclamation calling for a Canadian uprising, before being routed by Canadian militia. Twenty-one invaders died in battle; other Hunters were taken prisoner or died from exposure as they fled the battle site. 

Filibuster reinforcements poured into Detroit. However the movement, now plagued by the presence of 2,000 U.S. regulars on the frontier and other preventive measures by the Van Buren administration and state authorities, had played out. Cross-border raids and filibuster plotting continued in 1839– 41. Many Hunters hoped to provoke an Anglo-American war as a means of freeing the Canadas. But in 1842, northward filibustering suffered a crippling blow when the United States signed the Webster-Ashburton Treaty with Britain, resolving most border difficulties.27 

Meanwhile, few filibusters departed southward from U.S. territory in the early 1840s, though transplanted Americans participated in the Texas Republic’s disastrous “Mier expedition” into northern Mexico in 1842 and some Americans got captured and executed in a foray from New Orleans to the Mexican state of Yucatán in 1844. Certainly no filibuster army materialized to answer the call of a Mississippi paper for “thousands of bold and adventurous spirits from ‘the States’” to conquer Mexico City’s treasures on behalf of the “Anglo-Saxon race.”28

Paradoxically, the Mexican War that erupted in the spring of 1846 both inhibited filibustering and guaranteed its revival. Now, on the one hand, adventurous Americans could satiate their filibustering inclinations by joining their country’s largely-volunteer army. Why participate in an illegal military venture, when one might invade foreign domains with the government’s blessing? On the other hand, the war’s end in 1848 created a pool of latent filibusters— conquering soldiers accustomed to military campaigning who dreaded being mustered out of the service (if they were volunteers) or being posted to routine peacetime assignments (if they were regulars). 

In the months between the U.S. Army’s entry into Mexico City in September 1847 and the end of the war, some U.S. soldiers considered enlisting in an expedition to Yucatán, which had seceded from Mexico in 1846 and maintained neutrality during the fighting. Simultaneously, Cuba’s Havana Club (Club de la Habana), made up mainly of Creole merchants, planters, and professionals who favored the annexation of their island to the United States,29 took steps to enlist restless American war veterans in a rebellion to overthrow Spanish rule. 

Trying to repress a bloody insurrection by Mayan Indians that erupted in 1847, Yucatán’s ruling elite unsuccessfully solicited the United States to assume a military protectorate over their state, and also offered $8 a month and 320 acres of land to American volunteers willing to soldier against the Indians. By the late spring of 1848, word was racing through U.S. forces occupying Mexico’s capital of this opportunity for continued military service. “There are officers in the city of Mexico trying to raise companies to go to Yucatan,” observed one of Pennsylvania’s volunteers on May 27. That same day, an American occupation newspaper instructed soldiers how they might sign up.30 

At virtually the same time, the U.S. consul in Havana, Robert B. Campbell, informed the State Department of Cuban rebels’ hopes that “a few of the volunteer regiments now in Mexico” might “obtain their discharge” and join a revolution against Spanish rule that they hoped to initiate in the immediate future. Campbell’s information was accurate. That May, the Havana Club sent an agent and interpreter to Mexico in the hope of persuading U.S. General William J. Worth, one of the heroes of the American conquest of Mexico City, to lead this filibuster. To accommodate the arrival of these auxiliaries, moreover, Narciso López, a former Spanish army officer and functionary, postponed his own separately planned uprising for Cuban independence from June 24 until mid-July.31 

Possibly the Yucatán and Cuban plots had linkages to each other, with the peninsula intended as a way station to the island. Campbell, who was privy to many of the Cuban rebels’ plans, notified Commodore Matthew C. Perry, commanding U.S. naval forces in the region, that the plotters expected the Americans to arrive via Yucatán.32 

Though much remains in doubt about what occurred when the Cuban agents caught up with Worth in Mexico, the general reportedly gave tentative approval to the filibuster, promising, as one of the high-ranking Cuban rebels put it, to accept the call “contingent upon his resignation of his rank in the [U.S.] army.” Possibly, Worth even took preliminary steps to involve his fellow army officer Robert E. Lee in the plot. Lee had won considerable notice for his engineering feats during the Mexico City campaign. In a letter alluding rather obliquely to both Cuba and Yucatán, the army lieutenant Henry J. Hunt alerted Colonel James Duncan, “Genl. W. bids me to say to you . . . that  he has some rich developments to make in which the pious Capt. Lee figures conspicuously.”33 

Whatever the case may have been, both the Yucatán and Cuban schemes ran into resistance from Washington. President James K. Polk, who in June 1848 authorized the American minister in Spain to try to purchase Cuba, could ill afford to tolerate filibustering, which would naturally alienate the very Spanish officials who had to be persuaded to sell their colony. Tipped off not only by Campbell, but also by the New York newspaperman John L. O’Sullivan (whose sister was married to a wealthy Cuban opposed to Spanish rule) and by some Cubans who turned up for a White House interview facilitated in part by Senator Jefferson Davis of Mississippi, Polk had his cabinet take preventive measures. Secretary of War William L. Marcy gave an “awful” blow to “go-ahead” soldiers, as one reporter phrased it, by cautioning U.S. occupation commanders in Mexico to be on their alert against filibustering and by stipulating that troop transports returning to the United States avoid Cuban ports. Secretary of State James Buchanan cautioned Campbell against even giving the impression of collaboration with Cuban insurgents, and passed on to Spanish officials what the administration had gleaned about the intended uprising. Buchanan’s intimations failed to grease Spain’s cession of Cuba; but they did help Spanish authorities in July preempt López’s uprising by jailing a number of the alleged conspirators.34 

Yet Polk’s policies only delayed what in retrospect seems to have been filibustering’s inevitable revival. Even before the last remnants of the U.S. army withdrew from Mexico in August 1848, adventurers in southern Texas were conspiring with Mexican revolutionaries to carve out of northern Mexico an independent Republic of the Sierra Madre (also known as the Republic of the Rio Grande). Helen Chapman, married to a U.S. Army assistant quartermaster who was engaged in transferring army supplies from occupied Matamoros to the U.S. side of the Rio Grande, informed her mother that the plotters intended to include Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, and Coahuila in their new polity. Their organization was so “extensive” that she expected to hear of “the Texas story all over again.” Disturbed by press reports about the plot, Polk and Buchanan again used their influence against filibustering, realizing, as Buchanan put it, that any expedition would make an immediate mockery of the American pledge in its peace treaty with Mexico to respect the boundary dividing the two nations.35 

Meanwhile, Buchanan fended off complaints from the Venezuelan government about rumored expeditions being mounted against Venezuela from U.S. soil. He also received an apology from Viscount Palmerston, the British foreign secretary, for the arrest and detention of Americans traveling in Ireland. It had turned out, Palmerston explained, that they had been wrongly suspected of filibustering to overthrow British rule there. In September, Campbell reported that new plots were already being hatched in Havana for an “armed invasion” by American citizens.36 

By the fall of 1848, it seemed that borderland revolutionaries had called off the Sierra Madre movement. According to a press report from Galveston, some adventurers led by Lorenzo A. Besançon, who had captained the Louisiana Mounted Volunteers during the war, arrived prematurely at Corpus Christi only to be sent home. Relieved by the apparent evaporation of the threat, Buchanan took credit for stopping the expedition, and instructed the U.S. minister to Mexico to cultivate the goodwill of Mexican leaders by stressing to them the administration’s successful anti-filibustering efforts.37 

However, at the very time that the Sierra Madre scheme was put on hold, discharged U.S. soldiers were finally making their way to Yucatán. On October 29, a New Orleans newspaper reported that eighty Americans were already serving in Yucatán’s armed forces, and that David G. Wilds (a former U.S. Army lieutenant) had arrived in the Crescent City on a recruiting mission for Yucatán’s government. In November, George W. White, who had been an infantry captain of Louisiana Volunteers during the Mexican War, posted placards in New Orleans for “fighting men” willing to join Yucatán’s military. “Colonel” White raised his quota so quickly that he embarked for the peninsula before the end of the month. In December his regiment of just under 1,000 volunteers, including Lorenzo A. Besançon as lieutenant colonel and second-in-command, went into action. Although hundreds of the volunteers arrived back at New Orleans in March and April after the regiment disbanded, Besançon and a battalion of Americans remained in service well into the spring.38 

One might argue that Colonel White’s volunteers were mercenaries rather than filibusters, since they served at the invitation of Yucatán’s ruling authorities. But because Besançon had prepared to filibuster across the Rio Grande before his arrival in Yucatán, and because White officered an intended invasion of Cuba in 1849, immediately after his return to the United States from Yucatán, this would seem to be splitting hairs. It is easy to imagine White, Besançon, and company trying to convert their intervention in Yucatán into an attempt at conquest, had the opportunity to do so presented itself. Yucatán’s leaders seem to have suspected as much. A number of White’s subordinate officers complained to a reporter after their return that Yucatecan authorities had always kept their “regiment divided, and the different battalions separated by long marches,” for fear the Americans would take over the country.39 

Clearly, numbers of American veterans of the Mexican War had contracted  a filibustering spirit. Soon they and like-minded young Americans and recent immigrants would be invading lands throughout the Gulf-Caribbean region, and intimidating peoples as far away as Hawaii. Symptomatic of things to come, the aborted plots and Yucatán intervention of 1848 heralded America’s coming filibustering epidemic.

                                             Chapter 2 

                                  Harry Maury’s America 

Harry Maury was only slightly inconvenienced. True, the Mobile lawyer and merchant captain had raised men for General Quitman’s filibuster to Cuba, only to be notified, in late March 1855, that Quitman had canceled the expedition. Maury would have the unwelcome task of telling his recruits to return to their jobs and homes. But overcoming his “personal disappointment,” Maury expressed confidence that Quitman’s chivalrous nature would eventually induce him to reassemble the expedition. Something would surely be done by the famed general, Maury assumed, for Cuba’s “helpless women and children” suffering under Spain’s autocratic rule. Besides, Maury had other filibusters to choose from should Quitman really call it quits. “Please keep me advised of your address,” he asked one of Quitman’s collaborators, adding, “if I do go on any other expedition I will let you know at once.”1 

Had Maury joined an alternative filibustering expedition, it likely would have been the scheme of the Texas entrepreneur Henry L. Kinney to “colonize” part of Central America. Kinney’s project was well known in Quitman’s circle. Two months earlier, Quitman had received a letter of regret from a follower who reported that he had just signed on as a staff surgeon in “Colonel” Kinney’s movement, as well as a missive from Mike Walsh, a lame-duck congressman from New York, announcing that he might seek one of Kinney’s commissions. Late in February 1855, a New Orleans newspaper announced that Maury had opened a recruiting office for Kinney in Mobile.2 

But there were other filibusters reportedly in the works. U.S. Senator Jeremiah Clemens of Maury’s own state of Alabama, for instance, was rumored to be organizing an operation to Ecuador. Supposedly Clemens had contracted to raise 2,100 men and provide 6 vessels to assist an effort by the former Ecuadorian president Juan José Flores to regain control over the country. In return, Flores would provide Clemens—a former Mexican War colonel— and his followers with land grants, as well as the right to market guano deposits on Ecuador’s Galápagos Islands.3

Throughout the year, moreover, Americans plotted attacks against their southern neighbor. In January, for instance, while serving on the commission to survey the new U.S.-Mexican boundary necessitated by the recent Gadsden Treaty, the U.S. Army major and topographical engineer William H. Emory posted a letter from El Paso intimating that even though he despised “filibusterism,” he was conspiring with influential people across the border who favored the annexation of Chihuahua to the United States. A Vermonter running a private school in San Antonio notified his mother on July 1, “A ‘filibuster’ expedition is in progress from this vicinity against Mexico.... Some of my acquaintances have gone.” Almost certainly, this New Englander’s friends had become involved in plans of the Texas Ranger William R. Henry for a border crossing. Just seventeen days later, Henry broadcast a call for volunteers in a San Antonio newspaper. In October, Henry’s band would join another group of Texans and cross the border for a short-lived invasion.4 

Maury would more likely have heard of Ecuadorian and Mexican plots than about what William Walker was up to in distant California. Walker, who already had filibustered two years earlier into Mexican Baja California, was planning an expedition to Nicaragua. He had to slow the pace of his preparations, though, after taking a wound to his foot in a duel.5 

Had Maury been privy to official diplomatic correspondence, moreover, he might have wondered whether there were still other options. On March 12, the U.S. commissioner to Hawaii (then also known as the Sandwich Islands) alerted the Department of State that he anticipated an American filibuster against Honolulu. Later in the year, U.S. Secretary of State William L. Marcy complained about the British government’s decision to dispatch a large fleet to the western Atlantic on the basis of rumors that Americans had organized a filibuster to Ireland.6 

That Maury might have been able to choose from so lengthy a filibustering menu is less curious than one might suspect. Throughout the period between the end of the Mexican War and the beginning of the Civil War (1848–61) it was common for two or more U.S. filibustering expeditions to be in some stage of preparation or in actual progress. As an English observer put it regarding America’s most notorious filibuster, William Walker was merely a “straw upon the wind,” since there were hundreds of men ready to fill his shoes if he faltered. Harry Maury’s America, it would seem, had become a filibustering nation.7 

It took a foreigner to unleash American filibustering in the aftermath of the Mexican War. Not only did Narciso López command the first significant illegal invasions from American soil since the Canadian rebellions of the 1830s, but his landings in Cuba helped to spawn further expeditions by providing orientation and field training for many officers and enlistees in later filibustering bands. 

Swarthy, dark-eyed, and mustached, López arrived in the United States on July 23, 1848, when he debarked from an American vessel at Bristol, Rhode Island, having barely escaped arrest in Cuba during Spain’s crackdown that month on revolutionary activity. Over the following year, López organized a military expedition from American soil to free Cuba from Spain’s rule. Although many of his activities during this period remain unknown, it is clear that he made New York (and to a lesser extent Washington) the nerve center of a conspiracy that soon reached all the way to the Gulf Coast. In New York, López drew on the assistance of the Cuban Council (Consejo de Organización y Gobierno Cubano; headed by John L. O’Sullivan’s brother-in-law, Cristóbal Madan), an organization of exiles from the island and an offshoot of the Havana Club. 

Since López did not speak English, he also leaned heavily on Ambrosio José Gonzales, a Cuban educator and member of the Havana Club who had attended an academy in New York City during his youth and was fluent in the language. Gonzales arrived in the United States shortly after López, sailing from Havana to New Orleans on assignment from the Havana Club to follow up on its attempt (mentioned in chapter 1) to get the U.S. Army general William Worth in the revolutionaries’ fold and put him in touch with López. Sometime after arriving, Gonzales joined López’s staff in the principal subordinate role of adjutant general, and rendered invaluable service as López’s frequent traveling companion and liaison with potential American supporters.8 

By mid-summer of 1849, López and his cohorts, with financial assistance from the Havana Club, had acquired vessels and made elaborate arrangements for their filibuster. George W. White, recently returned from Yucatán, recruited and commanded a minimum of 450 men, and possibly as many as 600, who had been raised in New Orleans and its vicinity for the invasion. On July 31, White’s band landed at tiny Round Island, López’s assigned rendezvous in the Gulf of Mexico near Pascagoula, Mississippi. Had everything gone according to plan, White’s force would have eventually combined with hundreds of additional troops before invading Cuba’s southern coast. Gonzales later asserted that López intended a two-pronged expedition of approximately 1,200 men that would leave New York and Round Island.9 

Throughout late August and into September, newspapers reported that López’s agents were holding meetings and raising recruits at eastern urban centers such as New York, Baltimore, and Washington.10 A Philadelphia newspaper afterward broke the story of a young man who had told the editors about being recruited with other Philadelphians, and of how they had gone to New York City where the filibusters had quartered them at a hotel and then boarded them on a steamer in preparation for departure. In early 1850, a Louisville sheet published a public letter from a former U.S. Army officer, Edgar Basil Gaither, asserting that he had raised 500 Kentuckians for the enterprise.11 

Before López’s scheduled departure, Rose Greenhow, the future Confederate spy, tried to rally support for the venture. On August 29, 1849, after taking breakfast with “the main spring or mover in the matter,” Greenhow penned a letter from Washington to Senator John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, a former secretary of state, briefing him about the filibusters’ pending embarkation: “Now I must tell you of the progress of the Cuba affair. . . . The expedition will sail on Saturday, that is to say a steamer with a thousand men from New York or some point North, with one part of the forces, and a steamer of a thousand ton with 12 or 15 hundred more, from New Orleans simultaneously.” Greenhow’s note reinforced John L. O’Sullivan’s attempt of five days earlier to flatter Calhoun into collaboration. The famous Carolinian should become a “tower of strength” to the filibusters, O’Sullivan had implored, by writing fifty letters to key contacts who might “act with the requisite energy, promptitude, head and heart, in this matter.” Calhoun, however, remained uninvolved.12 

Even had Calhoun immediately thrown his influence behind López’s movement, it would have come too late. At the very moment when Greenhow was soliciting him, U.S. naval officers were blockading Round Island. Just the day before, Commander Victor M. Randolph had proclaimed to the “vagrants” on the island that they were mercenaries and lawbreakers, and warned them not only that he would prevent their boarding oceangoing steamers, but that starting the next day he would cut off their shipments of provisions from the mainland. About a week later, federal authorities in New York seized vessels intended for the expedition. Although Randolph eventually curtailed his attempt to starve out the Round Island filibusters, most of them had tired of waiting by mid-September and accepted the Navy’s free transportation back to the mainland, though a handful hung on for another month. A few of the men, rather than return to the mainland, enlisted as ordinary seamen on one of the blockading vessels.13 

Rather than capitulate, however, López renewed planning a filibuster. But now he encountered resistance within the Cuban exile community in New York. In the wake of the Round Island debacle, members of the council concluded that he had been impulsive, and that more advance planning ought to go into any future attempt. As a result, throughout the late fall of 1849 and over the winter, council members bickered with López over the timing of the next attempt and the disposition of arms and other resources recovered from the canceled invasion.14

Had Madan and his council cohorts felt more comfortable about the domestic political situation in the United States, they might have cooperated more energetically with López. But by early 1850, Madan was increasingly conflicted over whether it was a good time even to attempt revolutionizing his homeland, given the current disputes dividing the American people over slavery and its expansion. Heated debate had broken out in Congress, as well as in the nation’s press and in state legislatures, not only over whether California and other parts of the recent Mexican Cession should be allowed to have slavery, but also about such explosive issues as the slave trade in the District of Columbia, Texas’s boundary with New Mexico, and southern demands for a stronger fugitive slave law. From the moment that it convened on December 3, 1849, the first session of America’s 31st Congress found itself consumed with sectional issues. 

Strongly proslavery, neither the council nor the Havana Club wished to liberate Cuba unless it would afterward be annexed to the United States with its labor system intact. But how could the Cubans be certain that this would happen at a time when northern “freesoilers” in and out of Congress were demanding that slavery be prohibited from every inch of America’s newest territory in the southwest? As Madan put it, America’s “domestic disagreement” made it “inexpedient and criminal” to begin “any thing of a revolutionary nature without seeing clearly the sure safe arrival at annexation.” Madan worried that Cuba risked a slave insurrection should revolutionary currents be unleashed without “the frank and determined aid of the respectable classes of the South.” From the council’s perspective, Southerners were too distracted to provide such assistance for the time being. López’s decision to forge ahead with planning for an immediate expedition, therefore, amounted to putting “personal and ambitious considerations” above Cuba’s welfare.15 

Frustrated by the council’s inaction, Gonzales and other members of López’s faction announced in the American press in December that they were organizing their own junta in Washington, which they called the Junta for the Promotion of Cuban Political Interests (Junta Promovedora de los Intereses Politicos de Cuba), and provided a post office box for people wishing to contact López by mail.16 Moreover, to enhance their movement’s appeal to potential American volunteers and financial contributors, they made renewed efforts to identify a prominent American military figure who might be willing to head their invasion force or serve as second-in-command. 

The search for an American leader, by this time, had become something of a quest among the Cuban exiles. General Worth had expressed continued interest in the command, which reportedly included an offer to him of $3 million, during his negotiations with Gonzales. He even sent an agent to Havana to flesh out the details. However, the general apparently never made a firm commitment, and the filibusters considered other prospects after the War Department in late 1848 assigned Worth the command of Military Departments nos. 8 and 9 in far-off Texas and New Mexico. In retrospect, it was just as well for the filibusters that Worth faded from the picture, since he died the following May.17 

Between Worth’s exit and the end of the Round Island fiasco in September 1849, the Cubans and their American associates made overtures to several other possible candidates. For instance, at some point between April and July of 1849 López and Gonzales apparently attempted, without success, to persuade Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, two more Mexican War heroes, to assume the role intended for Worth. Then, as the men assembled at their Round Island rendezvous, the filibusters briefly placed their hopes on Senator Thomas J. Rusk of Texas, a onetime brigadier general in the Republic of Texas’s army. On September 13, John L. O’Sullivan expressed delight that Rusk had offered “to raise 500 of your gallant Texans and lead them yourself ” in a liberating army. Rusk should travel to New Orleans, O’Sullivan suggested, where at the rank of major general he could “take the position of head of the whole American part of the movement second only to the General commander-in-chief ” (meaning López), and earn himself a lump sum payment of $100,000 at the end of the campaign.18 

Now in early 1850, as López finalized his plans for another attempt to invade Cuba, he turned, with more success, to yet one more American military hero—John Anthony Quitman, who had just become governor of Mississippi. Muscular, more than six feet tall, mustached, and bearded, Quitman gained national fame during the Mexican War for his gallant leadership in the fighting at Monterrey in 1846 and in the storming of Mexico City in 1847. Beginning the war as a brigadier general of volunteers, Quitman received a promotion to the rank of major general in the regular army during the American advance on the Mexican capital. By the time he was mustered out of the service at the end of the war, Quitman had proven his bravery and demonstrated superior leadership abilities. Widely hailed not merely for his military abilities but also for the compassion that he displayed for common soldiers in his command, Quitman would surely attract recruits and money if he would only agree to serve.19 

In February, López and Gonzales left the East Coast and traveled westward and southward via the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, making contact with various sympathizers and potential recruiters and donors at Louisville and other points as they traveled, and intending to offer Quitman the command once they arrived in Mississippi. Meanwhile, the Cuban Council tried to preempt them. In January, Madan had asked the profilibustering Pennsylvanian George Cadwalader, another general from the war, whom he would recommend to supersede López in the command. Cadwalader, who had a close personal relationship with Quitman, apparently recommended him, because in a letter dated February 24 the Council formally offered Quitman the command and promised to “lavish” on him Cuba’s wealth if he would raise a four-thousand man expedition. The “impetuous” López “would certainly” cooperate in a subordinate capacity, were someone as influential as Quitman calling the shots.20 

López and Gonzales showed up in Jackson, Mississippi’s capital, on March 17, by which time the governor was already mulling over the council’s proposition. Tempted by the thought of becoming “the Liberator of a beautiful & rich island in the Gulf ” and trading his administrative duties for the excitement of military campaigning, Quitman queried Mansfield Lovell, one of his former aides-de-camp in the Mexican War, as to whether he would serve as prime minister or secretary of war in the government that the filibusters would establish in Cuba. Then, in a meeting at the Executive Mansion on the 17th, López and Gonzales tendered their own offer, making the governor “general-in-chief ” of the entire operation, with López as second-in-command, and promising that Quitman and any soldiers whom he raised would be “liberally and fairly remunerated for their military services.” According to this proposal, López would lead an initial invading force to the island in the near future, raise his flag for an independent Cuba, and send Quitman proof that the island’s inhabitants were rallying to the cause. Then Quitman would rush to Cuba (presumably with an auxiliary force) and take over the combined revolutionary army, leaving López in charge of civil affairs on the island until its annexation to the United States.21 

Citing his official gubernatorial duties, Quitman the next day halfheartedly declined the command, making it clear that his instincts were to sign on and that he might be free to do so in the immediate future. Quitman’s response left the door open so far that his participation in the plot was sought by a number of Americans associated with López such as O’Sullivan, Laurent J. Sigur (editor of the New Orleans Delta), and John Henderson (a lawyer, former U.S. senator, and onetime colleague of Quitman’s in the Mississippi legislature). 

Though no definitive evidence survives, everything points to Quitman’s caving in to the pressure soon after his meeting with López and Gonzales, and agreeing to command a secondary landing in Cuba provided that a genuine rebellion for independence erupted on the island after López’s initial attacks on Spanish forces. At the very least, Quitman became implicated at some level in the plot, for in April 1850 he traveled to New Orleans, around the time that the first contingent of López’s troops sailed, in response to Gonzales’s urgent appeal that the filibusters depended on his “aid in getting us out.” Moreover, in mid-May, while the expedition was in progress, Henderson alerted Quitman that a “squad” of 300–600 men was being mustered in anticipation of Quitman’s embarkation.22 

Quitman may even have turned over Mississippi state arms to the filibuster organizers. Well after the expedition, he responded to rumors about the arms by conceding that a transfer had occurred, but asserting that it had been made “by some means unknown to him.” He also seems to have solicited a U.S. naval officer to spy on Spanish defenses in Cuba. On May 26, Lieutenant Henry J. Hartstene, visiting Havana aboard a mail steamer, sent Quitman a detailed report about gun emplacements, movements of Spanish troops, and other particulars that would assist “the enterprize if carried out soon.”23 

Quitman, however, remained stateside, as the encouraging news that he was apparently awaiting never came. López’s army, consisting mostly of American recruits but including European immigrants to the United States and a handful of Cuban exiles,24 successfully got away from its rendezvous in and around New Orleans. But it lost almost 10 percent of its manpower even before arriving on Cuba’s coast. Worse, little went right during the actual invasion. 

Rather than sail directly from the mouth of the Mississippi River to Cuba as a flagrantly hostile squadron and risk attracting U.S. naval attention and likely interdiction, López had his vessels Georgiana, Susan Loud, and Creole sail separately for the island of Mujeres off Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula, with the intention of attacking Cuba only after the vessels all appeared at the rendezvous. But when the Georgiana sailed off course and encountered unfavorable winds, the filibusters had to alter their advance base to Contoy, a sandy cay twelve miles from Mujeres (see map 4). Thirteen men abandoned the expedition at Mujeres, after López sent them there as part of a detachment to obtain fresh water. Additionally, López permitted thirty-nine men to quit the army at Contoy, just before he boarded the rest of his forces on the Creole for his invasion of Cuba. Instead of attacking Spanish troops in Cuba with 570 soldiers, López wound up commanding only about 520.25 

Beginning at about 2:30 A.M. on the morning of May 19, 1850, López and his army effected an uncontested landing at Cárdenas. Then, after some confusion in locating military targets to attack, the invaders skirmished against enemy forces at the town’s plaza and demonstrated the kind of audacious bravery that filibusters would characteristically display throughout their military campaigns, by making a frontal assault on Spanish defenders at the building that housed the local governmental offices. By early morning, the filibusters not only captured Cárdenas’s jail, city hall, and customs house, but also took into custody the town’s garrison and government officials. A handful of surrendered Spanish soldiers even joined their cause. 

López’s projected liberation of Cuba, however, turned into a military debacle within hours. Gonzales and several regimental officers suffered wounds in the fighting, and a few of the other filibusters had already met their deaths. More importantly, Spain’s lieutenant governor at the port, a nephew of Cuba’s captain general, managed to get out word about the attack before surrendering, as well as issue orders that workers cut the railroad westward out of town to Matanzas. This diminished the filibusters’ prospects of making a rapid advance toward Havana, farther west, even as it became evident that the local population was far less enthusiastic about López’s cause than anticipated. The filibusters behaved fairly respectably during their brief tenure as occupiers, paying shopkeepers for food and the prodigious quantities of alcohol that they consumed that day. However, most residents fled town or shunned them, and there was no sign that the Cuban people were rallying. 

Upon learning around mid-afternoon of the approach of some 2,000 Spanish troops, López discreetly began reembarking his force. But before he could get all his men on board the Creole, Spanish cavalry and infantry arriving on the scene attacked his lone regiment still on shore, causing the filibusters another thirty-four casualties. López completed his embarkation so precipitately that he left several followers behind. Yet he remained in danger. The Creole grounded on the way out of the harbor, breaking free only after the filibusters threw tons of ammunition and other items overboard, and ninety men allowed themselves to be temporarily removed by rowboats to a nearby island. Then the Spanish steam warship Pizarro spotted the Creole, and literally chased the filibusters all the way to Key West.26 

Lucky to be alive but refusing to accept defeat, López subsequently began planning a second landing in Cuba, despite efforts by federal authorities (discussed in a chapter 5) to prosecute him and many of his key associates for their patent violation of the Neutrality Act. From June 21, 1850, until March 7, 1851, López and fifteen conspirators were under indictment. Yet, by early April 1851, a year after the launching of the Cárdenas affair, the resourceful filibusters were ready to sail again. 

According to a spy who infiltrated the movement, López this time hoped to invade Cuba with 4,000–5,000 men: the Cleopatra and another steam vessel or two would carry a few hundred men recruited in New York City and Philadelphia to a rendezvous in the South, where the filibusters would join a larger force and additional transports before initiating the actual expedition. In order to mislead federal authorities in New York, the Cleopatra, without the filibusters on board, would seek clearance to Baltimore from port authorities. Then, separate parties would board a smaller steamer at New York and a sloop at South Amboy, New Jersey, that would convey them to nearby Sandy Hook—a peninsula in New Jersey that separates New York City’s lower bay from the Atlantic Ocean (see map 3). From this point they would transfer to the Cleopatra for their oceangoing escapade.27 

Should we trust this spy’s figures? Ambrosio Gonzales claimed in a March 1851 letter to Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar, a former president of the Republic of Texas, that he had already succeeded in arranging for 1,000 men to join the expedition, and that another 1,800 men in the “Southwest” had committed to the cause. Since Gonzales made this boast in a letter soliciting support from Lamar, we might suspect him of exaggerating his recruiting accomplishment to gain the assistance of a well-connected public figure. However, given López’s successes at recruiting along the Gulf coast for his other expeditions, it would be dangerous to dismiss Gonzales’s claim as a fabrication. Reports reaching the U.S. district attorney in Mobile of up to 150 “strangers  of irregular life” congregating at Pascagoula lend partial credibility to Gonzales’s intimations.28 We can be certain that the filibusters again intended to raise several hundred men for a New York contingent. In an undated letter posted about this time, one of López’s recruiters reminded O’Sullivan that the “General” had sent both of them to New York under “the strictest instructions . . . to bring together four hundred men.” Moreover, they apparently came close to achieving this goal. Under the heading the Newark Daily Advertiser published an April 6 report from its Perth Amboy correspondent about the arrival at South Amboy of some fifty men ready to act “the emigrant.” Later in the month, the New York Mirror observed that the number of filibusters at South Amboy had grown to between one and two hundred men, and that they were “awaiting the arrival of others.”29 

In all, López’s agents in the spring of 1851 appear to have raised upwards of 1,000 men for an expedition that came close to sailing. On April 10, the editor of the Savannah Republican telegraphed President Millard Fillmore that Georgia’s railroads had become “crowded with an army of adventurers destined for Cuba.” A force of sixty-three men, which set out prematurely from Rome, Georgia, on the 9th, had to return once it became apparent that the expedition was unprepared to sail. Soon afterward, López’s volunteers in far greater numbers were reported on the move throughout Georgia and northern Florida. By late April, some 600 expeditionists had collected in and near Jacksonville, most of them congregating at a sawmill a few miles down the St. Johns River, waiting for the arrival of the Cleopatra. 

However, once news reached the South that federal officials in New York had detained the Cleopatra and arrested O’Sullivan and several other New York conspirators, the filibuster leaders had to postpone the invasion to a later date. “Every arrival of the cars,” noted a Griffin, Georgia, newspaper on May 22, “brings back to their homes some of the youngsters who were duped into the idea of taking Cuba by storm.”30 

Two months later, with fewer troops than attacked Cárdenas, López got off his second expedition to Cuba. As had been the case the year before, things began going wrong even before his feet touched Cuban soil. 

López was residing at the home of Laurent Sigur in New Orleans, with many of his preparations unfinished, when in late July intimations started reaching him and the city’s newspapers that resistance to Spanish rule had suddenly erupted in Cuba. López’s supporters in the city held rallies for recruits and funds on behalf of his cause at Lafayette Square on July 23 and the courtyard at Bank’s Arcade on July 26. Then, on July 28, the New Orleans press announced definitively that a major insurrection against Spanish rule had broken out in the vicinity of Puerto Príncipe (later Camagüey) in central Cuba on July 4, that the leader of the revolt had chosen that date—with its obvious significance for Americans—for a declaration of independence, and that the rebels had routed Spanish troops. The Crescent City erupted in an outpouring of pro-Cuba fervor. One of the expedition’s officers later recalled how a “blaze of sympathising excitement about Cuba” broke out, and how placards appeared on walls calling people to public meetings. “Cuba, Cuba, Cuba was the topic of the newspapers, the Exchange, the street corners, and the barrooms.” Throwing caution to the wind, López decided that it would be safer to leave at once and capitalize on the rebellion in progress than to prolong his preparations and risk the rebels’ defeat before he arrived. 

So over the next few days, López and his associates intensified their recruiting efforts, preparing to leave as soon as the ship that they had acquired, the steamship Pampero, was in good enough repair to sail. One young man in New Orleans who succumbed to the excitement explained to his brother in a letter dated July 31 how he had enlisted just minutes earlier, after being drawn to the wharf by the firing of cannon. Once there he had learned that “Most of the Towns” in Cuba’s interior had already revolted, that “several thousand patriots” were in the field, and that the rebels had repulsed Spanish troops in battle “with considerable loss.” 

López boarded many such enthusiasts on the Pampero in the early morning hours of August 3, and put to sea a couple of days later with between 400 and 450 men in all, a much smaller force than the thousands of men he had wanted. In his rush, he not only left behind hundreds of volunteers who arrived in New Orleans only about a week after the Pampero departed, but also Gonzales, who was far away at Fauquier White Sulphur Springs in western Virginia recovering from a serious ailment, most likely a malarial attack. 

Making matters worse, López had to improvise strategy as he went. He planned to pick up reinforcements and artillery at Jacksonville in northern Florida, before actually sailing for Cuba. But as the Pampero approached Key West on its way to Jacksonville, López learned that it lacked sufficient coal to include the detour. On August 10, while pondering what to do as his vessel lay at anchor at Key West, López heard from visitors to his ship that the revolution in Cuba had spread to thirteen towns and that it was now widening westward. More encouraged than ever, López and his officers determined to strike immediately, assuming that they could send the Pampero back for the men and supplies at Jacksonville once they were safely ashore in Cuba. Presumably Florida’s U.S. senator and Key West resident (and future Confederate naval  secretary) Stephen Mallory contributed to the filibusters’ confidence, when, during his visit to the vessel, he put a hair ring on López’s finger for good fortune.31 

Even as Mallory made this pro filibustering gesture, however, López was doomed. His filibuster hinged on the mirage of Cuban masses rallying to his standard. Yet reports reaching the American press of uprisings in the island were grossly exaggerated, and Spanish authorities entirely quashed the token uprising that was occurring a month before López even arrived off Cuba’s coast. Making matters worse, López failed to achieve surprise. Cuban officials spotted the Pampero on August 11, when because of a navigational error it appeared off Havana harbor, which was not López’s intended destination. 

On August 12, as López and his men effected their landing near the small village of Morrillo on Bahía Honda bay sixty miles west of Havana, Spanish forces were already marching against them from Havana by land, and encircling them by railroad and by sea. Wrongly assuming that he would be able to link up with insurrectionary forces east of Havana, that his revolutionary proclamations would rally the Cuban people, and that the Pampero would accomplish its round trip for reinforcements, López violated a cardinal rule of warfare—that commanders should be wary of dividing their forces in the face of a superior enemy. López pressed inland toward Cuba’s mountainous interior terrain with almost three quarters of his men, leaving the remainder under Colonel William Crittenden to safeguard his supplies until carts and oxen were acquired to bring them away from the coast. López did confiscate carts and oxen after arriving at the nearby village of Las Pozas, but on learning of Spanish forces in the area sent word to Crittenden to abandon the supplies and close up with him. It was too late. Spanish forces put both López’s and Crittenden’s detachments under attack on the 13th, and although the filibusters were able to repulse both assaults and inflict more casualties on the Spaniards than they themselves suffered, Crittenden made the mistake of chasing after his attackers with about eighty men. When the Spanish re-attacked, Crittenden’s party found itself entirely cut off from the main filibuster body, though some forty men whom Crittenden had left with the supplies did subsequently unite with López at Las Pozas. 

Over the next two weeks, Spanish forces crushed the invasion. Authorities on the Spanish war vessel Habanero picked up Crittenden and fifty men still with him off the coast, after they commandeered four launches back near their landing site on August 14, in a futile attempt to repeat the prior year’s flight to Key West. López held out longer than most of his men, but he was forced to surrender on August 28, and was executed a few days later.32 

Though news of the deaths of López and many of his cohorts including Crittenden shocked many Americans, it hardly curtailed interest in Cuban filibustering in the United States. The very month after López’s execution, enthusiasts in the southern Louisiana town of Lafayette formed the quasi-filibustering Order of the Lone Star, an organization made up initially, according to its leader Dr. John V. Wren, of persons who had been unacquainted with López but who were “sympathetically favorable to his expedition.” Their name drew on the precedents of the West Florida and Texas revolutions, and their constitution’s preamble proclaimed a mission of extending “the area of liberty.”33 

The Order spread rapidly in the Gulf South, with affiliated “divisions” materializing as far away as New York City. Undoubtedly the group’s rituals helped to attract some of its members. So, we may assume, did its social events, such as the “  Fancy and Dress Ball” in Lafayette, announced by the New Orleans Daily Delta on December 27, 1851. The Mississippi native and New Orleans lawyer Henry Hughes, who applied for admission in October 1852 (a couple of years before he emerged as one of the South’s leading proslavery polemicists) and recorded his initiation in his diary, had ambitious designs for the group. Hughes hoped that the Order would expedite his “life aim” of creating a “Universal Republic.”34 

How close the Lone Stars came to launching an expedition remains murky. In May 1852, Spain’s consul in New York claimed that Dr. Wren was in the city, that he was enlisting men in collaboration with O’Sullivan, Armstrong Irvine Lewis (who had captained both the Creole and the Pampero in López’s invasions of Cuba), and another collaborator, and that the men were being sent to rendezvous at Mobile and New Orleans for a Cuba expedition. That September, Spain’s minister complained to the State Department that in some American cities the filibusters were not only engaging in flagrant recruiting with press support, but they were even publicly announcing their schedule for military drills and target practices. Still, the Lone Stars deferred action, perhaps in expectation that Franklin Pierce, the Democratic nominee for president in that year’s election, would acquire Cuba from Spain once he was installed in office. In January 1853, the Democratic Review opined that the Order should refrain from attacking Cuba, not because there was anything improper about American citizens “going with arms in our hands to any country” in the “service of liberty,” but rather because private expeditions generally failed.35 

Even then, Cuban filibustering persisted. In October 1852, Cuban exiles formed a new junta in New York City.36 In April 1853, its agents called on  John Quitman in Natchez, in order to renew and this time formalize his commitment to lead a liberating invasion of their island. During a visit to New York in August, Quitman contracted with the Cubans to serve as “civil and military chief ” of an uprising to overthrow Spanish rule in their homeland. The Cubans gave Quitman “absolute control and disposal of all the funds . . . now in the hands of the revolutionary party, as well as those which may hereafter be received,” and authorized him to issue bonds, grant commissions, charter vessels and otherwise act in the junta’s name. For his part, Quitman agreed to surrender power and create an independent government on the island shortly after he defeated the Spanish military forces.37 

Quitman seems to have absorbed, rather than superseded, the Order of the Lone Star. Adventurous persons in the Order, as they became aware of Quitman’s intentions, melded into the general’s ranks. Writing in reference “to the Lone Star Expedition,” one Mississippian confided to Quitman that as “a member of that Division of Jackson No. 12. 3rd degree standing” he hoped to be included in the endeavor. Other Lone Star enthusiasts found their way into Quitman’s support network. The Pennsylvania attorney John Cadwalader (George Cadwalader’s brother) intimated his intention “to send a subscription to the Lone Star association for the redemption of that island.” Pierre Sauvé, a planter from St. Charles Parish, Louisiana, who had attended the Lone Star ball at Lafayette in 1851, helped to organize the financing for Quitman’s proposed invasion.38 

Believing that López’s movement had failed primarily because of its leader’s impulsiveness, Quitman insisted in his correspondence with the junta and other collaborators that he would only sail for Cuba after assembling sufficient manpower (as well as matériel and funding) to guarantee success. Quitman considered an army of three to four thousand men optimal. Anything less would be suicidal.39 

Although Quitman informed a prospective officer in February 1855 that he had not yet achieved his manpower goal, he had well-placed persons assisting his recruiting, and he likely did not fall short by much. In June 1854, an editor in Kosciusko, Mississippi, offered to raise a band of fifty to one hundred men for Quitman because he had learned that very day that Quitman was “on the point of leaving New Orleans for Cuba.” Various collaborators announced recruiting accomplishments in missives to Quitman, sometimes even identifying their enlistees by name. One agent, John Allen, claimed in a public letter to have raised fifteen hundred men in Kentucky alone.40 

All the while, participants were regularly dropping out of the conspiracy even as new recruits signed up. Because of funding and legal difficulties, Quitman delayed his scheduled departure for month after month, in the process driving men out of his ranks. Consider the aspirant who informed Quitman in the spring of 1854 that he wanted to filibuster. When almost a year passed without any news from the “chief,” this volunteer “trammelled” himself in matrimony. Then, merely days after his wedding, he learned to his immense frustration that Quitman wanted his services after all! The U.S. naval lieutenant Robert W. Shufeldt offers another example: while the plot was in progress, he resigned from the service to become a merchant ship captain for the New York and Alabama Steamship Company. Fearing that rumors of his involvement with Quitman might cause him problems with Spanish authorities in Cuba during the biweekly voyages to Havana that he would be making in his new capacity, Shufeldt quit the expedition, and pleaded that Quitman’s associates repress all word of his prior collaboration.41 

Eventually, Quitman decided anyway that the odds had shifted against a successful invasion, and he canceled the operation. Not only did federal authorities seize one of his ships, but Spanish authorities in Cuba discovered and repressed in time an insurrection scheduled for February 12, 1855, executing the leader Ramón Pintó as well as others of the plotters. President Pierce and Secretary of State William L. Marcy, moreover, refused to relax their enforcement of the Neutrality Laws and, in a personal interview with Quitman, shared information that they had received about a Spanish defensive buildup in Cuba. On April 29, Quitman tendered the junta his formal resignation as filibuster commander.42 

Apparently the Order of the Lone Star survived Quitman’s resignation, at least in some locales. On July 3, the Galveston Weekly News announced that the “Island City Division Order of the Lone Star” would participate in the next day’s Independence Day celebration. Several months later Isaiah Rynders, a Tammany Hall rabble-rouser and U.S. deputy surveyor for the port of New York, made a public point of his membership. He stormed into the office of the New-York Times to lambaste its editor for insinuating that his belonging to a “division of the Lone Star Order” proved that he supported filibustering.43 But Quitman’s divorce from the junta effectually ended American filibustering against Cuba, at least until after the Civil War. 

On September 22, 1851, a Texas newspaper reported the fate of two companies of Narciso López’s recruits, stranded at Mustang Island when the filibuster set out for Cuba the previous month without waiting for all his troops. Half the men on the island, off Texas’s coast near Corpus Christi, had returned to their homes or dispersed to other points; but the remainder had constituted themselves into a new company, elected officers, acquired horses, and intended to “march in a few days for the seat of war—the Northern States of Mexico.”44 

These filibusters surely intended joining the “buffalo hunt” then in progress to carve out a new republic from Mexico’s northern reaches. Any effort to calculate the number of Americans engaged in filibustering after the Mexican War certainly needs to take into account such expeditions into Mexico, though none of these filibustering parties were as large as the groups that accompanied López to Cuba, or that Quitman was counting on for his expedition. 

Earlier that month near Guerrero in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas, the Tejano borderlands leader José María Jesús Carbajal (sometimes spelled Carabajal or Carvajal), a longtime figure in the Sierra Madre movement, had issued a proclamation rekindling the cause of norteno separatism.45 Carbajal’s pronouncement demanded not only the withdrawal of government troops from Mexico’s northern states, but also a grace period of five years for certain American goods to cross the Rio Grande duty free. When Francisco Avalos, commanding Mexican forces on the northern frontier, sent troops to arrest Carbajal, he fled across the Rio Grande to Texan soil. At Brownsville, a town on the river near the Gulf of Mexico, he procured arms and other supplies from merchants who stood to gain trading advantages with Mexico if his tariff policies were adopted. Then he gathered an invading party at Rio Grande City, a sleepy village about ninety miles upriver from Brownsville on the American side, and recrossed the border with a band of followers to initiate what became a series of filibusters to revolutionize northern Mexico.46 

Carbajal had little difficulty relating to and recruiting Anglos for his scheme, given his personal history, relatively light complexion, and fluency in English. He had attended a Protestant academy at Bethany in western Virginia (today in West Virginia) for four years during his younger days, and he had played an active role in the Texan revolution. A U.S. army officer on the border noted that he “has completely ingratiated himself with the people along the frontier. . . . He is . . . fair for a Mexican . . . speaks good English & was educated in the United States.” Hundreds of Anglos participated in his border crossings and campaigns.47 

On September 20, 1851, commanding some seventy Americans and one hundred Mexicans, Carbajal initiated the so-called Merchants War by capturing the village of Camargo, across the border from Rio Grande City on the San Juan River, a few miles from its confluence with the Rio Grande (see map 2). For the rest of the month and into October, Carbajal used Camargo as his base, as he waited for reinforcements from the United States, especially promised help from the well-known Texas Ranger captain John S. “Rip” Ford. This Mexican War veteran, former Republic of Texas legislator, and sometime lawyer, doctor, and newspaperman had agreed to join the insurrection once his Ranger company was mustered out of federal service on September 23. Ford arrived along with twenty-nine other Rangers in Carbajal’s camp about October 1 and received a commission as a colonel of American volunteers in the insurgent army.48 

On October 9 the combined forces evacuated Camargo to move against Matamoros, a city above the mouth of the Rio Grande roughly opposite Brownsville, Texas. More Anglo filibusters from the United States joined Carbajal during the campaign, so that he commanded an army of approximately four hundred men, including a company of volunteers from Brownsville, by the time he arrived at Matamoros. Some of the men from the Brownsville unit recrossed the river each night to sleep in their own homes. 

During the afternoon of the 20th, Carbajal’s advance took a fort on the northwestern outskirts of the city, to the horror of a U.S. newspaper correspondent across the Rio Grande who confessed humiliation at the thought that his fellow countrymen were attacking “the unoffending inhabitants of a neighboring republic” under the phony pretense of bringing them freedom. Moreover, the filibusters could not even behave with dignity, he lamented. Rather, the Americans took to “yelling,” “whooping,” and randomly firing their guns like “wild savages” once they had gained possession of the enemy works.49 

Unfortunately for the attackers, General Avalos’s command of regulars and local defense forces had prepared for them by erecting barricades to protect the city, fortifying rooftops with sandbags, and stocking supplies. Carbajal’s three six-pound cannon lacked the power to dislodge the defenders, and although his army continued to receive reinforcements from the Texas side, including as many as twenty-seven deserters from the U.S. army post opposite Camargo at Ringgold Barracks, it was not enough. Carbajal’s soldiers attempted several assaults on Avalos’s positions in the city between October 22 and 26, but they were repulsed each time, and in one of the attacks Rip Ford suffered a head wound that caused him to give up his command and seek treatment in Brownsville. Another casualty during the action was the resident U.S. consul at Matamoros, J. F. Waddell, who took his wound on the 24th when joining an effort to put out a fire that the filibusters had set in a large building near his office. In a dispatch to the State Department, Waddell condemned the filibusters for committing acts of “atrocious barbarity” during their futile efforts to crack the Mexican defenses. 

Carbajal kept Matamoros under siege into early November, when on the 8th his army began a retreat, with Mexican forces in pursuit. Ford, who by this time felt sufficiently recovered from his wound to rejoin his companions, took a steamer across the river and caught up with Carbajal at Reynosa, fifty miles upriver from Matamoros on the Mexican side; but Carbajal sent him back to the American side to drum up recruits in Texas’s interior. However, time was running out on the invaders. Carbajal’s force safely reached Camargo on November 16, and near the end of the month attacked some two hundred Mexican soldiers at Cerralvo, driving them into a stone house and pinning them down for two days, in an attempt to capture artillery there. But the defenders, though losing horses, gear, ammunition, and wagons to the filibusters, managed to salvage their artillery. Carbajal had to give up the siege and flee back across the Rio Grande with the approach of Mexican reinforcements.50 

Twice more, Carbajal’s filibusters invaded northern Mexico from Texan soil. But General Avalos undercut Carbajal’s appeal along the border with reductions in duties on American goods, and neither incursion had the staying power of the 1851 campaign. In the first instance, Carbajal crossed the river below Rio Grande City on February 20, 1852, and marched on Camargo with a force of 244 men, including about 60 Anglos, but ran into heavy Mexican resistance the next day. Although the filibusters this time had a twelve-pound gun with them and were able to repulse several Mexican charges by firing double loads of canister, they reportedly took scores of casualties and suffered large numbers of desertions once night set in, causing Carbajal and his twenty two remaining companions to seek safety across the river. 

In the second case, Carbajal authorized a raid against Reynosa by about eighty filibusters under “Major” A. Howell Norton, who had lost his right arm in 1851 at Matamoros. Norton’s band entered Reynosa on the morning of March 26, 1853, and demanded that the inhabitants pay him a large sum of money for Carbajal’s cause. When it became evident that the money would not be forthcoming, he took the alcalde and another inhabitant hostage and demanded $4,000 in ransom, before settling for $2,000 and fleeing back across the river. For some time after the raid, rumor had it that Carbajal was mounting yet another filibuster. But the next invasion of Mexico would occur far to the west of Carbajal’s scene of operations.51

Just as filibustering can be traced to the first years of the United States, so it should be linked to the opening moments of California’s statehood. By the time that the López, Quitman, and Carbajal conspiracies had run their course, Anglos in America’s newest state had taken up filibustering with considerable gusto, and made California into one of the nation’s hubs of filibustering intrigue. 

In early May 1851, California’s quartermaster general Joseph Morehead, under suspicion at the time for embezzling proceeds from the unauthorized sale of state arms, boarded the barque Josephine at San Diego with forty-five followers for a seaborne expedition to Mazatlán in the state of Sinaloa on Mexico’s Pacific coast. Morehead’s band seems to have been one component of a planned infiltration by land and water of Sonora—Mexico’s northwesternmost state, just north of Sinaloa on the Gulf of California. However, the group never made it past Mazatlán as an organized force. After vigilant Mexican authorities there boarded the Josephine in a search for weapons, the filibusters prudently assumed the role of miners looking for employment, and refrained from any kind of hostile activity that would risk their being taken into custody. Likewise, Mexican officials kept a close watch on groups of men apparently connected with Morehead who arrived during the summer by sea at La Paz, the territorial capital of Baja California (on the Gulf of California near the southern tip of the peninsula), and by land in Sonora itself (see map 5). The band in Sonora grew to sixty-seven men by the time Mexican officials expelled it in November. The suspected filibusters at La Paz dispersed into historical anonymity.52 

Several months later, Alexander Bell, a historically obscure figure who according to his nephew had once captained a steamboat on Alabama’s Tombigbee River and been a spy during the Mexican War, got together some forty adventurers in and around San Francisco and sailed with them for South America’s Pacific coast, as part of a multinational filibuster against Ecuador. Agents of Juan José Flores, a native Venezuelan who had served as president of Ecuador for much of the 1830s and early 1840s but was now in exile in Peru, had enlisted Bell in the scheme, involving upwards of seven hundred men from a variety of countries, to assist in a campaign to restore Flores to power in Ecuador. Bell’s American band united with Flores’s forces in the spring of 1852, but the invading coalition was unable to rally native support and took many casualties in raids on villages near Guayaquil. By summer, Flores’s army was disintegrating from desertions, with Captain Bell surfacing in Panama. There he posted a letter dated August 2 that got published in a California newspaper, relating that he had got in “plenty of fighting” and complaining that Flores’s army was “not worth a d——n,” yet predicting that he would one day fight with Flores again. Flores escaped overland to Peru and continued to plot new expeditions for several more years, but there is no evidence that other American military parties sailed in his support.53 

About a year after Flores’s campaign concluded, William Walker left California state with his first filibustering comrades. Thirty years old and usually taciturn among strangers, Walker was a former part-owner and co-editor of the New Orleans Daily Crescent. He impressed many of his contemporaries as a most unlikely candidate for the rigors and macho camaraderie of filibuster campaigns, standing only five feet six inches tall and weighing about 115 pounds; besides, his smooth, freckled face lacked the whiskers and rough features of so many of the day’s military adventurers. One reporter even dismissed his “tone of voice” as “monotonous.” Still, this apparently uncharismatic man found ways to convince others to follow him in incredibly dangerous ventures. On October 16, 1853, Walker and forty-five adventurers departed from San Francisco harbor aboard the schooner Caroline, apparently bound for the Sonoran coast, with hopes of conquering the state and gaining control of its mineral wealth. However, interference from U.S. authorities had stripped Walker of much of his manpower just before departure. Realizing that for the time being he lacked sufficient soldiers to take Sonora, Walker changed his immediate target to lightly populated Baja California, hoping to establish a base there pending reinforcements. 

Walker’s invaders committed their first hostile act on November 3, by seizing La Paz and taking captive its governor. During their occupation, which only lasted a few days, Walker proclaimed the establishment of an independent “Republic of Lower California,” raised a flag with two stars (for both Baja California and Sonora), issued two decrees, and took his second gubernatorial hostage when the incumbent’s replacement arrived on the scene. Walker declared himself president, and announced a cabinet and preliminary policy decisions (e.g., that his state would be based on free trade and Louisiana’s legal code). 

Reembarking his men on the Caroline on the sixth, Walker left La Paz with his force intact, taking no casualties but inflicting several in a last-minute skirmish when some of the inhabitants fired on a party of his men who were gathering wood. Walker’s band stopped briefly at Cape San Lucas at the tip of the peninsula, and then proceeded northward up the Baja peninsula’s Pacific coast, putting in at Ensenada, less than one hundred miles south of San Diego, on November 29. Ensenada had the advantage of being much closer than La Paz to expected reinforcements from California as well as to land routes into Sonora, and Walker designated it his new republic’s capital. He also sent his secretary of state Frederick Emory to San Diego with a formal address to the American people, in which Walker justified his aggression with claims that Mexico’s government had failed completely in its governance of Lower California. Upon reaching San Diego on December 2, Emory announced that the filibusters had achieved a telling military triumph at La Paz. Over the next several days, California’s coastal press duly released Walker’s propaganda and news of the filibusters’ supposed victory in battle, triggering a temporary boom in recruitment activity in San Francisco. 

Over time, Walker’s prospects boiled down to whether enough reinforcements would arrive from California to compensate for the enmity that his invasion was arousing around Ensenada. Walker sent out details to raid neighboring ranches for horses, saddles, cattle, and provisions. As a result, Mexican landowners and bandits in the area organized irregular forces to resist the occupation. These improvised bands not only killed and wounded several filibusters in skirmishes, but also for over a week starting on December 5 kept the invaders under siege at Ensenada. Although the filibusters drove their antagonists off with a surprise charge on the night of the 14th, they suffered from supply deficiencies and desertions in the days afterward. Further, during the siege Walker lost both his hostages and his vessel when the Mexican governors persuaded the Caroline’s mate to sail away and return to La Paz rather than risk awaiting the outcome of the standoff. 

Finally, on December 28, a party of approximately 150 reinforcements arrived from San Francisco aboard the barque Anita, accompanied by Henry P. Watkins, their recruiter and Walker’s onetime partner in a Marysville, California, law practice. A month later, 125 more reinforcements, enlisted by Walker’s quartermaster-general Oliver T. Baird, reportedly boarded the steamship Goliah at San Francisco bound for San Diego, apparently planning to make their way from there into Lower California by land. About fifty of them did arrive at Ensenada, but Walker still lacked sufficient force to mount a credible threat against Sonora. 

Despite these setbacks, Walker made the best of a deteriorating situation and issued a proclamation on January 18, 1854, creating his intended Republic of Sonora, with Lower California and Sonora as its constituent states. Meanwhile Watkins, who returned to California, tried to raise more troops. In February, Walker transferred his army to the inland town of San Vicente. Then on March 20, he took some one hundred men, driving about the same number of cattle before them, on a northeasterly march across steep terrain toward Sonora, over two hundred miles away, in a desperate bid to make his two-state republic a reality. On April 4, the filibusters swam and took rafts across the Colorado River (several miles above where it empties into the head of the Gulf of California) into Sonora, but were unable to get their cattle across with them. Walker proceeded only a short distance into Sonora before deciding, after disaffection erupted in his ranks, to retrace his route to San Vicente. Encountering Mexican irregulars upon reaching his former headquarters, and suffering from more desertions, Walker finally conceded the hopelessness of his situation, and in mid-April fled with what was left of his band for the United States. He reached his homeland in May, after engaging in several skirmishes with his enemies, who avoided a pitched battle with the filibusters but harassed them all the way to the border.54  

Disregarding Walker’s failure, gringo adventurers continued to plan and wage filibuster campaigns below the border throughout the mid- and late 1850s. On October 1, 1855, for example, the Texas Ranger captain James Hughes Callahan led 111 men, including William R. Henry’s volunteers, across a rain-swollen Rio Grande near Eagle Pass in an expedition authorized by his state’s governor for the purpose of pursuing and attacking Indians who had been raiding Texas settlements and using Mexican soil as a safe haven. Callahan’s invaders plundered and burned the town of Piedras Negras before recrossing the river on October 6.55 

Less than two years later, a boyhood acquaintance of William Walker’s commanded his own invasion of Mexico. A one-time attorney from Vicksburg, Mississippi, who sang in a Whig party glee club celebrating Henry Clay’s 1844 presidential candidacy, Henry Alexander Crabb moved to California in 1849 after losing a political race earlier in the year. Eventually establishing his residence in Stockton, Crabb served his locality as city attorney, and became active in California state politics and filibuster affairs, having the gall to ask a U.S. army general in San Francisco as early as 1853 for a passport so that he could invade Sonora. When Walker went on trial in San Francisco the next year for his attack on Mexico, Crabb was summoned to court as a witness to testify about his knowledge of the plot. With dark, deeply recessed eyes, a bushy brow, a beard, and a full face, Crabb looked the part of a filibuster far more than did Walker, whom he had known when they were both youths in Nashville.56 

In March 1857 Crabb and sixty-eight members of his “Arizona Colonization Company” invaded Sonora, taking a land route from Los Angeles. Two smaller parties of adventurers who were connected to Crabb’s plot also entered the Mexican state in what must be judged the most thoroughly crushed of the many unsuccessful filibusters of the day. Only one member of Crabb’s party survived the expedition. The rest either died in battle or were executed by Mexican firing squads. 

Given William Henry’s background, it is not especially surprising that in February 1859 he confided to his state’s governor Hardin Runnels that he was recruiting one hundred men for a border crossing. More remarkably, in early 1860 Sam Houston, Runnels’s successor, gave thought to personally conducting a filibuster. During his gubernatorial campaign the previous year, Houston had proclaimed, “I am no friend of filibustering.” Yet the governor now considered leading a thrust into Mexico in response to hysteria in southern Texas over the recent raids of the Tejano social bandit Juan Cortina, who had been operating on both sides of the border since briefly occupying Brownsville the previous September and freeing prisoners from the city’s jail. In February 1860 Houston notified U.S. Secretary of War John B. Floyd that though he hesitated doing anything that might “raise even a question as to the   propriety of his action,” he would recruit ten thousand volunteers for an invasion of Mexico unless the U.S. government sealed the border against Mexican threats. Houston might not have been bluffing. As his filibustering intentions became public knowledge, adventurers implored the governor to find a spot in his ranks for companies that they intended to raise for the invasion. In deference to countermeasures against Cortina by the U.S. army, however, Houston announced that he would refrain at least for the time being from a border crossing.57 

Although Houston deferred his attack, George Bickley’s Knights of the Golden Circle mustered near the Mexican border on a couple of occasions over the following months. A Virginian by birth who earlier in the decade had been a member of the faculty of the Eclectic Medical Institute in Cincinnati, Bickley had attempted all sorts of pursuits before organizing his Knights in 1859 and becoming their “president general.” He had written books and journal articles, edited several periodicals, attempted land speculations, and apparently even practiced phrenology. Given to lying about his own background (he claimed a medical education in England), Bickley seems to have created the Knights on the rebound from personal disappointments, quite possibly as a scheme to recoup his fortunes by collecting membership fees. Before becoming a filibuster, Bickley had alienated his second wife (his first wife had died in 1850 after a two-year marriage) by trying to appropriate her property,  been fired as the editor of a Cincinnati weekly magazine, and failed to make good on his debts. At any rate, Bickley boasted in April 1860 that the Knights had forty thousand members, of whom sixteen thousand were enrolled in the organization’s “army.” 

Given Bickley’s historical reputation as a charlatan, we can assume that he grossly exaggerated. Still, enough evidence survives of men joining this secret society that we should be wary of dismissing it as inconsequential. A Montgomery, Alabama, paper in February 1860 observed “[l]arge numbers” of Knights “passing through this city every day en route for Mexico.” That March, a reporter in Baltimore claimed that four thousand young men in that city had joined the Knights and begun drills for their invasion of Mexico. A Texas Ranger, James Pike, remembered in his memoirs that a Knights recruiter had turned up at an encampment in the spring of 1860 and managed to seduce “nearly all the rangers” into his organization, claiming misleadingly that Governor Houston had agreed to command their invasion. In May 1860 a U.S. army lieutenant complained to his father that the Texas border town of Brownsville had become “overrun with the K.G.C.,” that he had talked with many of the members, and that they intended to “filibuster in Mexico.” By mid-summer, recruits in far-off Southampton County, Virginia, were joining the Knights. A Memphis newspaper in October reported that two thousand Knights had assembled on the Rio Grande, ready to “pour” across the border.58 

Some of the most anxious Knights apparently crossed the border on their own hook. Major Samuel P. Heintzelman, then conducting the U.S. Army’s operations against Cortina, noted in April 1860 that “K.G.Cs” had “straggled into Matamoros” and were “behaving badly.” But Bickley never ordered his troops to launch their invasion. That summer, Heintzelman heard that some of the Bickley’s Knights had taken up horse theft as their newest avocation.59 

Despite all these plots and expeditions against Mexico, U.S. filibustering’s center of gravity shifted southward to Central America in the mid- and late 1850s. Both Henry L. Kinney and William Walker took expeditions to Central America in 1855. By conquering Nicaragua, Walker would become the preeminent filibuster in U.S. history. 

Described by one of his boosters as a large-framed man over six feet tall, with a face made ruddy and weathered by exposure to the elements, Kinney was a native Pennsylvanian who had spent some years in Illinois before drifting to Texas in 1838. Soon emerging as one of the Republic’s most talked about public figures, Kinney served in its congress and at the 1845 Texas Constitutional Convention before going off to the Mexican War as a division quartermaster of the Texas Volunteers in General Zachary Taylor’s invading forces. He resumed his political career after peace was achieved, holding a seat in several sessions of the Texas state legislature. Known as one of the founders of Corpus Christi, Kinney engaged in a maze of business enterprises and land speculations during his time in Illinois, where he served as Daniel Webster’s land agent for a while, before engaging in a range of trading, ranching, newspaper, and speculative schemes in Texas. His filibuster simply diverted his entrepreneurial instincts in new directions. That he was trying to recoup his fortunes after several business disappointments, and that his marriage had failed several years earlier, only makes his Central American gamble more understandable. 

In association with a consortium of investors from the mid-Atlantic States, Kinney laid a legal foundation for his filibuster by claiming title to 22,500,000 acres in Mosquitia—Great Britain’s protectorate on the Caribbean coast of today’s Nicaragua and Honduras (see map 4). Publicly, Kinney insisted that his Central American Land and Mining Company (also called the Nicaraguan Land and Mining Company) had no intention of invading anything, but instead would send peaceful settlers to its holdings, where they would settle on plots ranging from 160 to 640 acres. However, British authorities had repudiated the original land grants on which Kinney based his claims. Kinney, who had won notoriety in the Mexican War for his daring missions as a scout and messenger, instructed his colonists to arm themselves and enlisted them for a year at pay scales pegged to those of the U.S. Army. The whole scheme, as perceptive observers realized, smacked of an invasion. One newspaper quipped that Kinney had surrounded himself with “young filibusters, who are desirous of taking part in any cause where more fighting than work is to be done.” Kinney planned an expedition of hundreds of men, but because of federal interference was lucky to get off from New York harbor aboard the schooner Emma on June 6 with a mere eighteen accomplices.60 

Once in Central America, Kinney only received a handful of reinforcements. Correspondence from Kinney’s expedition following its arrival in July 1855 at the port of Greytown (formerly San Juan del Norte) within Britain’s Mosquito Protectorate reveals that twenty-two men reinforced Kinney by August 16, and that a few additional filibusters arrived later that month. Though Kinney manipulated his own selection as “Civil and Military Governor of the City and Territory of San Juan del Norte” by what one scholar has called a “rump convention” of his followers and “renegades,” and although he remained there until July 1857, he never gained a significant number of additional adherents. Rather, he suffered defections to his rival Walker, who gained control over most of Nicaragua by the end of the year. When Kinney returned to Greytown in April 1858 in a hopeless attempt to reestablish himself, he did so in command of what must have been the era’s smallest expedition—six men!61 

Shortly after midnight on May 4, 1855, about a month before Kinney’s departure for Central America, fifty-six men left San Francisco with Walker on the brig Vesta, bound for Nicaragua’s Pacific coast, across the isthmus from Kinney’s projected Mosquito colony. Walker not only commanded more manpower from the beginning than Kinney did, but he had the advantage of a better contract for filibustering. At the time, Nicaragua was in the throes of civil war. A crony of Walker’s had reached an agreement with Nicaraguan Liberals, or Democrats, by which Walker would bring “colonists” to help the Liberals against their Conservative, or Legitimist, enemies, in return for a large land grant.62 

Walker and his “Immortals” (as they were later called) arrived on Nicaraguan soil at Realejo on June 16. The next day, Walker and two cohorts mounted horses and proceeded to the Liberal headquarters at León, a city in sight of some of Nicaragua’s beautiful volcanoes, where his waiting allies commissioned him as a colonel and incorporated into the Liberal army his band, which they dubbed La Falange Americana (the American Phalanx).63 

Walker’s troops met defeat in their first battle, an attack on July 29 on Conservative forces holding the interior town of Rivas, a key point near the Transit Road from Lake Nicaragua to the Pacific. From the beginning, Walker had the strategic sense to realize that reinforcements and supplies from the United States could reach him if he maintained control over the combined river, lake, and overland route by which travelers and goods commonly crossed Nicaragua’s narrow domain between the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific, of which the Transit Road was a part. Naturally, he selected military objectives such as Rivas with this goal in mind. In the fighting, the filibusters took fewer casualties than their enemies but nonetheless suffered six fatalities (including two high-ranking officers) and twelve men wounded, and had to abandon their assault.

Walker’s fortunes rebounded quickly, however. His Phalanx, with the help of some 175 Nicaraguan Democratic troops under the native Indian colonel José María Valle, thoroughly repulsed a conservative attack on their positions at Virgin Bay on September 3, absorbing no fatalities and causing the Legitimist attackers about sixty casualties. On October 13 Walker’s troops took the enemy capital of Granada; and days later Walker executed the secretary of  foreign affairs in the Legitimist régime, who had been taken into custody, after news arrived that Legitimist forces had fired on American civilians crossing Nicaragua, killing some of them. The seizure of Granada and Walker’s threats of more executions induced the Conservative general Ponciano Corral to agree to a treaty ending the hostilities and creating a fourteen-month provisional, coalition government, with the elderly former Legitimist customs official Patricio Rivas serving as president. The agreement not only disbanded most of the Conservative forces but also allowed Walker to retain power for himself as commander-in-chief of the republic’s army. 

Early in November, Walker got a break that allowed him to eliminate his most important rival. Valle turned over to him intercepted letters that Corral, who had taken the position of minister of war in the coalition, sent out calling on other Central American states to invade Nicaragua. This gave Walker justification to have Corral executed for treason, which he did despite his court-martial’s recommendation that the guilty prisoner be shown mercy, and despite, as Walker’s memoir put it, the “sobs and anguish and tears” of Corral’s daughters and the many other women of Granada who visited him the night before the scheduled execution in a futile effort to persuade him to change his mind. 

The following June, Walker took the final step in his rise to power, by issuing a proclamation renouncing as traitors his puppet ruler Rivas (who had turned anti-filibuster) and Nicaragua’s current minister of war, and calling for new elections. In tainted balloting on July 10, 1856, Walker defeated his closest rival for the presidency by what was reported in the filibusters’ organ El Nicaragüense as a margin of 11,488 votes. Two days later, Walker swore an oath of office as president in a ceremony held at Granada’s plaza.64 

The filibuster régime lasted until the spring of 1857, when Walker was defeated by a coalition of the other Central American states and his Nicaraguan enemies (including many alienated Liberals), with assistance from Britain’s government as well as the American steamboat magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. The latter’s investments in transit operations to, from, and across Nicaragua had been damaged by Walker’s policies, and he had good cause to seek revenge against the filibusters. Sadly, during the waning days of his tenure, Walker made one of his most ruthless and detested decisions. Forced in December 1856 for military reasons to have his troops evacuate Granada, the Legitimists’ former capital and a city dating back to its founding by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, Walker ordered the place burned. Finally, on May 1, Walker surrendered to a U.S. naval officer serving as an intermediary between the filibusters and their enemies, with the understanding that he and his men would be evacuated to the United States.65 

Since reinforcements kept arriving in Nicaragua on various vessels from the United States almost until the surrender, Walker’s invasion became, over time, the most numerically significant filibuster of the period. On June 1, 1857, shortly after returning to New York after Walker’s defeat, the European soldier of fortune and military historian Charles Frederick Henningsen claimed that exactly 2,518 men joined Walker’s cause during his tenure in Nicaragua. Commissioned a brigadier general and given command of Walker’s artillery after arriving at Granada in October 1856 with ordnance stores and arms from New York, Henningsen deserves consideration as a credible source, especially since his estimate is roughly confirmed by other data. Walker’s muster rolls show that he enrolled more than nine hundred men by July 1, 1856, and U.S. newspapers and other sources indicate the embarkation of hundreds of recruits for Nicaragua after that date. Moreover, a traveler arriving in San Francisco from Central America in October estimated the filibuster army at sixteen hundred men, a figure that obviously took no account of soldiers who had died in Walker’s service, much less those who had deserted or been granted honorable discharge.66 

Of course, in calculating the number of Americans who filibustered to Central America before the Civil War, one considers not only those men who served during Kinney’s and Walker’s initial invasions, but also the many adventurers who joined Walker’s later aggressions. Spiritually still the filibuster after his return to U.S. soil, Walker seems to have been consumed by only one thought from the moment that he arrived in New Orleans on May 27, 1857— how best to recapture power in Nicaragua. Addressing a crowd on Canal Street, Walker announced, “duty calls upon me to return.” Immediately he plunged into the minutiae of arranging another expedition, informing the former U.S. assistant secretary of state A. Dudley Mann that “enough” had been “done in New York” to allow him “a speedy return to Central America.” He even had the gall to alert U.S. Secretary of State Lewis Cass that as “the rightful and lawful chief executive” of Nicaragua, he would be returning with his “companions” to that country.67 

Walker’s single-mindedness led not only to his second filibuster to Nicaragua that fall, but to three subsequent ones to Central America, the last of which cost him his life. Despite invoking the charms of “quiet and domestic life” in one letter,68 Walker proceeded so methodically from one scheme to the next that his expeditions merge almost seamlessly in the historical record. 

Walker’s initial encore began on November 14, 1857, when the Mobile and Nicaragua Steamship Company’s vessel Fashion slipped out of Mobile harbor with Walker and his associates aboard, and ended after Walker’s arrival in Central America later that month. On December 8, U.S. Commodore Hiram  Paulding compelled Walker and most of the expeditionists to surrender after they had established an encampment on the Central American coast near Greytown; moreover, between December 23 and 25, the U.S. naval captain Joshua R. Sands, commanding the U.S. steam frigate Susquehanna, rounded up an additional forty-five invaders, commanded by the filibuster colonel Frank P. Anderson, who had been landed separately by the Fashion south of Greytown. Anderson’s group managed to capture a fort held by Costa Rica up the San Juan River before being taken into custody. 

According to the American commercial agent at Greytown, Walker arrived in the vicinity with “about two hundred men.” This figure correlates roughly with a note in the journal of one of Walker’s officers that “195 all told” had traveled with him from New Orleans to Mobile before the expedition, as well as several documents indicating that Walker’s force totaled 186 men.69 

Walker commenced planning his next Nicaraguan filibuster immediately after the breakup of the Fashion expedition. Walker arrived back in the United States on December 26, 1857, still claiming to be Nicaragua’s lawful president. Damning the Navy’s interference, he announced his intention to persist in a public letter dated January 4, 1858, to President James Buchanan, a piece of propaganda designed to subject Buchanan to so much public pressure that he would relent in his enforcement of the Neutrality Law. Five days later, Walker intimated to his former naval commander Callender Fayssoux his hope that they could “ leave again for Nicaragua.” 

In December 1858, Walker got off a party of expeditionists from Mobile aboard the schooner Susan, this time under the command of Colonel Anderson, who was given the responsibility of establishing a foothold in Central America before Walker’s arrival with a shipload of reinforcements. A correspondent for the New York Herald listed by name ninety-seven filibusters on board, not including the ship’s captain. After the Susan grounded on a coral reef in the Bay of Honduras, ending the expedition, its captain reported to the vessel’s owners that there had been 112 “hands” on ship, making clear that every passenger was a filibuster, since the crew had deserted before the vessel left Mobile.70 

Determined to “yet get back to our country—ours by every right legal and moral,” the indefatigable filibuster devoted most of 1859 to plotting yet another expedition. Walker sought men and funding in New York, around New Orleans and Mobile, and in San Francisco; he also sent agents to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec in southern Mexico under assignment to establish an advance base there for his return to Nicaragua. After encountering difficulty raising funds in California, where he sojourned for part of the spring, Walker concentrated on his eastern and southern operations. However, Walker postponed the expedition that fall because of intervention by federal authorities. Not only did U.S. customs officials keep Walker’s reputed vessel in New York under close watch; they also denied clearance to Walker’s troop transport, the Philadelphia, at New Orleans. This prevented the vessel from descending the Mississippi River and picking up Walker’s recruits, who had taken a tugboat downriver to the Southwest Pass (one of the Mississippi’s outlets into the Gulf of Mexico) in anticipation of boarding Walker’s ship at that point. A federal marshal, accompanied by U.S. army troops, gave the expedition its final blow on October 7, 1859, by taking the gathered filibusters, whom he numbered at “about seventy-five,” into custody.71 

Walker’s finale unfolded over the spring and summer of 1860. Initially, Walker intended to send his recruits, ten to twenty men at a time, to Aspinwall on the Caribbean coast of New Granada (now Colón, Panama), and to use that port as a staging base. However, Walker shifted his sights northward to Roatán, the largest island in Britain’s colony of the Bay Islands off Honduras’s Caribbean coast. During the spring, Walker’s men, traveling in small parties, made their way to Roatán. Walker then joined them on June 16.72 

After British officials landed troops and artillery on Roatán, Walker evacuated the island rather than risk that the authorities might seize his munitions or make arrests. For a while, the expeditionists sailed around the Bay of Honduras, putting in at Cozumel Island off the Yucatán peninsula and other points as they awaited the arrival of further reinforcements, munitions, and provisions. Finally, on August 5, they went into action, capturing Trujillo on the Honduran mainland, which they held for two weeks. Walker and his men fled Trujillo by land, however, after the British warship Icarus, commanded by Norvell Salmon, arrived on the scene, and Salmon demanded their surrender. Pursued eastwardly along Honduras’s Caribbean coast by both the Icarus and Honduran forces, Walker surrendered to Salmon on September 3, expecting to be treated, along with his men, as British prisoners of war. Instead, Salmon turned them over to the Hondurans. Honduran authorities had Walker executed by firing squad on September 12.73 

How many men were foolish enough to join Walker’s mission impossible? Salmon’s report to his superior officer noted the surrender of seventy-three filibusters in all. However, Walker lost expeditionists during the campaign from desertions, battle wounds, and other causes. Salmon discovered, for instance, that Walker had left three wounded filibusters behind when he abandoned Trujillo, as well as three other followers. Our best guide to Walker’s 1860 expedition, a ledger maintained by Callender Fayssoux, indicates that five schooners, making eleven voyages in all, carried 147 men from American soil who intended to participate in Walker’s campaign. Fifty of these adventurers either failed to link up with Walker before his capture or embarked just before news of his execution arrived in the United States.74

As for the total number of antebellum Americans who took part in filibusters, that depends on one’s definition. If filibustering includes only those adventurers who actually invaded foreign countries, then it was a marginal phenomenon. Perhaps as few as five thousand persons, including un-naturalized immigrants and foreigners temporarily in the United States, filibustered from American territory during the entire period between the Mexican and Civil wars, and a significant proportion of these were repeat offenders who participated in more than one expedition. Given the more than thirty-one million people enumerated in the 1860 U.S. Census, such figures seem inconsequential. 

But such calculations understate filibustering’s manpower. For one thing, we err by excluding American men who conspired to invade foreign soil as members of private military parties but whose expeditions never arrived at their intended destinations. Consider the case of the future U.S. senator Matthew S. Quay of Pennsylvania. After studying law, teaching school, and publishing a newspaper, the young Quay likely became a filibuster in late 1852, then shortly afterward backed out of whatever scheme he had joined. In December 1852 one of Quay’s correspondents noted that he was not surprised by the contents of Quay’s recent letter from New Orleans, given one of their earlier conversations that caused him to infer that Quay was “on a filibustering expedition.” In February 1853 Quay received a letter from a cousin announcing her relief that he had abandoned “that Cuban expedition.”75 Quay never actually invaded a foreign country. But he apparently signed on with a filibustering group. 

Thousands of additional Americans would have filibustered had it not been for developments beyond their control, including federal efforts to enforce the Neutrality Act. The Round Island adventurers of 1849, John Quitman’s volunteers for Cuba, and George Bickley’s Mexico-bound Knights, for instance, were every bit as dedicated to filibustering as the men who died in López’s ranks in Cuba. They just never quite got abroad. Henry Kinney intended to take many more men than eighteen to Central America. The owner of the United States, a 1,500-ton steamer that Kinney originally intended should carry his expedition before it was placed under surveillance by U.S. authorities in New York, testified in an affidavit that the vessel had been “fitted up with accommodations for five hundred passengers.” Likewise, Walker could easily have commanded more soldiers than he did during his 1855–57 tenure in Nicaragua had it not been for federal intervention and inefficient recruiting operations. On one occasion, for example, the U.S. district attorney in New York caused forty suspects to be ejected from the steamer Northern Light before its sailing for Central America.76 

According to various reports, had Commodore Paulding not broken up Walker’s November 1857 expedition, General Henningsen, commanding hundreds of reinforcements, would have made a second landing in Nicaragua. Even after news of Paulding’s intervention reached the United States, additional adventurers prepared to rush to Nicaragua. Some hoped to reinforce Colonel Anderson’s party; others wanted a role in the next filibuster. “I would like to join Genl. Walker . . . and from my popular bearing upon the surrounding country, think I could carry with me a company of from 60 to 100 fighting men,” announced one North Carolinian on January 18. In May 1858 Walker claimed privately that seven hundred men had already committed to his next expedition.77 

Should we expunge from filibustering’s record the enlistees who deserted from expeditions before they left U.S. territory, others left behind by their expeditions, and still others who were waiting in the wings when expeditions returned? In October 1855 Henry McCulloch, a legislator and veteran of the Texas Rangers, had twenty-three men ready to reinforce James H. Callahan’s filibustering party, when he learned that Callahan had returned from Mexico to U.S. soil. In October 1856 one of Walker’s recruiters in New Orleans reported that “a large number” of recruits had arrived in New Orleans from beyond Louisiana’s state lines, but that they had returned to their homes because of a lack of funds to support them while awaiting passage. In 1857 a group of Nicaragua-bound filibusters changed their minds and jumped ship when their vessel, the steamship Sierra Nevada, put in at Manzanillo harbor, Mexico, during their passage from San Francisco to Nicaragua. Henry Crabb left several sick soldiers at the border when he moved into Sonora. Before news of his death reached California, moreover, a company of Stanislaus County men, headed by a former sheriff, moved out intending to join his expedition. All such men were filibusters.78 

I would also contend that one did not even have to join a military unit to be a filibuster, since U.S. law treated all persons involved in pre-expedition planning as criminals. One federal judge, John McLean, made this point most explicit in a charge to the grand jury of a U.S. district court. McLean argued that the “offence is committed by any overt act which shall be a commencement of the expedition, though it should not be prosecuted. . . . ‘To provide the means’ is within the statute. To constitute this offence the individual need not engage personally in the expedition. If he furnish the munitions of war, provisions, transportation, clothing, or any other necessaries to men engaged in the expedition, he is guilty, for he provides the means to carry on the expedition.” McLean’s expansive definition requires us to open filibustering’s ranks to organizers, recruiters, suppliers, and financial backers. Any individual complicit in an expedition becomes a filibuster.79 

But do McLean’s standards incriminate those who were merely active sympathizers? Was Governor Runnels of Texas a filibuster for overseeing a meeting at Houston in January 1857 to arrange collections for Walker’s cause in Nicaragua? What about persons who allowed adventurers to store weapons on their property? Do we include partisans who shielded filibusters from arrest, such as the son of the former South Carolina governor James Hamilton and the several Georgians who allowed Gonzales to hide out on their plantations in the weeks following the breakup of the April 1851 Cuba conspiracy? Clearly, McLean’s definition greatly enlarges the pool of filibusters. The question becomes when to bar admittance.80 

Finally, we may not even know about, much less have statistics for, all the filibuster plots of the pre–Civil War period. We should dismiss as an outright fabrication a rumor, reported to the Department of State by one of its agents in 1849, that an expedition of as many as 10,000 men might be setting out for Japan. We probably should also assume that scattered reports in 1858 and 1859 about the Sons of Malta, a new fraternal order, misrepresented the organization as having designs on Cuba, though resolutions passed in October 1860 by the Cairo, Illinois, chapter deploring William Walker’s death hint that some of the Sons indeed had pro filibustering sympathies. Most likely, too, “General” N. S. Reneau was a filibustering pretender.81 

Reneau, a Tennessee native who had served as a private in the Mexican War, notified President James Buchanan on January 6, 1859, of his readiness to invade Cuba. In 1854 Buchanan, then American minister to England, had joined several other U.S. diplomats in drafting the notorious “Ostend Manifesto,” in which they proposed that the United States seize Cuba if Spain refused to sell it. In December 1858, moreover, just a month before Reneau’s letter, Buchanan had suggested a negotiating strategy to acquire Cuba in his annual message to Congress.82 Undoubtedly expecting a sympathetic response from a man whose 1856 presidential campaign had revolved in part around the likelihood of his acquiring Cuba, Reneau proposed to command an expedition of 5,000 men in support of a pending revolution for independence that he claimed would be led by the island’s Spanish ruler, Captain-General José de la Concha. But he would only do this if Buchanan would support him with five warships or $100,000 in federal funds. The money would let him charter vessels to convey an army to the island. 

Reneau enclosed in his letter a copy of an October 25, 1858, message that he had supposedly sent to the captain-general, insinuating not only prior collusion with Concha but also, amazingly, that Reneau had already consulted with Buchanan about the scheme. If we are to believe Reneau, the president had promised U.S. military protection of a liberated Cuba, once the rebels formally declared their independence and requested annexation to the United States. In October 1859 Reneau contacted Buchanan again, this time claiming that he had seven to eight thousand men ready to embark for Cuba, that he needed $10,000 in secret service funds, and that Buchanan’s secretary of the interior had promised that there would be no governmental interference with his scheme!83 

Although a correspondent for the New York Herald noted that Reneau had been observed strutting around Memphis wearing a sash, epaulettes, and long sword and was apparently “deranged,” a number of newspapers in the United States took Reneau seriously enough to take his conspiracy at face value. A paper in Natchez, Mississippi, for instance, noted Reneau’s arrival at Vicksburg in May 1859 for a “Cuban Convention” that he had called. A writer for a Memphis sheet the next October affirmed that Reneau had assembled hundreds of “brave, bold, and daring fellows” to “Americanize” Cuba in December. Still Reneau never did launch his invasion, and we must assume that the Herald got it right. During the Civil War, Buchanan would remember Reneau as a “monomaniac” who had afforded the president’s cabinet “much amusement” with his demands.84 

But we had better reserve judgment as to whether any Americans participated in schemes that targeted Peru. In the winter of 1857–58 Peruvian leaders became convinced that exiles were in the process of organizing an expedition of several hundred “Yankees” out of New York, with the intention of “defrauding” their country.85 Additionally, some U.S. filibusters may have had their eyes on Canada, Haiti, Hawaii, and Ireland. Stephen B. Oates, in his biography of John Brown, notes that Brown and his men acquired the cutlasses that they used to kill proslavery settlers at Pottawatomie in the Kansas Territory in 1856 from “an Ohio filibustering society called the Grand Eagles, whose members had indulged in fantasies of attacking and conquering Canada.” Given the extent of filibustering to Canada in the 1830s and late 1860s, it would be surprising if at least some Americans did not engage in Canadian filibustering plots between the Mexican and Civil wars.86 

Very possibly John T. Pickett, who had invaded Cuba with López in 1850, struck a filibustering deal involving a thrust against Haiti with the Hungarian revolutionary Louis Kossuth during his tour of the United States in 1851– 52.. Pickett would raise men for an expedition to conquer Haiti that Kossuth would organize in collaboration with the authorities of the Dominican Republic; afterward the combined forces would sail from Haiti to liberate Hungary. The Dominican Republic, a former Spanish colony, and Haiti, a black republic and former French colony, shared the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (or Saint Domingue) near Cuba, but had experienced hostile relations for much of their histories as independent countries. Earlier in the century, Haiti had even conquered the Dominican Republic and then ruled it for years. Thus there was a rationale for the supposed plot. 

In December 1851 Theodore O’Hara, who had been a fellow officer of Pickett’s in López’s ranks, sent Pickett a letter in the hope that it would arrive before he sailed. O’Hara observed, “from the official statements claimed in the President’s message things in the Island wear not a very favorable aspect for our enterprise.” Very possibly, O’Hara referred to a passage in President Millard Fillmore’s annual message to Congress (Dec. 2, 1851) stating that peace had been achieved “between the contending parties in the island of St. Domingo.” Obviously, peace between the Dominican Republic and Haiti would have precluded the former’s cooperation in an invasion of the latter, lessening the chances of a successful filibuster. Less than a year later, Pickett arrived anyway in the Dominican Republic, around the same time that the journal Our Times claimed that U.S. citizens in a “Dominican Encampment of the Brotherhood of the Union” were planning a filibuster to Haiti. However, Pickett got nowhere in his negotiations with Dominican leaders, and his plot, whatever it was, collapsed.87 

By that time, Hawaii had gone through a filibustering scare of its own. In November 1851 Hawaiian officials suspected thirty-two or thirty-three American passengers arriving at Honolulu aboard the vessel Game Cock, some of them former California vigilantes, of entertaining filibustering intentions against their independent kingdom. It is by no means certain that the suspected passengers truly intended a takeover; if they did, they may have been preempted from attacking by defensive preparations previously initiated by the Hawaiian government. The next spring, however, just before sailing back to California, one of the passengers who had sailed on the Game Cock boasted that he would soon be returning to conquer the islands as part of a 4,000-man filibustering army already being assembled. The scaremonger did indeed return. But he traveled alone, and announced upon arriving that he intended to found a banking establishment. Nothing ever came of his threat.88 

The historical record remains just as clouded about U.S. filibustering across the Atlantic as it is about expeditions crossing the Pacific. In January 1856 federal authorities in Ohio issued warrants against twenty naturalized Irish natives for organizing an expedition to liberate Ireland from British rule, and arrested thirteen of the suspects, but never proved their case. Whether a filibustering plot was really in progress remains a mystery.89 

And what of Harry Maury? As it turns out, he became one of filibustering’s repeat offenders. He never made it to Cuba with John Quitman or even to the Mosquito Coast with Henry Kinney, but he did emerge as a mainstay in William Walker’s Central American escapades in the late 1850s. 

It was Maury who captained the Susan in the December 1858 expedition from Mobile, an experience that despite its failure only whetted his appetite for further filibustering. In July 1859, at a time when Walker was counting on him to raise men for his next Nicaraguan expedition, Maury became so impatient to filibuster again that he studied army tactics in preparation, apparently, for joining an invasion of Mexico by land should Walker put things off for too long: “During the next month I shall either go to sea or to Mexico, provided the General has no use for me. I consider myself amphibious, as I have been studying military tactics.... The General speaks to me of ultimate success, but not of immediate action. Whenever he does go, I follow.” The general, however, had “use” for Maury after all. In fact, Maury suffered arrest as one of the leaders in Walker’s fall 1859 fiasco. A year later, after learning of Walker’s execution in Honduras, Maury gave fleeting thought to leading one hundred men on a mission to avenge the death of a man whom he once had described as inspiring him with more “respect & warm attachment” than did any other person.90 Maury, by 1860, had become an American filibustering addict.

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America’s Second Sin.

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