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Science Forum Index » Anthropology Forum » The White Conquest of Nicaragua
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| Kevin Alfred Strom |
 Posted: Sat Nov 08, 2003 12:21 am |
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http://www.nationalvanguard.org/story.php?id=1055
The White Conquest of Nicaragua
History; Posted on: 2003-11-07 10:59:20 [ Printer friendly ]
How a White Doctor From Tennessee Conquered Nicaragua
from National Vanguard No. 85, 1982
by Charles H. McGuire
Nicaragua in 1982: Squalor. Poverty. Marxist troops from Cuba. The
main export is revolution. With the Sandinista victory in 1979,
power has shifted from the Latin-White element in the population
back to the mestizo and Indian. A frowning U.S. secretary of state
mutters darkly to reporters that he cannot rule out the prospect
that American GIs may soon be fighting and dying in Central American
jungles, only seven years after the fall of Saigon, in order to
contain another spreading Marxist threat.
It didn't have to turn out that way. In the 1850s Nicaragua was
actually marching toward U.S. statehood. Had the visionary conquest
of Nicaragua by William Walker (pictured above) and his private army
not been sabotaged, that whole fruitful and verdant country might
today (perhaps along with the rest of Central America) be teeming
with White Americans, the descendants of setters from the North. The
recently surrendered Panama Canal would never have been built,
because Nicaragua would have provided a far better location for the
canal. And this vital inter-ocean link would be on United States
soil, defended by White Americans protecting their own land.
In place of Central America's perennial instability, sloth, and
backwardness -- the consequence of a multiracial population base and
rampant miscegenation -- millions of hard-working Whites could be
flourishing.
Though a German Jew and a Yankee railroad magnate were able to
thwart Walker's undertaking, the life of the man from Nashville was
neither a failure nor "a tale of sound and fury, signifying
nothing." William Walker, called "the gray-eyed man of destiny" by
his contemporaries, truly exemplified that Nordic breed which, said
Aristotle, "would prefer short and intense pleasures to long quiet
ones; would choose to live nobly for a year rather than to pass many
years of ordinary life; and would rather do one great and noble deed
than many small ones." For Walker, that "one great and noble deed"
would be to open up Nicaragua to what he, along with others of the
time, called the "Anglo-Saxon" or "blue-eyed race."
Manifest Destiny
After the 1970s, a decade of unprecedented retreat from strength and
confidence, it seems hard for Americans today to remember the
certainty their White ancestors of a little more than a century ago
felt that it was their destiny to conquer and settle all of North
America -- and perhaps even South America too. In fact the first 140
years of the American republic saw territorial expansion, whether by
sword or by dollar, as the normal state of affairs. From the 1780s
when the 13 former colonies annexed everything east of the
Mississippi, until the First World War, when Denmark was pressured
to cede the Virgin Islands, American territorial expansion, and with
it White population growth, seemed inexorable.
But it was during the 19th century, especially, that men like
William Walker could flourish. The United States, with a population
under 5 million in 1800, increased its land area on the North
American continent from less than 0.9 to more than 3.6 million
square miles.
What fueled this gigantic land-nama (as the Vikings would have
called it) was endemic confidence. We find Thomas Jefferson boldly
ushering in the new century with the prediction: "Our rapid
multiplication will cover the whole northern, if not also the
southern continent." One writer at mid-century concurred, suggesting
that America, with its large White birth rate, was "conquering the
New World from its bedchamber." Others, like Sam Houston, the
"father" of Texas, knew that White power grew as much from the
barrel of the gun as from the bedchamber. The latter was of the
considered opinion that the "Anglo-Saxon" race was destined to seize
and people all of Northern and Central America, right down to the
Isthmus of Panama.
How the mighty have fallen! The same Texas which Sam Houston and
Davy Crockett secured for the White race is now ordered by a federal
court to feed, clothe, and school the offspring of "Tex-Mex" illegal
aliens, who are swarming into the state from Mexico at a rate of
more than a million each year.
As the 19th century unfolded, the expanding frontiers made the race
question of paramount importance. East of the Mississippi there was
the question of Negro slavery, which eventually tore the Union apart
in fratricidal combat. But west of the Mississippi the racial
problem had to do with the Indians, a people of Asian origin, and
with the Indian-Spanish hybrids called "mestizos," (or in the
American vernacular of the times, "Greasers").
Except for a few New England intellectuals and divines the bulk of
the population had no desire to "civilize" the Indians and mestizos,
and no longing to assimilate them either. Representative Roger
Griswold of Connecticut declared unmistakably that the United States
had not been formed "for the purpose of distributing its principles
and advantages to foreign nations" but rather "with the sole view of
securing these blessings for ourselves and our own posterity."
An influential book published in 1935, Manifest Destiny, by Alfred
Katz Weinberg, explained this racialist attitude, albeit
disapprovingly:
"A key was the judgment that democratic institutions fuction best
among a racially homogeneous and generally intelligent population.
"Another reason was the prototypically Nietzschean judgment that it
was more important to develop the more splendid race than to lift up
the inferior.
"Still another influence was the aristocratic exclusiveness [of
American Whites] which repels untouchables with a noli me tangere.
The exclusiveness was not that of an esthete but involved the
impatience of the hardy pioneer with the incompetent."
It was this deep-felt determination not to absorb the incompetent
which led the United States to avoid annexing all of Mexico after
the fall of Mexico City to U.S. troops in 1848.
In fact, there earlier had been voices opposed to annexing even
Louisiana because of New Orleans' considerable Latin (French and
Spanish) population. One U.S. Senator, John Bell of the 32nd
Congress -- like William Walker a Tennessean -- insisted that all
future annexations should be pointed north, into Canada. There, he
said, we find "bone of our bone," a kindred White people who would
add "strength and vigor to our body politic."
Mercifully absent from the great annexation debates of the last
century was the gospel of "human rights" for our "little browns
brothers in Christ." A distinguished writer for Harper's, John
Burgess, expressed the healthy belief of the times: "The Teutonic
[White] nations can never regard the exercise of political power as
a right of all men."
What made whites like Burgess convinced that non-Whites had
forfeited any "rights" to power and land was the essentially
unproductive nature of the brown- and red-skinned peoples. James
Buchanan, later the 15th President, in a book published in 1824 on
Indian history and customs, let a Pawnee Indian chief explain the
temperamental difference:
"'The Great Spirit,' said the chief during a visit to Washington,
'made us all. He made my skin red, and yours white. He placed us on
this earth and intended that we should live differently from each
other.
"'He made the whites to cultivate the earth, and feed on domestic
animals, but he made us redskins to rove through the uncultivated
woods and to dress with their skins. He intended that we go to war,
to take scalps, to steal horses and to triumph over our enemies.'"
About the only thing that Whites and Indians could agree on here was
the mutual desire to triumph over their enemies. But as for the
rest, the White man had not come from Europe to roam the woods and
steal horses. Proud scions of the race that built Athens, Rome,
London and Berlin, the Whites had come to work. Like Doctor Faust,
the quintessential Homo europaeicus in Goethe's drama, the European
came to America "ever striving, exerting himself."
Therefore, the productive land had to be cleared of its unproductive
inhabitants. To do this in Nicaragua was the chosen task of William
Walker.
William Walker
Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on May 8th, 1824, to
prosperous, middle-class parents. Though short and slight of build
(5' 5'', 120 lbs.), the blond Southerner had a pair of fixating
blue-gray eyes that made men stop in their tracks.
Like many of predominantly Nordic racial stock, Walker was something
of a loner. He never drank or smoked, and the one romance of his
life was cut short by his belle's death in a cholera epidemic in
1848. Instead, as a youth, Walker "hit the books," graduating summa
cum laude from a Nashville college in 1845. Then it was off to the
University of Pennsylvania medical school in Philadelphia, where
Walker gained his M.D. degree with high honors.
Not content with just what he'd learned at the then top-ranked
medical school in the country, Walker embarked for Europe to study
at the Old World's great medical teaching institutions. After brief
stays in Edinburgh, Paris, Heidelberg, where he also studied
languages, the Tennessean came home to Nashville -- to watch in
shock as his mother wasted away and died of cholera, despite all his
efforts to save her.
This blow not only shattered Walker's confidence in the medical
knowledge of the era -- it also shattered the young physician's
assumptions about bourgeois security. Walker opted for the daring
life, for experiencing whatever the world could give him.
Against his father's bitter opposition, Walker began studying for a
law degree. In a year and a half he passed his bar examination with
distinction. Now he had two areas of expertise: medicine and law --
at age 24. Still searching for more experience, Walker took the
stagecoach south to New Orleans. There he became the editor of an
antislavery newspaper, the Crescent. One of his close co-workers on
the staff of the Crescent was a budding young writer named Walt
Whitman.
Unlike the businessmen of the Deep South center of the cotton trade,
Walker clearly saw the insidious and growing dangers which Negro
slavery posed for America as a White nation. But although the
Crescent's circulation soared under his guidance, Walker felt unable
to make any headway against the vested interests in slavery. In 1850
the doctor/lawyer/editor from Tennessee moved on -- to San
Francisco.
As a college student in Nashville, Walker had studied the great
epics of Homer, and he always remembered the high praise the poet
gave to Achilles: "He was a speaker of words/ And a doer of deeds."
This, the Greek aristocratic ideal, now came to fruition in the life
of William Walker. America had just annexed the Southwest from
Mexico. Walker resolved to invade the northwestern part of what was
left of Mexico and annex it himself.
Utterly bereft of military experience (other than his college
reading of Caesar's De Bello Gallico), William Walker drew on his
only resource: his will. For three years in San Francisco he studied
military books, talked with officers (and with soldiers of fortune,
of whom there were many in San Francisco, then a frontier town), and
read all the newspapers he could get his hands on, in order to keep
up on world events.
By fall of 1853 Walker was ready to invade Baja (or Lower)
California. He had collected a grand total of 45 men (!) for the
task, got them on an old sailing ship loaded with food and arms, and
by a ruse managed to sail out of San Francisco harbor under the nose
of the authorities. (The Neutrality Act prohibited U.S. citizens
from waging private war on foreign countries.)
The lilliputian force landed at La Paz, near the southern tip of the
Baja California peninsula, with only token opposition from the local
Mexicans. The true opposition would come from Walker's own men, many
of whom had joined Walker's expedition more for plunder and whoring
than for soldiering, and from a fiercely inhospitable desert
environment. But the five-foot-five, self-made "colonel" soon proved
his mettle: he marched his men over hundreds of miles of sand and
arid sierras, shooting would-be deserters and warning the
faint-hearted.
By the time Walker's platoon-size army hit the first Mexican
garrison town it was a disciplined, stout-hearted fighting unit. The
local militia fled, and the Republic of California and Sonora was
proclaimed, William Walker, President. Though the new republic
lasted only seven months, Walker's performance was remarkable and
typical of his later actions in Nicaragua. When federal troops in
San Francisco seized his supply ships, Walker made do without. When
Mexican troops and snipers counterattacked, Walker dug in. It comes
as no surprise in view of his background that the new President
ordered medical and hygiene reforms in his domain and that he gave
the area a constitution. Walker also strictly banned raping and
pillaging, as well as the shooting of prisoners -- three mainstays
of Mexican military life.
Walker returned to San Francisco in May 1854 to face charges for
violation of the Neutrality Act. The two-fisted port populace
welcomed him as a hero, and a sympathetic jury acquitted him of all
charges. One juror, mistaking Walker's intentions, thought that the
Tennessean's only crime had been "trying to civilize the Greasers."
Nicaragua
Exactly one year after his acquittal, William Walker and another
army -- this time of 58 men -- landed on the Pacific coast of
Nicaragua. By now famous around the world, Walker seemed the
embodiment of the indomitable Nordic American spirit. A newspaper in
Muenster, Germany, told its readers:
"The bold advance guard of the American people in Nicaragua, General
Walker, has a most typically American personality: clever,
determined to the point of recklessness, ruthless, tough, and
energetic to a degree seldom found in other nations. Walker seems
born to dictate to the soft and spineless Spanish-American
population."
While the German paper was correct in saying Walker would "dictate"
to the Spanish and mestizo population of Nicaragua, it left out the
most significant point: Walker's plan to colonize the country with
Anglo-Saxon Americans. Walker had not come as a mere "filibuster"
(in the 19th century meaning of "plunderer"), but rather to assert
the right of a superior race to ownership of the land.
In his The War in Nicaragua, Walker himself wrote: "That which some
ignorantly call 'filibusterism' is not the offspring of hasty
passion or ill-regulated desire, it is the fruit of the sure,
unerring instincts which act in accordance with laws as old as
creation. They are but drivelers who speak of establishing fixed
relations between the pure White American race, as it exists in the
United States, and the mixed Hispano-Indian race, as it exists in
Mexico and Central America, without the employment of force. The
history of the world presents no utopian vision of an inferior race
yielding meekly and peacefully to the controlling influence of a
superior people."
Racially, Nicaragua has always been an overwhelmingly Indian and
mestizo country, with a mere aristocratic sprinkling of European
blood, mostly Spanish and German. In addition, a number of Blacks
were settled by England in the eastern lowlands of the so-called
Mosquito Coast.
In 1811 the general Latin-American revolt against Spain reached
Nicaragua, touching off an unending series of civil wars and coups
which has dragged on until the present. At first Nicaragua fought
only against Spain, but then it took on its Central American
neighbors. Finally Nicaragua's internal provinces, as well as her
social classes, came into open conflict with one another.
In June 1855 more than four decades of anarchy and chaos were
interrupted by the appearance of new blood from the North. Landing
at the invitation of a left-wing group among the country's feuding
factions, Walker and his men began an amazing campaign which, by the
end of the year, made William Walker ruler of Nicaragua.
Though their numbers were small, Walker's troops were hand-picked.
Many were veterans of the Mexican War, and they were armed with
Mississippi rifles, a Colt revolver on each hip, and deadly bowie
knives. Walker kept discipline strict and drilled his men
constantly. But beyond their leadership, training, and experience,
Walker's men had one huge advantage over the Indian and mestizo
troops of Nicaragua: they were willing to actually close with the
enemy and kill him. The whole idea of combat was foreign to the
local troops. As often as not, by the time the mestizo troops got
close enough to clash, one or both sides broke and ran. Units
received incredibly poor training, their officers were incompetent
or worse, and the favorite tactic seems to have been fleeing into
town, holing up inside the fort or a church, and daring the enemy to
attack. The only occasion on which machismo was displayed was when
prisoners were captured: they were always brutally tortured and then
slaughtered, their remains usually being thrown into a river or down
a well.
Everything the mestizo armies were not, Walker's men were. They shot
well, the stood their ground, they closed for the kill, and if they
captured a town, prisoners and civilians were spared. The latter
point, especially, led to the enemy's surrender. By December 1855,
all of Nicaragua had been pacified. After six months of Walker's
rule, he was elected President of Nicaragua on July 12th, 1856.
Nemeses
Before William Walker began a series of governmental reforms
reminiscent of his Baja California days, virtually nothing
functioned in Nicaragua. There were no public services, such as
sanitation, mail delivery, or schools. The only smoothly running bit
of infrastructure in Nicaragua was Cornelius Vanderbilt's Accessory
Transit Company.
When gold was discovered in California in 1849 the whole world began
clamoring for a quick sea route west to the Promised Land, and
Nicaragua was the natural choice as a place to cross the Central
American isthmus: in the San Juan River and Lake Nicaragua, nature
has already provided a water route across more than three-quarters
of the country. Only about ten miles of land separate the western
shores of Lake Nicaragua from the Pacific Ocean, and here the U.S.
railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt built the only truly
serviceable coach road in Nicaragua, to ferry passengers from the
lake ships to his vessels waiting on the Pacific shore. With the
vast profits Vanderbilt made from his monopoly on inter-ocean
traffic in the 1850s, the New York capitalist (worth over
$100,000,000 at his height) financed a program whose aim was to buy
up all the good land in Nicaragua.
This was, of course, at complete cross-purposes with President
Walker's design to open Nicaragua to U.S. colonists -- and not
merely to one American "fat cat" interested only in exploiting cheap
Indian farm labor. Walker allied himself with two officers of the
Accessory Transit Company, Cornelius Garrison and Charles Morgan, to
wrest control of the company from Vanderbilt. Garrison and Morgan
provided Walker with critically needed cash for government and army
expenditures, and in turn the Nicaraguan President seized the
Accessory Transit Company on the grounds of charter violations and
signed it over to the two officers.
Needless to say, this made Cornelius Vanderbilt into Walker's
implacable enemy. Between the Wall Street magnate's further scheming
and the betrayal of Walker's armed forces by a Jewish officer, the
Tennessean's fate was sealed.
(illustration: Some Cuban volunteers helped President Walker in
1856.)
But Walker's dream lived on for almost another year, until May 1st,
1857. Thousands of Americans responded to the efforts of Walker's
stateside recruitment agents and came to settle and farm in
Nicaragua, or to serve in the Tennessean's army. However, many
thousands of others were intercepted by the U.S. Navy and turned
back. With the growing hostility between the proslavery and
antislavery factions in the United States, Vanderbilt found it easy
to persuade the politicians of the northern states that Walker,
despite his antislavery record with the Crescent, was planning to
bring Nicaragua into the Union as a slave state. They preferred
instead to keep Nicaragua out altogether.
Vanderbilt then began scheming with Nicaragua's neighbors to invade
Walker's domain and depose him. But with an army of about 1,200
Whites Walker fought off a whole coalition of invaders from El
Salvador, Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala. One point in his
favor was the traditional hatred which the various Central American
nations had for each other, despite their nearly identical racial
and cultural roots. Only on the rarest of occasions did rival
commanders consent to join forces to attack the norte-americano's
men, and even then the mestizo armies usually melted into the bushes
at some decisive moment.
Walker's rule, and with it the success of the American colonization
effort, seemed assured. A close friend of Walker, William Wells,
wrote confidently in his book, Walker's Expedition to Nicaragua:
"That the effete and decadent descendants of the early Spanish
colonists and their Indian servants must succumb and give place to
the superior activity and intelligence of the Anglo-Saxon, none who
have lived in Central America or Mexico will dispute. 'Manifest
Destiny' is no longer a myth for paragraphists and enthusiasts; the
tide of American population, stayed on the shores of the Pacific,
seeks new channels; and already the advancing step of the blue-eyed
race is heard among the plains and valleys of Central America.
(illustrations: Instead of this, Nicaragua could have been White,
beautiful, and productive.)
"The power of the press; public opinion; Government vigilance;
absurd bugbears of malaria and deathly miasmas; distance; dangers
and trials; are alike impotent to prevent the southward march of our
people.
"The fiat has gone forth; and as was the case with Florida, Texas,
and California, it is only a question of time. With an enlightened
and courageous policy on the part of the American Government, a
solid front presented against European interference in the affairs
of this continent [a reference specifically to British attempts to
seize and colonize with Blacks a large section of Nicaragua's
Mosquito Coast], and a rigid enforcement of the Monroe Doctrine, we
may look cheerfully and hopefully to the speedy accomplishment of
American rule in Central America."
But what was speedily accomplished instead was the will of Cornelius
Vanderbilt. He bankrolled a five-nation invading force, and set up a
bogus Nicaraguan "government-in-exile" in neighboring Honduras. The
U.S. and British Navies, each acting to protect its government's
separate interests from the threat posed by White rule in Nicaragua,
shut off all of Walker's supplies and sent American recruits back to
the States in chains. Nevertheless, under the personal leadership of
"the gray-eyed man of destiny," the American colonist forces
continued to prevail.
Walker's Waterloo came at the town of Rivas. After months of fierce
fighting against up to 18,000 enemy soldiers, the Tennessean's army
dwindled to under 500 men, many of whom were mercenaries. What was
left of his men and supplies Walker concentrated outside Rivas. One
night, while out reconnoitering, he left his camp under the
supervision of a certain Colonel Schlessinger, a soldier of fortune
whom the men intensely hated. Looking back on the disaster that
followed, William Wells wrote:
"The appointment of Schlessinger to this command was in every way a
most unfortunate one. A Jew, he was of a capricious, violent and
despotic nature.... At a quarter past two o'clock one of the women
who had been captured in the morning complained of being sick,
whereupon the Colonel, in a freak of liberality, let the whole squad
go. But it proved to be a fatal folly, for in less than
three-quarters of an hour a picket-guard ran in crying, 'The
Greasers are coming!'
"This sudden alarm threw the whole camp into confusion, and none
seemed so entirely bewildered and panic-stricken as Schlessinger
himself. His cheeks turned pale, his knees smote together; it seemed
impossible for him to compose himself!" (Walker's Expedition to
Nicaragua, p. 301)
Schlessinger fled. As he ran off into the bush, he shrieked a few
garbled commands which a mercenary Dutch company misinterpreted to
mean, "Follow me!" And follow they did. Walker's force was crippled
by the desertion of its temporary commanding officer and by the loss
of the Dutch contingent, and it suffered heavy casualties in the
ensuing battle.
After the losses at Rivas the war only lasted a few more months.
Schlessinger, at least, was caught and court-martialed for
desertion. But when sentenced to death, he broke his officer's word
of honor and fled Nicaragua. As for Walker's government, it
collapsed and was replaced by Cornelius Vanderbilt's puppet regime.
On May 1st, 1857, William Walker surrendered to Commander Charles
Davis of the American sloop of war St. Mary. He and hundreds of his
men were eventually transported back to the United States. Fearing
for their lives, thousands of White colonists packed up and sailed
back as well.
Back in the United States, Walker immediately raised another force.
Late in 1857 he was on his way back to Nicaragua, but the Buchanan
administration in Washington cut short this second expedition.
Though Walker managed to slip out of New Orleans Harbor, he was
intercepted by a U.S. Navy warship as he was he was landing in
Nicaragua and was returned to the States again.
While he was gathering forces for one last try in Central America,
he wrote a remarkable book (composed, like Caesar's De Bello
Gallico, in the third person) called The War in Nicaragua. Even
Walker's enemies praised its honesty and accuracy.
Walker bided his time until the summer of 1860, when with a force
weak even by his standards he invaded Honduras. Quickly boxed in by
overwhelming native forces, he surrendered to a certain Commander
Salmon of the British Royal Navy. Salmon promised the American safe
conduct home, but then, on the pretext that Walker was a Nicaraguan
citizen, turned him over to agents of Honduras in the pay of the
Nicaraguan government. On September 12th, 1860, at age 36, William
Walker was killed by a mestizo firing squad.
(illustration: The historical marker at Walker's home in Nashville,
Tennessee. Walker, like virtually all other Americans of his day,
was conscious of the natural inequalities which distinguish the
various races of man, and neither he nor his contemporaries in that
era before the advent of the Jewish media masters felt any need to
deny or make excuses for a self-evident White superiority. Unlike
most of the rest, however, Walker felt a responsibility to the
future generations of his race, and he acted accordingly.)
Walker's unmarked grave has long since been lost, but for a time
just after his death there were efforts to bring his body back to
Nashville. The Honduran government resisted, and the efforts came to
nothing. The unmarked grave is, at least, an appropriate symbol of
the death of a forgotten dream.
"Whom the gods love, they make to die young," said Menander. Because
he died in his prime the Tennessean was spared the sight of
Nicaragua reverting to its accustomed squalor, and he was not forced
to watch his White countrymen slaughter each other over "states'
rights" and the status of the Negro in the Civil War.
Walker was a far-seeing warrior and statesmen born out of his time,
a stranger in an era where White racial interests were coming
increasingly under the hammer of capitalistic and commercial forces.
But a future generation will remember William Walker and what he
tried to do. As the Vikings said:
One thing I know
That always lasts:
The fame of dead men's deeds.
(National Vanguard, Issue No. 85, 1982)
transcribed by William Wilson from the book, The Best of Attack and
National Vanguard 1970-1982, edited by Kevin Alfred Strom, ©1984
National Vanguard Books, Box 330, Hillsboro WV 24946 USA.
Notes:
Since this article was written 21 years ago, a marker has been
erected or come to light in Trujillo cemetery in Honduras. An older
photograph of it shows the name 'William' misspelled 'Wuliam,' and a
later one shows that an attempted correction has been made which
fractured the stone, and a plaque added, with another indignity,
this time misspelling his name 'Willian' and indicating that Walker
was "fusilado" -- shot.
Source: William Wilson
--
Kevin Alfred Strom.
News: http://www.nationalvanguard.org/
The Works of R. P. Oliver: http://www.revilo-oliver.com
Personal site: http://www.kevin-strom.com |
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