manifest

destiny’s
inept diplomat
How William Carey Jones
“Lost” Central America

B y L orraine M c C onaghy

B y 1854, the United States’ Pacific coast as we know it

had been secured.
Middle-aged Americans had experienced a dynamic
nation that expanded aggressively in their lifetimes as
the United States purchased the huge Louisiana Territory
in 1803 and moved northward and westward to the
Pacific Northwest. Oregon Territory was organized in
1848, and California was admitted to the union as a
state in 1850; three years later, Washington Territory was
separated from Oregon. Expansion moved southward and
westward through Texas, New Mexico, and California in
the Mexican War.

In the expansion of America’s manifest destiny during the mid-1800s, Nicaragua was an appealing
target with its pathway from ocean to ocean across Central America
 Antebellum western boundaries seemed
fluid to many, and the nation’s destiny
seemed manifest to continue its imperialist
momentum, pursuing an ordained mission.
The U.S. Navy, the Pacific Squadron,
William Walker—the “grey-eyed man
of destiny”—and the exceptionally inept
diplomat William Carey Jones all shared in
that undertaking and its ultimate failure.
The Mexican War had trained a generation
of fighting men to fulfill the American mission
by gaining new territory and subduing its
inhabitants under force of arms. They formed
a pool of recruits for a “filibuster”: a private
military expedition to conquer territory
outside U.S. borders, from Cuba to the
Sandwich Islands.
Manifest destiny’s lush rhetoric was
easily borrowed to clothe such freebooting
expeditions as crusading acts of “regeneration”
to “liberate” former European colonies,
disguising conquest as redemption. Aggressive
expansionists in the Young America wing of
the Democratic Party looked west and south
to a variety of targets, including Nicaragua
and its transit, the pathway from ocean to
ocean across Central America.
The Panama transit is familiar to us today,
but in the 1850s, an alternative route across
Nicaragua was equally appealing. Cornelius
Vanderbilt’s Accessory Transit Company
developed a segmented passage from Greytown
on the Atlantic side to San Juan del Sur on the
Pacific, by steamer and stagecoach.
Opened in 1851, the Nicaragua route
cut 700 miles off the Panama route and was
advertised as cooler and healthier. During
the first years of the Nicaragua transit’s
operation, an average of 2,000 Americans
made the crossing each month, mostly
heading westward to golden California.
According to a contemporary journalist in
Putnam’s Magazine, travelers had “ample time
to admire the splendid country through which
they passed, to look with utter contempt on
the natives, and to speculate on what a country
it would be if it were only under the stars and
stripes.” To expansionist Americans, Nicaraguans
were not fit to look out for themselves. Above
all, they could not manage the transit so vital to
American interests in the west.
“Conquering” Nicaragua
In May 1855, William Walker sailed from
San Francisco to Realejo, Nicaragua,
leading 60 filibuster soldiers. Invited by
the representative of a Nicaraguan political
faction, he soon became the “general” of an
army of more than 2,000 fighters in a private
war to conquer Nicaragua.
Under the Neutrality Law, U.S. citizens
were forbidden to mount such private military
expeditions. However, Walker’s successful
invasion initially had national support from
Americans in and out of government.
President Franklin Pierce formally recognized
the Walker administration as Nicaragua’s

Top left: The navigable San Juan River was a vital 120-mile link in the
Nicaragua route between New York and California in the 1850s.
Bottom left: Walker’s troops rest after the successful battle to take
Granada. Bottom right: Gen. William Walker landing troops at Fort
Castillo, Nicaragua.

32 Prologue
legitimate government. Many expansionists
saw the filibuster as the first step to “pave the way
for large scale American settlement and eventual
annexation of these areas to the United States.”
The United States Democratic Review pointed
out that “every sensible man . . . has expressed
a strong desire for the Americanization of
Central America [and its] possession . . . is no
less desirable than was the acquisition of Texas
or Kansas, or even of California.”
For a time, William Walker was celebrated
as Young America’s national agent of
manifest destiny, a pioneer on the “Isthmian
and Caribbean frontier.”
Following an election of dubious legality,
Walker became president of Nicaragua
and authorized a “crash program” of
Americanization. He confidently revoked
the vital transit charter and awarded it to
Vanderbilt’s rivals to cement a new alliance
with them.
And Walker’s message of recruitment
called to a generation of Young Americans
eager to wrap their personal ambition in the
flag, to be both successful and heroic, to be
both an opportunist and a knight.
Stateside newspapers breathlessly reported
Walker’s successes, his lavish entertainments,
his “groaning” table and “elegant” ladies. One
observer noted that the streets of Granada
were soon “thronging with the representatives
of ‘Young America’,” hoping for a crusade,
good pay, and a 250-acre rancho.
William Walker, the “grey-eyed man of destiny,” was
celebrated as Young America’s national agent of
manifest destiny.
Manifest Destiny’s Inept Diplomat
Then, in September 1856, William Walker
reinstituted slavery in Nicaragua, a strategic
bid to tap the resources of the American
South to filibuster the Pacific West. Writing
in his 1860 autobiography, Walker recalled
the proclamation of the slavery decree as
“calculated to bind the Southern States to
Nicaragua, as if she were one of themselves.”
Walker claimed that his goal had always
been to provide slavery with a refuge—a
tropical empire “beyond the limits of the
Union”—and that Nicaragua was just the
beginning. DeBow’s Review praised the
“glorious acquisition” of Nicaragua as “a
new State to be added to the South, in or
out of the Union” which Walker had taken
“possession of in the name of the white race.”
But the filibuster soon faced a series of
disastrous setbacks.
A Hasty Exit
By January 1857, Walker’s romp was over.
British warships blockaded the Atlantic side
to prevent supplies and reinforcements from
reaching Walker. Supported by a vengeful
Vanderbilt, Costa Rican Gen. Joaquin Mora
rallied troops from Costa Rica, Honduras,
El Salvador, and Guatemala into an allied
army, determined to drive out the invaders.
Ridden with desertion, illness, hunger, and
fatigue, Walker’s army was “driven back step
by step into a corner,” according to the New
York Times, and U.S. representatives prepared
to negotiate a settlement, rescue American
citizens among the filibusters, and reopen the
Nicaragua transit, held by the Costa Rican
alliance, initiatives that involved the U.S. Navy.
Pacific Squadron Commodore William
Mervine ordered Commander Charles Henry
Davis to sail the sloop-of-war St. Mary’s north
to meet with senior officers of the Walker
camp and the Costa Rican high command.
Davis found that he was uniquely placed to
negotiate a ceasefire and Walker’s surrender.
The Navy commander and the filibuster
general signed an agreement in which
Walker surrendered to the U.S. Navy rather
than to the Costa Rican alliance.
William Walker was sworn in as president of
Nicaragua at the Church of our Lady of Mercy in
Granada.
Walker and his senior staff sailed to
Panama on board the St. Mary’s on May 2,
1857, then headed across the isthmus and
on to New Orleans, where he was met with
“almost frantic enthusiasm.” He went to
work planning the second filibuster.
Meanwhile, on June 5, 1857, Commodore
Mervine directed Commander Henry
Knox Thatcher to prepare the sloop-of-war
Decatur to receive U.S. State Department
“special agent” William Carey Jones.
Secretary of State Lewis Cass had delegated
Jones to “negotiat[e] between the hostile parties
[in Nicaragua], and assist to end the contest.”
Jones agreed to this difficult and dangerous
assignment, expecting to “enter the camps . .
. of belligerent forces” and to carry “weapons
of defense.” At $8 a day plus expenses, Jones
was to “visit the states of Central America for
the purpose of observing and reporting upon
the condition of affairs in that quarter, and
of preventing, as far as possible, the recent
occurrences there from affecting injuriously
the interests of this country.” At the time Jones
received these orders from Cass, Walker had
not yet surrendered.
Enter Mr. Jones
William Carey Jones was an attorney in his
mid-40s, the son-in-law of Missouri Senator
Thomas Hart Benton and the brother-in-law
of California settler and politician John C.
Frémont. Marrying Benton’s daughter Eliza,
Jones smoothly entered the world of political
patronage, and his appointment depended on
Prologue 33

An American hotel was used as way station at the halfway point of the Nicaragua transit road between Lake
Nicaragua and San Juan del Sur.
the support of President James Buchanan and
the consent of Secretary of State Cass.
Though fluent in Spanish, Jones was
an unlikely diplomat to send to Central
America. In May 1856, a number of
stateside newspapers published his open
letter calling attention to the plight of
“our brave countrymen in Nicaragua” who
must be protected “to the extent of war if
necessary.” Walker had broken no laws,
argued Jones, and had instead shown a
“pacific, statesmanlike and commendable
character” in the betterment of Nicaragua.
In fact, Jones continued, that country had
not in 20 years been “so quiet, order so well
maintained, the laws so well administered,
property so secure and business so safely
conducted.”
Jones argued that Costa Rica had invaded
Nicaragua to attack American citizens and,
in doing so, had in effect declared war against
the United States. In conclusion, Jones
identified himself and Walker as Western
men: he deplored the disregard that the
federal government showed for the interests
of “us settlers on the Pacific,” and called for
war with Costa Rica to protect the filibuster
“settlers” on the Nicaraguan frontier.
34 Prologue
The belligerent diplomat boarded the mail
steamer at New York on May 20, 1857, sailed
to Panama, and crossed the isthmus by train.
Writing to Jones prior to Walker’s surrender,
Secretary of State Cass worried, “Much
must be left to your discretion, because it is
impossible to foresee what precise condition
of affairs may exist” in Nicaragua.
The latest available intelligence indicated to
Cass that many American citizens were stranded
in Central America “who ha[d] participated in
its local controversies and [were] left by the
reverses of war without the means of returning
home.” Cass directed Jones to obtain the release
of “Walker and his friends” if they had been
captured, and to get them to a port, to then be
taken home on a Navy ship.
But Cass carefully instructed Jones that
the evacuation of Walker and his men—
so easily perceived as a rescue—was a
compassionate act in no way intended
to “express an opinion concerning the
Nicaraguan controversy.” Indeed, the official
position of the State Department was that
Walker and his army were in Nicaragua at
the “invitation of one of the native parties.”
Jones was to reassure the Central
Americans he encountered that the United
States had no designs to colonize, annex, or
occupy Nicaragua but instead hoped to help
that republic maintain its independence.
In fact, Cass continued, the alliance was a
cynical Costa Rican scheme to seize the
Nicaragua transit—the great prize—and
argued that the transit must “be reopened
for the travel of the world.”
Finally, Cass ordered Jones to travel as
a private citizen, reasoning that he would
have access to information that would be
unavailable to a “public functionary,” and
provided a special passport:
To all to whom these presents shall
come, Greeting.
Know ye that the bearer hereof,
William Carey Jones, a distinguished
citizen of the United States, is proceeding
to Central America as a Special Agent of
this government.
These are therefore to request all
whom it may concern to permit him
and his suite to pass freely without let or
molestation, and to extend to him such
friendly aid and protection as would in
like cases be extended to similar officers of
foreign governments in this country. . . .
Aboard the Decatur
By the time Jones reached Panama, the war
was over, and he decided to start his mission
in San José, the capital of Costa Rica, master
of the transit. Jones wrote to Cass that he
was confident he would there encounter
“the leading minds of all Central America,”
many of them eager for the region’s
Americanization. Jones also requested that
“any private hostile expeditions” be delayed
until he had gained a foothold in Costa
Rica. His clear implication is that Cass was
aware of pending filibuster ventures and able
to advance or hinder them at will.
As for Jones himself, the envoy reiterated
his sympathy with the filibuster mission of
“General Walker and his brave command,”
as he termed them. Jones got off on the
wrong foot at the very start, encouraging “a
Winter 2010

thousand and one rumors to circulate” about
his mission by brushing off every inquiry
with the facetious claim that he had been
sent to investigate the headwaters of the
Amur River, located in Manchuria. Jones
thrived on theatrical secrecy, on the role of
the “mysterious stranger,” as he came to be
called derisively.
On June 3, 1857, Jones and his baggage
were loaded on board the Decatur. He then
wrote directly to President Buchanan, urging
his patron to take “no important step” with
regard to Central America without receiving
“a statement” from Jones. On June 5,
awaiting “the first favorable wind, for the
Decatur to sail,” Jones reiterated the need for
swift communication.
Manifest Destiny’s Inept Diplomat
The private mail company steamers made
monthly circuits of the Central American
ports on the Pacific, but Jones considered
that frequency by no means adequate. He
called—unsuccessfully—for a steam warship
to be placed at his disposal.
On June 9, the Decatur finally put to sea,
beating north against contrary winds and
through extended calms. Nearly three weeks
later, the ship anchored in the protected
harbor of Punta Arenas, Costa Rica’s
principal seaport.
A party—including Commander Thatcher
and Jones—left the Decatur to travel
inland to San José. They rode the mule-
drawn railway to its terminus, paused for
lunch, and then mounted mules. The next
The Decatur’s assistant surgeon, John Y. Taylor,
sketched the ship during its cruises. In one (top
left), he fancifully gave the main ground to a flying
fish. In two others, he recorded the Decatur in foul
weather: beating against contrary wind in the Straits
of Magellan, heading for the Pacific (top right), and
in a fierce storm off Patagonia’s Cape Fairweather
(bottom).
morning, they climbed uphill—“up, up and
up,” as Thatcher remembered. A heavy rain
began “as usual” in the mid-afternoon, and
they ended their second day of travel at a
“rancho” eating beefsteak and “tortillos”
for dinner. Then “some of the company,”
including Jones, fell sick and were left
behind.
After visiting San José, Commander
Thatcher returned to the Decatur to await
Jones’s return. There, he received a note from
a former military surgeon in Walker’s army,
describing a large group of “wretched and
helpless” filibuster survivors who were on
shore in desperate condition. The surgeon
begged Thatcher to find a way to send them
to the United States.
“A speedy removal to a more bracing
climate,” his note continued, “together with
the comforts of home and friends can save
the lives of a large portion of them.” Thatcher
visited the filibusters on shore and wrote to
Pacific Squadron Commodore Mervine that
“more complete destitution and misery, I
have never witnessed or conceived.”
Thatcher had brought Jones to Punta
Arenas, and the diplomat was believed to
Prologue 35
be gainfully occupied at San José. Then
Thatcher had been ordered to “render
assistance to American citizens who have been
connected with the expedition under General
Walker in Nicaragua”—they were to be
rescued and brought to Panama. Over the next
10 days, the Decatur was prepared to house
the invalids, and on July 27, 25 filibuster
soldiers were brought on board. Fourteen
of them suffered from disabling wounds, at
least one was an amputee, three had severely
infected bullet wounds, and four suffered from
dysentery. Some had walked barefoot from
Rivas to Punta Arenas, and their feet were
lacerated and infected. Many were syphilitic
and all had malaria—they were “emaciated,
bloodless and spiritless,” according to Decatur
Surgeon Levi Cooper Lane.
As the Decatur sailed south to Panama,
the warship’s surgeons were overwhelmed
by caring for these invalids, and “this small
vessel” was overcrowded with sick men
whose “groans and cries” could be heard
throughout the ship and whose wounds
created “offensive stenches on board . . .
extremely . . . prejudicial to the health of
the crew.” When Thatcher anchored off
Panama, the Decatur had become a hospital
ship.
healthy, and they continued to gamble on
the main chance in Central America.
Jones encountered one of them—Tom
Edwards, a veteran of Walker’s army and
a likable western rogue. Charmed by the
filibuster’s stories, Jones chose Edwards as
a traveling companion from Punta Arenas
to San José, and then as a roommate in the
city. There, Jones claimed that Edwards
had stolen $700 and many valuables.
Certainly, Edwards had easy access to Cass’s
instructions in Jones’s trunk because he was
soon “blabbing them all over the country.”
But in fact, long before his arrival in
the city, San José newspapers had already
published the news that “an agent of the
government of the United States” was on his
way. It had taken the Decatur three weeks
to sail from Panama to Punta Arenas; the
mail steamer left Panama 12 days after the
Decatur sailed and arrived seven days before
the sloop-of-war. Under the circumstances,
Jones complained to Cass that it was
impossible to “hold here the character of a
simple traveler.” He decided to visit Costa
Rican President Juan Rafael Mora and
candidly explain his mission, initiating
discussion of the Nicaragua transit.
Mora declined to meet with Jones for
nearly two weeks, offering various excuses
that irritated the touchy diplomat. When
Mora finally received Jones, the New York
Times correspondent in San José reported
that Jones rudely thrust a summary of U.S.
objectives into Mora’s hands at the beginning
of their meeting.
Jones then instructed Mora to only read
the paragraph that referred to Costa Rica,
pointing to it on the page. But “[t]he
President replied that if he read any, he must
read the whole” because both he and Jones
were concerned with all five states of Central
America. Jones then impatiently “snatched
the paper, telling President Mora that he
should read nothing.”
But Jones reported to Cass that he was
“received with apparent warmth” in a
pleasant but inconclusive meeting, of “a most
friendly character.” The discrepancy between
the public newspaper account and private
diplomatic report could not be greater. Cass
must have been concerned by Jones’s lack of

Off to Costa Rica

The secretary of the Navy and the U.S.
State Department had ordered the Pacific
Squadron to help these American citizens,
but no one had realized how many invalid
filibusters there were and how weak and ill
they had become.
Commodore Mervine booked rail
passage across the Panama isthmus for
those filibusters fit to travel. On the
Atlantic side, they were shared out among
Navy warships and transported to New
York. When the filibusters arrived, the
newspapers published shocking tales of
their condition. It was hard to believe that
men even more debilitated stayed behind
in Central America, too sick to travel. But
a few of Walker’s opportunists remained An officer inspects a squad of filibuster soldiers at Virgin Bay in Nicaragua.

36 Prologue Winter 2010

self-discipline and tact, by his dishonesty, and
by his highly public misadventures.
Established in a San José hotel, Jones hired
as cook a man he described as a “destitute
fellow countryman who had been the
baker” for Walker’s army. Then Jones struck
up an acquaintance with another former
filibuster, a naturalized German American
citizen named Stroebel, who had been one
of Walker’s topographical engineers. Jones
hired the engineer to make some sketches to
accompany his reports to Cass.
On August 18, 1857, while Stroebel sat
in San José’s central plaza, sketching “the
Cathedral and the mountains,” he was
arrested and charged with “speaking in
favor of William Walker, late president of
Nicaragua, and against the government of
Costa Rica, and of having been an officer
in the army of General Walker.” Jones
filed a protest, claiming that Stroebel was
a member of his diplomatic “suite” and
should be released at once. Mora was said
to be unable to read the note, written in
English, because there was no translator
present. Jones rewrote the note in Spanish,
and the president was said to be unable to
read it because he was sick in bed.
Snubbed, Jones seethed in the lobby of
the residence and eventually returned to
his hotel to fire off a volley of irate notes
to Costa Rican officials. The secretary of
foreign relations responded by disparaging
his credential as “a simple passport” which
Jones was improperly trying to use to free
Stroebel. Jones replied with 13 pages of long-
winded indignation to which the secretary
returned a curt note, affecting surprise that
Jones seemed to expect “attentions and
immunity” that his passport did not merit.
Jones found the secretary’s tone so insulting
that he wrote to Cass he could hardly bear
to translate it.
According to the New York Times
correspondent, Stroebel was an “insufferable”
character who “used to get intoxicated, and
go reeling and swaggering through the
streets of San José . . . proclaiming his earnest
Manifest Destiny’s Inept Diplomat
Secretary of State Lewis Cass warned Jones that
“Much must be left to your discretion, because it
is impossible to foresee what precise condition of
affairs may exist” in Nicaragua.
desire that Walker might return, take the
country, confiscate the property, and chop
its inhabitants into inch pieces.” Stroebel
had been legitimately arrested for disturbing
the peace, the reporter continued, and Jones
was incompetent, tactless, and ignorant of
the language and customs of Costa Rica.
Certainly Jones was indiscreet to hire these
former filibusters, banished by decree August
9, 1857, in reaction to repeated rumors of a
filibuster landing. After his “bust-up” with
President Mora and the Stroebel affair,
Jones stormed out of San José, “in high
dudgeon.” Far from securing an agreement
with the Costa Rican government to reopen
the Nicaraguan transit, Jones had become
persona non grata.
Seeking More Power
At the coast, Jones found that the Decatur
had sailed for Panama with the filibuster
invalids. In Punta Arenas, he encountered as
many as 40 more survivors of Walker’s army.
Everywhere one turned in Central America,
there seemed to be more ragged, starving,
feverish scarecrows.
The survivors were, Jones wrote, “sick,
many; wounded, some; nearly naked,
without shelter day or night. They wound
the sight wherever one turned in Punta
Arenas. They are . . . without any possible
means of getting away [and] they are mostly
Americans by birth.” Two dozen Americans
passed a petition to Jones for President
Buchanan, begging to go home, that they
were “in the most unhappy condition that
men could be placed upon the earth.”
Petitioned by these wretched American
filibusters and stinging with his San José
rebuke, Jones made formal application
to the State Department to be appointed
minister to Nicaragua or Costa Rica, with
“powers of commissioner” to the other
Central American states. One month later,
Jones directed the same request to President
Buchanan. There appears to have been no
response. Instead, Cass instructed the special
agent to take a firm stand against Costa
Rica’s apparent “war of conquest” because
the United States would not tolerate the
Nicaragua transit’s continued closure.
Cass was worried that Costa Rica would
repudiate the “transit grants” made to
American investors and urged Jones to
remind the Costa Ricans that their president
had declared, “Ours is not a fight for a piece
of land, not to secure ephemeral powers, not
to achieve wretched conquest” but rather to
drive out “the freebooters now attempting
to usurp the territory, and the independence
and liberties” of Nicaragua. That goal had
been accomplished, Cass wrote, and it was
time for Costa Rica to withdraw.
In the fall, Jones traveled north to
Nicaragua on the mail steamer. Tomas
Martinez and Maxime Jerez had just been
elected co-presidents of Nicaragua, but the
transit remained closed by the Costa Rican
army to prevent access by the “highway of
filibusterism.”
Jones wrote to Cass that he’d urged
President Martinez to trust American
Prologue 37
assurances to prevent any filibuster and
that he was met with ridicule and “disbelief
in the good faith of the United States.”
Rumored sightings of William Walker or his
senior officers were almost daily occurrences
on both coasts.
Walker toured the American South to the
strains of “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” speaking
to enormous crowds to raise recruits
and money for his second expedition
to Nicaragua. He claimed that he had
been forced from Nicaragua by Northern
abolitionists because of his reinstatement of
slavery.
Walker’s “sub secretary of state” wrote
to a Kentucky sympathizer, encouraging
“gentlemen from southern states . . . to
emigrate to this country [Nicaragua] with
their slaves.” The New Orleans Delta reassured
slaveowners that they could soon safely head
for Nicaragua “to cultivate sugar, coffee, rice,
indigo or chocolate plantations.” All that
remained to be done, the Delta concluded,
was to regain Nicaragua and then restore
the African slave trade to the Atlantic coast.
American slaveholders fervently embraced
Walker’s second filibuster, eager to build a
Central American refuge.
Return to Nicaragua
The steamer Fashion left New Orleans
on November 14, 1857, with nearly 300
filibuster recruits. Once a beachhead was
established, “many thousands of young
To learn more about
• How the border between the
United States and Mexico was
established, and re-established,
go to www.archives.gov/publications/
prologue and click on “Previous Issues,” then
Summer 2005.
• African Americans and the building of the
Panama Canal, go to www.archives.gov-/
publications/prologue, click on “Previous
Issues,” then Summer 1997.
• Finding ancestors in the Panama Canal Zone, go
to www.archives.gov/publications/prologue, then
click on “Previous Issues,” then Fall 2007.
38 Prologue
southerners” planned to follow Walker to
Nicaragua. The steamer ran down the coast
past Greytown to disembark a company
to advance overland, and the Fashion itself
headed into Greytown harbor. Two hundred
filibusters hastily made camp on Nicaraguan
soil, landing unmolested right under the
nose of U.S. Navy Commander Frederick
Chatard in the Saratoga.
However, Home Squadron Commodore
Hiram Paulding turned the Wabash
broadside against the encampment and
ordered 300 marines and sailors rowed
to shore to arrest Walker and his men.
Outflanked and outgunned, the filibuster
army surrendered, and so ended Walker’s
second filibuster.
Central Americans were relieved that
Paulding had intercepted the invaders but
irate that he had landed an armed force on
the Greytown beach to do so. In fact, they
were indignant that the filibuster had taken
place at all. If the U.S. government sincerely
wished to put an end to these illegal
expeditions, surely it would be prudent to
arrest, try, and imprison their mastermind.
For his part, Walker styled himself
as an outraged citizen of Nicaragua, “as
legitimately President of Nicaragua as
Buchanan of the United States.” President
Buchanan sent a message to Congress that
condemned filibustering but also charged
Paulding with a grave error in landing
armed sailors and marines on Nicaraguan
soil to arrest Walker. Cass reportedly told the
filibuster in a face-to-face meeting that he
disavowed Commodore Paulding’s actions
as “illegal, inexcusable and unauthorized,”
and Walker was said to have gone “on his
way rejoicing,” as the Independent put it.
The second filibuster generated
considerable controversy concerning the
Navy’s response, and public opinion about
Chatard and Paulding’s actions and inactions
divided largely along sectional lines. In
its ambiguous response to Walker, U.S.
leadership expressed the nation’s growing
inability to pursue a foreign policy in
Central America that was free from sectional
influence. A western crusade of manifest
destiny had become a Southern crusade for
slavery. As historian David Potter remarked,
by late 1857, American nationalists were
no longer expansionists, and expansionists
were no longer nationalists. In Central
America, U.S. representatives followed their
convictions while pursuing their duty.
The second filibuster posed a further
challenge to Jones’s diplomacy. Nicaraguan
President Martinez and Jones were in
conference when the urgent message arrived
reporting Walker’s landing in the Fashion
and Paulding’s capture of the filibuster.
The Nicaraguan president questioned
Jones “pretty closely” as to whether Paulding
had really “captured” Walker’s force and why
the U.S. government believed it had the
“right” to seize prisoners on the shores of a
foreign state. Annoyed, Jones retorted that
if President Martinez wished to appeal the
filibuster arrests, doubtless the U.S. Navy
could return the prisoners to the “place from
which they had been taken,” armed and
ready to go, and that he would be happy to
be Martinez’ messenger in the matter.
Jones’s thinly disguised advocacy for either
Walker’s filibuster or American annexation
of Nicaragua alienated the presidents of both
Costa Rica and Nicaragua; the New York
Times reported that Jones had “succeeded
in getting upon nearly as bad terms with
President Martinez as he did with Mora in
Costa Rica.”
Jones had reached the end of his rope by
January 1858. “First,” the New York Herald
commented derisively, “he lost his baggage,
now it seems he has lost himself.” He had
suffered constant mishaps: it had become
public knowledge that the ingratiating thief
Tom Edwards had bestowed Jones’s stolen
wedding ring on a prospective bride at San
Juan del Sur.
Jones had been embarrassed by the
Decatur’s painfully slow progress up the
coast; his cover was blown, he was robbed,
he “quarreled with everybody,” his travel
Winter 2010
San José, the capital of Costa Rica, was a modern thriving city when Decatur captain Henry Knox Thatcher and agent William Carey Jones visited in the summer of 1857.
plans were frustrated by “sinister controlling
influences,” and he was insulted, almost
mocked. He was deeply offended by
theatrical displays of insolence, he couldn’t
keep his temper, and he drank far too much.
He was convinced that his correspondence
was being opened and read. He was irritated
with Cass and with his assignment: he
complained that he had “all the duties and
more than the responsibilities of a diplomatic
minister, without his power, privileges
or position.” His bids to be appointed
ambassador had met with stony silence;
there was no Navy warship to support him.
And he thought it was high time that Costa
Manifest Destiny’s Inept Diplomat
Rica and Nicaragua were punished for their
“outrages on our citizens.”
Absorbing the Failures
The most foolish element of Jones’s bumbling
diplomacy was his continued relationship
with filibuster veterans.
On the heels of taking up with Edwards
and hiring two former filibusters in San
José, Jones hired a third in Nicaragua—a
Mr. Fields—to serve as his private secretary,
“who told me very frankly that he had been
in the army of Walker . . . the fact of [which]
was not a crime and to have continued until
the capitulation rather a virtue.” President
Martinez remarked that he suspected Fields
would join any future filibuster, and perhaps
Jones agreed.
In one of his final reports to Cass, Jones
suggested that 500 armed men could easily
seize the Nicaragua transit, if the force could
“escape the vigilance of the authorities
of the United States.” If, as Jones was
convinced, his mail was being intercepted,
this inflammatory suggestion was de-
liberately written to be read by Martinez,
Mora, and their staffs. Jones had abandoned
his mission.
Meanwhile, in the states, Walker was
raising just such a force, as he organized
Prologue 39
the third filibuster and worked on the
manuscript of The War in Nicaragua. He had
been driven against his will from Nicaragua,
Walker wrote, and was compelled to return
by “honor and duty.” Framing the filibuster
as a noble quest on the South’s behalf, Walker
paid tribute to the martyrs who left their
homes “in defense of slavery [and] yielded
up their lives for the interests of the South.”
As Walker raised money and recruits,
Southern newspapers trumpeted “We are
Walker, Nicaragua, Pro-Slavery Men” above
the fold, and Southerners continued to
“regard General Walker as the great agent
for the Americanization of that region and
the reinstitution of slavery.”
As Southern fire-eaters embraced
Walker’s obsession, resistance to anticipated
filibusters and resentment of seeming federal
complicity solidified pan–Central American
nationalism. Jones did nothing to calm local
fear and anger. According to the New York
Herald, Jones loudly remarked while drunk
in the Rivas public square that he was all for
American interference in Central America,
that he advocated “no milk and honey
policy,” and if Walker’s filibusters couldn’t
hold Nicaragua, he would see to it that
“Uncle Jonathan” did.
“Damn all diplomatic missions!,” Jones
was reported to have continued, “Nicaragua
forever! Boys, let’s have a drink!” Jones was
publicly ridiculed in the Times and Herald
columns, satirized as “Mr. Buchanan’s
secret agent,” thin-skinned, arrogant, and
quarrelsome, a tragicomic ambassador of
manifest destiny.
William Walker’s easy and amiable
relationship with the President and the
secretary of state, the apparent support of
some U.S. Navy officers (though not all),
and the belligerent diplomacy of Jones
crippled American interests in Nicaragua.
Horace Greeley editorialized that the
government had alienated Central Americans
by its “open sympathy with and aid to
William Walker’s butcheries in Nicaragua,”
and Decatur Surgeon Levi Cooper Lane—
40 Prologue
who was there in person—maintained
that Walker’s “freebooting expedition . . .
had the sanction of President Buchanan’s
administration, and the aid of the Navy, as
far as it was possible to go without arousing
international suspicions.”
While U.S. policy condemned the
filibuster’s “illegal expeditions,” U.S.
practice furthered his successes and
softened his defeats. Presidents Martinez
and Mora jointly signed a May 1, 1858,
proclamation, condemning all the “official
agents of the United States at Nicaragua
[to date]” as “accomplices and auxiliaries
of the invaders . . . openly menac[ing]
Central America with inevitable annexation,”
Note on Sources
The principal primary sources for the Decatur’s
antebellum Pacific Squadron cruise are found in the
Old Navy and U.S. State Department records in the
National Archives in Washington, D.C., and in College
Park, Maryland. This material includes a wealth of
bureaucratic paperwork: logbooks, medical logs, and
records of courts-martial that document daily naval
life, as well as correspondence among the secretary of
the Navy, squadron commodores, and numerous sea
officers and site commandants, and among Secretary of
State Lewis Cass, Special Agent William Carey Jones,
and other U.S. ministers and consuls. I am deeply
indebted to the kind and competent help of archivists
in Washington and in College Park as well as at the
National Archives in Seattle.
Additionally, this article involves contemporary
perspectives and convictions drawn from newspapers,
including the New York Times and the New York
Herald, and periodicals, including The United States
Democratic Review and DeBow’s Review, and E. G.
Squier’s prolific booster literature on opportunities of
the Central American antebellum frontier. William
Walker’s The War in Nicaragua is a fascinating—and
carefully stage-managed—revelation of what Richard
Slotkin, in The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the
Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890
(1985), called the filibuster’s effort to “recapture
his own myth, to vindicate his own heroism.” The
best way to learn about life on merchant ships and
warships under sail is in the words of sailors: Richard
Henry Dana, Two Years Before the Mast; Herman
Melville, White-Jacket or, The World in a Man-of-
War; and Alfred Thayer Mahan, From Sail to Steam:
Recollections of Naval Life.
clearly referring to William Carey Jones. In
1858, the Nicaragua transit—the filibuster
highway and the great isthmian strategic
link—remained closed. P
© 2010 by Lorraine McConaghy
Author
Lorraine McConaghy is public
historian at Seattle’s Museum of
History & Industry. This article
is drawn from her book Warship
Under Sail: USS Decatur in the
Pacific West (University of Washington Press, 2009),
and the reader will find there an interpretive history
of the sloop-of-war’s commission in the Pacific
Squadron, 1854–1859, including maps, endnotes,
and bibliography.
Scholarship on the old Navy, Pacific West
imperialism, and the filibusters themselves is
extensive—here are a few starting points. For the
political landscape of radical expansionists, see
Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the
Transformation of the Democratic Party (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007). For antebellum
imperialism, readers should begin with Norman A.
Graebner, Empire on the Pacific: A Study in American
Continental Expansion (New York: Ronald Press
Co., 1955) and Arrell Morgan Gibson, Yankees in
Paradise: The Pacific Basin Frontier (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1993); also see
Matt K. Matsuda, “The Pacific,” American Historical
Review 111 (2006): 758–780. For the classic study
of antebellum America, see David M. Potter, The
Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York: Harper &
Row, 1976). For the old Navy and the antebellum
Pacific Squadron, readers will enjoy Robert E.
Johnson, Thence Round Cape Horn (Annapolis,
MD: United States Naval Institute, 1963); Harold
D. Langley, Social Reform in the United States Navy,
1798–1862 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1967); and John H. Schroeder, Shaping a Maritime
Empire: The Commercial and Diplomatic Role of
the American Navy, 1829–1861 (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1985). For the filibusters and the
men to whom they appealed, readers will find helpful
and appealing Robert E. May, Manifest Destiny’s
Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2002) and Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood
and the Antebellum American Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Winter 2010