A hell of a storm, p.16
A Hell of a Storm, page 16
Resistance to the rising Yankee wave began to build early in northwestern Missouri. Over the previous few years, a restless, speculative economy cropped up, accustomed to outfitting men and women passing through to still farther frontiers. Oregon pioneers and California gold rushers had recently transited, dropping dollars on their way, while suppliers of army troops and Indian traders serviced a more stationary exchange. Some border Missourians, even before Douglas introduced his organic act to Congress, had come to Kansas, eager to assert claims on these new lands.
Anxiously assailing the Emigrant Aid Company settlers as abolitionists, concerned Missourians quickly organized to contest this alleged threat. In early June assemblies in Westport and Independence variously called for the creation of vigilante committees “for mutual protection,” promised to bring slaves into Kansas, and pledged to “meet and repel the… fanaticism which threatens to break up our border.”19 On the eleventh of that month a colleague of Missouri’s senior senator, David Atchison, received a letter from an associate warning that something akin to the apocalypse now imperiled Kansas:
From certain indications in the North and East, it would seem we are threatened with trouble in this Territory and on the frontier… by a curse equally at least, in its pestiferous character, the plagues of Egypt, in being made the unwilling receptacle of the filth, scum and offscourings of the East… to pollute our fair land, to dictate to us a government, to preach Abolitionism and dig underground Rail Roads.20
One could fairly see war clouds forming on the flat horizon.
The Missourians assumed neighboring Kansas to be rightfully theirs and looked upon the tent-pitching Yankees as interlopers coming to practice politics rather than farm. Atchison, in a fight to maintain his Senate seat, toured the western border, making provocative speeches designed to focus the fears of his constituents. On September 21, he took the steamer New Lucy from Weston and cruised eighteen miles up the Missouri River to the new community of Atchison, Kansas, named obviously in his honor. There he gave a blistering address openly calling for violence against abolitionists, perhaps remembering his role as a state militia commander when Missouri’s Mormon War (1838) resulted in nearly two dozen deaths and the Latter-day Saints’ withdrawal east to Illinois. Though sympathetic to the Mormons’ right to settle, representing Joseph Smith in land disputes with non-Mormons in Missouri, he eventually backed the military solution that led to their flight.21 Might the Yankees now be warned off as well?
In this stylized image of the sections, northern “Liberty, the Fair Maid of Kansas” is at the mercy of heavily armed southern “Border Ruffians,” one of whom, a bearded Stephen Douglas who is holding up a fresh scalp, shouts “Victory! Victory! WE WILL SUBDUE THEM YET!”
A sizeable crowd greeted Atchison in Atchison. After feasting on a 50¢ a head picnic lunch of bacon and bread, the senator jumped on a wagon and made the day’s main address. In a dispatch sent later that week to Jefferson Davis, he offered his impressions of what transpired: “I… advised in a public speech the squatters in Kansas and the people of Missouri, to give a horse theif, robber, or homicide a fair trial, but to hang a Negro theif [those aiding escaped slaves] or Abolitionist, without Judge or Jury.” This call reflected a broader urgency among many Missourians to turn away the northern “horde.” Numerous local politicians and publishers encouraged this on-edge attitude throughout the second half of 1854 as the Yankees trickled in. “We have no sympathy for Abolitionism,” one Kickapoo Kansas Pioneer editorial expressed a commonly held dissent. “Their hearts are as black as the darkest deeds of hell. Away with them; send them back where they belong.”22
Atchison’s fiery rhetoric aligned with the organization that autumn of several secret associations in the border region. These paramilitary bodies—known variously as “Sons of the South,” “Social Bands,” and “Friendly Societies”—aimed to protect proslavery settlers and intimidate northerners. They enjoyed a pool of important and well-placed support in Washington. As the Kansas situation unfolded, President Pierce publicly criticized the “inflammatory agitation” of the antislavery settlers and thus more generally condemned the free-soil movement from which it came. Assorted newspapers and congressmen—not all southern—openly denounced Thayer’s enterprise. Stephen Douglas, for one, complained of his pet popular sovereignty “being struck down by unholy combinations in New England,” while border state senator J. A. Bayard of Delaware insisted, “Whatever evil, or loss, or suffering or injury may result to Kansas, or to the United States at large, is attributable, as a primary cause to the Emigrant Aid Society of Massachusetts.”23
On the other side of the Kansas divide, Thayer could count several important congressmen in his corner. Among them, Charles Sumner attacked the secret southern societies stirring up unrest along the western border—these groups were peopled by mere “hirelings,” he supposed in a prickly Senate address, “picked from the drunken spew and vomit of an uneasy civilization.” He had little better to say of Douglas, describing his Illinois colleague in private correspondence as “a brutal vulgar man without delicacy or scholarship [who] looks as if he needed clean linen and should be put under a shower bath.”24
Though defended by Sumner and other well-placed Yankees, Thayer ran afoul of slavery’s more radical critics, who accused him of pursuing the Emigrant Aid “scheme” merely to make money. Oliver Johnson, an aide to William Lloyd Garrison, complained that the EAC’s “flavor of craftiness… repelled the Abolitionists” by “flatter[ing] its patrons with hopes of great pecuniary profits.” Nearly a year after Thayer sent his first company to Kansas, The Liberator grumbled: “Hardly an abolitionist can be found among all who have emigrated to that country.” Certainly, the demands of those advocating immediate emancipation grated on the ears of the more conservative Cotton Whigs, some of whom, as noted, supported Thayer’s enterprise but wished to remain on good terms with their southern suppliers. Thayer himself called the abolitionists “fanatics” who “could see but one sin in all the world.”25 Invariably, all sides—Thayer’s, the Garrisonians, and the Missourians—created vivid, dangerous caricatures of their ignoble adversaries.
In 1854 the Emigrant Aid Company sent a half-dozen modest-sized settler groups to Kansas. Into the following year, and despite Thayer’s extravagant plans, it had managed to transport only 1,240 people. And yet the first territorial census in 1855 disclosed a population of 8,500, the bulk of whom, upward of 75 percent, came from Missouri and the Ohio Valley, about 240 of whom were enslaved men and women. The 1860 census revealed that only 4 percent of colonizers came from New England. “We are too far off,” Lawrence wrote to Charles Robinson, when this trend became apparent, “we can pay some money and we can hurrah; but we cannot send you men…. The Western States will furnish them, if you have them at all.” In November 1855 a Boston Advertiser editorial reported upon the rather large discrepancy between the public’s fanciful notion of a northeastern invasion of the plains and reality. The “very general impression that New England has been drained of a considerable number of her people to settle in Kanzas,” it observed, “is entirely false.”26
The impact of Thayer’s much touted and talked-up Emigrant Aid Company, however, extended far beyond the modest numbers it actually sent west. It provided, rather, a model for other colonization associations while, by its mere existence as an outpost of antislavery sentiment, provoking some Missourians into intemperate, even violent action. Just a few months after its formation several other organizations—the Union Emigration Society (Washington, D.C.), the New York Kansas League, and the Kansas Emigration Aid Association of Northern Ohio among them—emerged as well; these were supplemented by more specialized groups aligning with the free-soil theme, including a German society called the Kansas Anseidlungsverein (colonization union) out of Cincinnati and the Vegetarian Settlement Company from Philadelphia. Most pioneers in these and other associations were less motivated by the plight of the nation’s enslaved than their own economic self-interest, though when cast against the immediate backdrop of the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the still broader tableau of issues relating to race, bondage, and free labor, the Yankee thrust into the frontier shook planter perception. Thayer’s ghost lingered long. In 1859 John Brown, a veteran of the Kansas border war, led, as noted earlier, an assault on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, that resulted in more than a dozen deaths. After watching U.S. Marines under the command of Colonel Robert E. Lee take the wounded Brown into custody, a bystander speculated (erroneously) on the radicalization of this arch abolitionist: “Hadn’t the Emigrant Aid Society sent him to Kansas?”27
The question, loaded with stormy associations, evoked the “Bleeding Kansas” (1854–1859) period of paramilitary guerrilla warfare and gang violence, which resulted in nearly sixty casualties and numerous assaults and raids, along with repeated fraud in territorial elections. This chaos began to show itself already in the autumn of 1854 when disputes over land, cabins, and other forms of property between northerners and Missourians threatened to erupt into violence. Stowe’s brother Henry Ward Beecher declared about this time that “Sharps rifle was a truly moral agency, and… there was more moral power in one of those instruments, so far as the slaveholders of Kansas was concerned, than in a hundred Bibles.” Greeley’s Tribune echoed this high-strung sentiment, observing that Kansas’s Free-Soilers required above all else “the spirit of martyrdom and Sharpe’s rifles.” And indeed, by the spring of 1855 Robinson was writing to Thayer asking for “200 Sharps rifles as a loan.” Desirous of a more immediate response, however, he also sent George W. Deitzler, in the employ of the Company, east to prod his contacts into procuring the desired weapons. “Within an hour after our arrival in Boston,” Deitzler recalled in the late 1870s, “the executive committee of the Emigrant Aid Society held a meeting and delivered to me an order for one hundred… rifles and I started at once for Hartford, arriving there on Saturday evening. The guns were packed on the following Sunday and I started for home on Monday morning. The boxes were marked ‘Books.’ ”28
The question of slavery’s contested extension became unrelenting in 1854. And more than merely a Kansas account, it extended beyond the clean tree lines of U.S. territory, enchanting those many sunbaked adventurers who dreamed of carving out private fiefdoms in distant fields of gold and green. This expansionist impulse invariably became enmeshed in the welter of sectional issues disquieting the country. Its foot soldiers, uninterested in settling on the neighboring plains, set their acquisitive sights elsewhere, peering as odd antebellum pirates to the dusty Sonoran south, eager for conquest and restless to set out for Mexico.
10 Empires to the South
We know that schemes, open and secret, are… set on Mexico.
Putnam’s Monthly Magazine, 1854
On May 8, 1854, the day he turned thirty, the American filibusterer William Walker led some three dozen worn, depleted, and defeated men across the Mexico–U.S. border to San Diego. There this uncombed paramilitary—said by one unsympathetic contemporary to consist of “every ruined gambler, outlaw, and used-up person in California”—surrendered to U.S. forces, having failed in its self-anointed mission to assert control over the state of Sonora.1 An Anglo extract of the Spanish filibustero, which itself derives from the Dutch vrijbuiter (“freebooter”), the term “filibuster” implied a compulsion to raid, invade, or otherwise claim territory in the New World. Shy, slight, and ascetic, the diminutive Walker hardly looked the part of a privateer or a picaroon. And yet he came in the 1850s to exemplify a certain swashbuckling attitude among a distinct cohort of his countrymen—chiefly a congregation of mirage-minded southerners—to wrest land, islands, and isthmuses from Spanish-speaking peoples. Such banditry appealed to an old impulse; Americans, after all, were long practiced in the dark art of plunder, having penetrated over the last half century deep into the Gulf region, removing tens of thousands of native peoples along the way. Walker’s dubious adventures below the border took on a particularly unsettling resonance in light of the broader race, slavery, and expansion triad then challenging the country. They seemed to represent, in some fatal way, the interests of a plantocracy angling to extend its cotton enclave far beyond the reach of abolitionists and emigrant aid companies.
The most notorious filibuster effort in the young United States was almost certainly the Burr Conspiracy (1805–1807). Former vice president Aaron Burr is alleged to have eyed a generous slice of the southern Gulf Coast, including New Orleans and those parts of Madrid-governed Mexico constituting present-day Texas. The mercurial Burr whispered to some that he merely wished to lease land from the Spanish Crown, though in a more belligerent mood he expressed a distinct interest in forcibly detaching a chunk of Spanish territory as a gift to the American republic. But to Anthony Merry, Britain’s envoy to the United States, he said something else altogether:
Mr. Burr… has mentioned to me that the inhabitants of Louisiana seem determined to render themselves independent of the United States, and that the execution of their design is only delayed by the difficulty of obtaining previously an assurance of protection and assistance from some foreign Power, and of concerting and connecting their independence with that of the inhabitants of the western parts of the United States, who must always have a command over them by the rivers which communicate with the Mississippi. It is clear that Mr. Burr (although he has not as yet confided to me the exact nature and extent of his plan) means to endeavor to be the instrument of effecting such a connection.2
Burr’s extravagant project to put New Orleans in his pocket came to naught. Seized in the wilds of Alabama while on the lam—a spooked Jefferson, then president, ordered the arrest—he was taken to Richmond for trial. There the cunning politician won acquittal, though more “official” filibusters soon followed.
During the War of 1812 Jefferson’s successor, James Madison, quietly commissioned George Mathews to pursue what became known as the “Patriot War”—an effort by irregular American recruits to launch, with regular U.S. troops lagging not far behind, an insurrection into East Florida. When the unseemly venture became public and threatened the existing peace with Spain, an embarrassed administration disavowed Mathews’s unconventional soldiering and ordered the return of the territory it had taken in the Atlantic-facing vicinity of St. Augustine. Not to be outdone, President James Monroe turned an army under Andrew Jackson loose in both Floridas (East and West) in 1818 with orders to pursue border Seminoles marauding—with provocation—in neighboring Georgia. In the process of warring on the natives, Jackson’s force illegally seized Spanish citadels and briefly occupied Pensacola, West Florida’s capital. Rather than punish the tall, rail-thin, and notoriously aggressive general, already the Hero of New Orleans and perhaps beyond the censure of mere public servants, Monroe stood by Jackson, whose success demonstrated the inability of the Spanish Crown to defend the peninsula. The following year, as part of the Adams-Onís Treaty, Spain ceded all of Florida to the United States.
A generation later, in the 1830s, Americans living in Texas broke away from the Mexican government and established by revolution a new republic. This opened the door to a host of armed conflicts and land acquisitions in the southwest including the annexation of Texas (1845), the Mexican-American War (1846–1848), and the Gadsden Purchase (1854). The latter, negotiated by James Gadsden, a South Carolina–born diplomat disappointed with California’s free-state status, anticipated the creation of a railroad connecting New Orleans to the Pacific by bringing yet more Mexican territory—portions of present-day Arizona and New Mexico—to the United States. Combined, the focus on Mexico and overlapping California gold rush sharply reoriented American foreign policy in a southern direction. More, it seemed to give some unstated sanction to filibusterers looking to “liberate” Cuba, or take the mineral-laden Yucatán Peninsula (in the name of saving a white minority from the Mayans), or, à la Walker in 1854, claim the sprawling Mexican state of Sonora. As one student of U.S. imperialism has recently observed, “southern slaveholders,” in the hopes of carving out new slave states, “played an outsized part in most of these endeavors.”3
Along with a distinct Dixie inflection, the midcentury American filibuster profile tilted still more particularly toward the fortune hunter and the freelancer. It included veterans of the Mexican-American War and disappointed gold rushers; it comprised a swarm of drifters and deadbeats, as well as a scattering of crooks and convicts. It appealed further to the adventurous and the penniless, while making a place for the discontented and the grandiose. Most famously, it attracted William Walker. Standing only five feet, five inches tall and weighing perhaps 110 pounds, with fine tawny hair and a thicket of yellow freckles dotting a chaste face, he gave the appearance of being more chaplain than chieftain—boys in school had called him “honey” and “missy.”4 This consummate opportunist, a self-styled “Colonel,” exuded some mesmeric charm that enchanted a certain kind of man. In the words of a delighted former recruit, Walker is rendered a surrogate for an older kind of corsair, no longer welcome in an empirical world of contracts, accountants, and time-serving congressmen:
In the 50’s men looked upon life from a more romantic view-point than they do now. There was more sentiment, more singing of songs, and more writing of love verses to sweethearts;… the cavalier, with his plumes and ribbons, had not departed, and the music of the troubadour still tinkled amidst the sounds of revelry. Those were days when the ardor for adventure by land and sea was hot in the breasts of men. In the vast regions of the West, the stars shone upon a primeval wilderness, where there was lure of gold, and where hunger and conflict and even death challenged those whose daring and hardihood defied the vicissitudes of fortune in their search for El Dorado. Men had not outgrown the customs of their forefathers… they were moved by sincerity, and surrounded by traditions still too potent to cast aside. Such were the men who took service under Walker.5
