 On April 7th, 1856, a company of Costa Rican soldiers marched through Nicaragua and surrounded the lakeside village of Lavirhen, where a handful of Americans were employed by the transit company that carried passengers to and from California. There were no soldiers defending Lavirhen when the Costa Ricans arrived. One of the Americans stepped outside of his home that morning, saw the Costa Ricans moving toward him, bayonets fixed on their muskets, and he immediately warned the other eight Americans in the village. They took shelter inside a small building, locking the door behind them. It didn't matter. The Costa Ricans surrounding the building fired through windows, battered down the door, and killed all nine of them. The ones who survived being shot were finished off with bayonets, and their pockets were looted for anything of value. Three days later, on the other side of Lake Nicaragua, another band of costas had been using machetes to hack the jungle, creating a new trail to sneak into Nicaragua without being detected. They created enough noise that Lieutenant Tom Green and 16 Americans were sent to check it out. The Americans found the Costa Ricans without being seen, so Green had his men quietly take position to fire on them. The Americans readied their rifles and let loose a volley, taking out a handful of the surprise soldiers. They reloaded as the coast is scurried to get their weapons to find their attackers. Their volley was let loose, and more costas went down. Alerted by the sound of the gunfire, more Costa Rican soldiers started appearing through the jungle, revealing that there were more soldiers than the Americans previously thought. The 16 Americans had unknowingly attacked a group of 200 Costa Ricans. Finally, some of the enemy soldiers had found them and started a return fire. One of the Americans, Lieutenant Rakeshaw, Green's deputy, got so excited that he leapt up from the ground the Americans were lying on their bellies to shoot from, and as soon as he stood up, a musket ball took him out. That he would be the only American killed that day, and after the rest of the Costa Ricans scattered, Green would count 27 enemy dead. These were hardly battles. Loverhinn was just a group murder, and Green's fight was barely a skirmish, but they indicated the change that had taken place due to William Walker's conquering of Nicaragua and establishing his own government. The civil war in the country was over, and now a new war had started that by the end of this episode would put William Walker against Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and with the exception of some of his loyal native allies, Nicaragua. And these five countries, who would soon be referring to themselves as the allies united against the American filibuster, were being supported with funds and weapons sent by Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was determined to ruin the man who had interfered with his business. I'm Chris Calton, and this is the Mises Institute podcast, Historical Controversies. In the past three episodes, we learned about William Walker's conquest of Nicaragua and the establishment of the provisional government of the New Republic of Nicaragua. We left off after the civil war in Nicaragua had been ended, but with new enemies, Americans had just faced a defeat in the Battle of Santa Rosa. We'll be continuing this story in today's episode. After the Costa Ricans took a lot of your hen, they started moving north toward Rivas. Walker had been there recently, but he had just left and returned to Granada, so the coasters took Rivas with no resistance. The last time that William Walker had tried to take Rivas, his first battle in Nicaragua, he faced a terrible defeat, but the city was vital to maintaining access to reinforcements and resupply coming from San Juan del Sur. Besides, he had a much stronger fighting force at this point, so he prepared for his second battle in Rivas, which would take place on April 10th, the same day that Green and his 16 Americans carried out their ambush on the other side of the country. Rivas wasn't just important for its connection to trade routes. As Walker was preparing his attack, an enemy soldier was captured and was able to inform him that Costa Rica's President Juan Rafael Mora had taken residence in one of the larger homes in the village. The home had not been commandeered. It was owned by a widow named Dana Francesco Carrasco, a loyal legitimista who was thrilled to play hostess to Mora. If Walker could capture both the town and the president, he might be able to end this war before it had hardly even begun. But Walker had only 650 men, 100 of whom were Nicaraguan natives, against about 3,000 Costa Ricans occupying the city, so this would be no small feat. His plan was to send men to attack from three directions, north, south, and east. Carrasco's house, containing the president, was on the western side of the city, so the filibusters would be moving toward it from all angles. Lieutenant Colonel Edwin Sanders led four 50-man companies from the east. They reached the plaza in the center of the city without facing any resistance. Then he moved to the right side of the plaza, to a street that would lead him to a gunpowder magazine on one side and President Mora on the other. Not far down the road, they hit a stroke of luck, finding two brass cannons and some ammunition carts all unmanned. Sanders had his men drag them back to the plaza, but this is where the fighting started. Bullets started raining down on the plaza, but the Americans didn't know where they were being attacked from. Several of them took bullets and hit the ground, and finally Sanders identified his attackers as troops that had been stationed on the western side of the plaza, occupying the buildings around President Mora. There were hundreds of them, some with muskets and some even had rifles. Sanders ordered his men to retreat. Major A.S. Brewster was having better luck on the south side of the plaza. He was leading three companies of men, and when they saw Sanders being fired on, they went to help. Before they could do anything, they too started getting fired on. This time, from marksmen set up as snipers in the tower of the San Francisco Church. These soldiers had rifles firing mini-balls, so their weapons were far more accurate from a longer distance than any of the soldiers Walker had faced in Nicaragua up to this point. But Sanders and Brewster had men dropping like flies around them. Finally, Colonel Bruno Natsmir arrived with the rest of the men from the north. This meant that all the troops were in the plaza except the small band of reserves under the command of Colonel Birket Fry and the company of 100 Nicaraguans serving under Colonel Machado. Machado's men were pushing toward the plaza from the north as well, but they were being slowed down by Costa Rican soldiers firing from both sides who had been woken up by the plaza gunfire. Machado was on horseback behind the troops waving a sword when he was knocked from his horse by a series of musket balls. He was killed. His horse was fleeing and his men took the cue and skedaddled as well. Walker also on horseback was with Fry in his reserves and they entered the fray from the east. By the time they reached the plaza, the Americans had fled to surrounding buildings where they wouldn't be sitting ducks as they returned fire. Major John Waters led a group of rangers who'd come with him from Texas into the San Pedro Cathedral. They took the tower and set up snipers of their own. Walker ordered Fry to lead his men in a frontal attack to try to take Moro on the other side of the plaza. Fry protested. It was a suicide mission. If you will not lead the men, Walker said, I will. Walker held up his sword and calmly led his horses into the plaza, where he was an open target for the Costas. The testimonies from some of the soldiers who witnessed this commented on how fearless Walker seemed, but some of his more level-headed soldiers ran out and grabbed the horse and their general and dragged him out of harm's way. Inside the house where Moro was staying, Donna Francesco was proving herself to be more than just a loyal hostess. When the filibusters attacked, she grabbed a musket and joined the soldiers in the fight, shooting from the window of her home. The battle was dying down as the filibusters had taken cover in the buildings around the plaza and nobody had any easy targets. But Moro had seen Sanders' men drag the two cannons into the square. This worried him, so he ordered two of his officers to grab some iron spikes and hammers and run out to disable the cannons. When they went, Donna Francesco was proving herself to be something of a badass because she ran out with them to provide cover. The three of them rushed out into the open. The two officers hammered the spikes into the cannons' touch holes and then they ran back into the house. Miraculously, none of them were harmed, and Sanders' cannons had been rendered useless before they could even be put into action. But seeing the cannons disabled infuriated John Markham. I can't even remember at this point if I mentioned him by name in the first episode on the Nicaraguan filibuster. But Markham was one of the survivors from the first battle of Rivas. After he saw Moro's officers safely achieve their mission, he asked for volunteers to follow him in a charge across the plaza. Thirty men, including two officers, agreed to join him. So Markham led the way, yelling like a madman and waving his sword. And the men ran down the same street that Sanders took to find the cannons. The street was narrow, so the men had to pack tightly behind each other, making them easy pickings for the coasters, firing at them from either side. They were 90 feet from Carrasco's house, but they had probably a thousand guns pointing down at them, so it was a reckless charge. One of the officers following Markham, Captain Linton, took a hit that caused him to spend 180 degrees before falling dead to the ground. Markham himself took a blow to the knee and the other officer, James Jameson, whose testimony most of this comes from, had his right leg shot out from under him. As he lay on the pavement, he could see the street filling up with blood and his men falling around him. With his knee destroyed, Markham ordered the survivors to retreat. This was maybe half of the original volunteers, the rest either dead or immobilized. Dragging Jameson with them, the men returned to the plaza, joining Sanders and his men, where they had taken refuge at the start of the battle. Jameson was dropped next to several of Sanders's injured men. The building they found themselves in was a dry good store, and inside the store were giant blocks of cheese that were so hard that they could stop a bullet, which Jameson would actually write about in his personal accounts of the battle later. So Sanders's men had hauled these blocks of cheese to create a protective barrier that they could fire from behind. So if anybody ever makes a movie about this, and this would certainly make for a good movie, they had better include this scene. So these men are taking cover behind giant blocks of rock hard cheese. They'd load their rifles and then pop up, fire on the enemy, and then duck back behind the cheese. And when they did this, many of the men would take a break, pull out their jackknives and cut off a piece of their barrier to snack on. And to make this even more movie worthy, among Sanders's men was a soldier that Jameson only referred to by the nickname Arkansas in his accounts of the battle. But this guy was a crack shot, and he had come to Nicaragua with his buddy who was there as well. So the duo worked as a team. They each had their own rifles, but Arkansas did all the shooting. He would fire one rifle while his friend was loading the other, basically demonstrating the law of comparative advantage, right? So Arkansas handled the shooting and his friend handled the reloads. From Jameson's estimates, Arkansas must have taken out 50 coasters, sniping them one by one. Jameson would claim that this was, quote, the most spectacular sharpshooting I saw in Nicaragua. Sanders and Jameson were finding more useful goods than just the cheese. They were rolling out balls of cotton as makeshift hospital beds. William Walker showed up and started speaking to the injured and checking their bandages. This was the second time in the Battle of Rivas that Jameson was impressed by his general, the first being when he bravely or stupidly led his horse out into the plaza, exposing himself to the gunfire. Up in the church tower, John Waters and his Texans were also sniping at the Costa Ricans. One of his deputies had already been killed after making himself too easy of a target. The rest of his men kept low and fired carefully, only shooting when they had a target in their sights. But Waters noticed somebody coming up the steps of the tower, and he was surprised at who he found. So I didn't mention it previously because Walker didn't talk about it in his own memoirs. But after he took Renata, Walker's brother, Norval Walker, had shown up to join him. Walker had two younger brothers, and this was the middle one. His youngest brother would eventually join him as well, only to die of cholera, but we aren't there yet. Walker made his brother an officer, but he proved to be a useless drunk, and Walker fired him. So Norval wasn't even supposed to be in this battle because this was after he'd been fired. But he had apparently followed William Dorivus, and now he was in the middle of the battle. But he wasn't fighting. He climbed the steps of the tower with a drink in his hand, took a seat in the corner and pretty much just watched the rest of them and fight while he got drunk. So again, if you're making a movie about this, there's another part that you need to include for the comical element alone. So the fighting continued this way until midday. Basically, both sides trying to snipe the enemy while taking cover in one of the buildings. But Costa Rican reinforcements had just arrived after Mora sent word to lob your hen in San Juan del Sur hours earlier. So 100 newly arrived soldiers rushed into the plaza. Their charge took them into the building that was being occupied by Bruno Natsmer and his men. The Coasters drove them out and made this building their point of attack directly across from Walker, no longer at the dry goods store. Walker knew he had to take the building back, so he asked for volunteers. And his first volunteer was Lieutenant Robert Gay, who had been at the first battle of Rivas and had defended the beach in the battle of lob your hen. A dozen other men volunteered as well, including a few officers. The 13 men decided that the close quarters fighting called for pistols. After readying their weapons, the men charged with gay leading the way. Right away, gay went down along with one of the other officers who volunteered. Next went the third of the officers in charge, Captain Breckenridge, who'd been shot in the head. But the rest of the men were able to break through the doorway and some apparently climbed in through the window and they were able to fight back. Four more Americans went down, but nearly 30 Costa Ricans were killed before the rest fled out the rear entrance. Walker had lost some valuable men, but the mission was a success. The success of taking this building inspired the remaining men to try to take the next building over as well. Another officer, Captain McCartle, led the attack, but this one was less successful. The coast is inside the building, kept the door ajar to fire through the opening and at one point McCartle took his pistol and shoved it through the opening to fire at whoever was on the other side. He apparently hit one or two of them judging by the cries of pain he heard, but one of the enemy soldiers from the other side of the door took his bayonet and stabbed it into McCartle's wrist. Now McCartle couldn't withdraw his hand, it was pinned. So now the soldier took his musket and placed it against McCartle's pistol hand and blew it clean off. So now McCartle could pull his arm free only to find a bloody stump yelling, the damn Duraskel got my pistol. Sometime earlier in Granada, McCartle had actually participated in a duel with another of Walker's officers, Dewitt Clinton, over a Nicaraguan woman they were both after. At this point, the duel probably seemed silly. McCartle had lost his hand, but he would survive the battle. Clinton, his enemy dualist, was already lying dead only a few yards away. At this point, the fighting was practically a standoff. Nobody could do anything without exposing themselves to enemy fire, but the third in command of the Costa Rican army, President Mora's brother-in-law named General Connus, remembered the story of the heroes of the First Battle of Rivas. If you remember from part one of the Nicaragua episodes, Walker's men had been driven out of the building they were garrisoned in a year ago after two soldiers set the roof on fire. Connus wanted to repeat this, and he already had a soldier in mind. Connus called for a 23-year-old private named Pacheco. Pacheco was a rapist, but after he'd been convicted, President Mora had given him a pardon on the condition that he serve in the military. So as far as Connus was concerned, Pacheco owed President Mora a favor, and it was time to deliver. Connus lit a torch and handed it to Pacheco. Then he sent him toward the inn on one side of the plaza with the instruction to set it on fire. The hope is that the fire would spread from building to building and the Americans would have to flee. Commanding the same luck as the two soldiers who disabled the cannons earlier in the day, Pacheco made it to the inn unharmed. He thrust the torch at the roof and then ran back to safety without seeing to make sure the fire took. It didn't take. But as Pacheco was running back, he was hit. He continued to run, but he was hit again. This time he fell, just outside the building he was trying to get to. Another soldier dragged him inside and when he was inspected, he would find out that he actually had a total of five bullet wounds. The men tending to him assumed he'd be dead soon, but he apparently survived. But the mission was a failure and Pacheco couldn't move, so Connus found two volunteers for a second try. One was a Nicaraguan Legitimista and the other was a Costa Rican drummer boy, which meant he was too young to fight. The drummer boy went by the nickname El Arizo. The hedgehog, apparently is what that means. Pacheco actually ripped the bottom of his bloodied shirt himself and the soldiers fashioned another torch by wrapping the shirt around the leg of a chair. Two torches were made and the pair took to the plaza. The Nicaraguan soldier was killed before he made it to the inn, but the hedgehog had better luck. He set his torch to the roof and the flames took this time. When he turned around to run back, he was riddled with bullets, died in the plaza with the flames growing above his body, but his mission was a success. Back in the dry goods store, Jameson could see the flames erupt on the roof of the inn. Next in was another of the many filibuster officers, Captain Jack Dunnigan. Dunnigan was taking a drink when a bullet hit him in the throat. He grabbed his throat and horsely said to Jameson, quote, never before has my drinking been cut short and so discourteous a manner. So there's another good line for whoever makes this into a movie. But Jameson was more worried about the fires he was seeing. After the inn had been set on fire, other coasters had set fire to buildings on the opposite side of the plaza. So as the fire spread, the filibusters would be closed in from each side. They still had some time, but they'd have to evacuate. It was decided that they would wait until the sunset so they'd be covered by the darkness and then they'd make their escape. The plan for the injured men was to bring them into the San Pedro Covenant and George Winters was instructed to go to the Covenant to get things ready for the wounded. Winters apparently had come from a wealthy family and he brought a pearl handled pistol with him when he joined Walker at Nicaragua. When he made his way to the plaza, he decided he'd take the more direct route by running right through the middle of the plaza. This made him an easy target for the enemy snipers in the San Francisco church tower and they hit Winters with a mini ball shattering his thigh. He wasn't dead, but he couldn't move. So he waited to be finished off. Instead, Captain Myron Veter, another officer in the dry goods store, Walker was really generous in handing out officers commissions if you're wondering why so many people are officers. But Captain Veter ran for Winters, hoisted Winters over his shoulder and brought him to safety. Neither Veter nor Winters were hit during the rescue and Winters still had his hand on his pearl handled revolver. So the battle of Rivas went on for a total of 17 hours. By the time it was nearing midnight, 60 injured Americans had been taken to the Covenant and the men were ready to leave. Waters and his Texas snipers were still on the tower of the cathedral, taking out whoever they could. Everybody else was grouped inside the Covenant. There were maybe 400 men left able to fight, but they were almost out of ammo, so they readied their escape. The officer horses were brought to the Covenant where any injured men who could ride were put in a saddle. Those who, like George Winters, were too injured to join the escape would have to be left behind and this is what General Walker told them. They would have to die so the rest could live. Nobody protested and instead the injured men who were left behind offered their encouragement to the rest. They were carried to the altar inside the Covenant in the hopes that it might compel the Costa Ricans to be merciful when they were found. Jameson, with his knee shattered, was one of the men who would have to be left behind. But at this point, his injured leg was twice its normal size and was hurting tremendously. So he dragged himself across the Covenant and into the cathedral next door where he found a corner with a cool breeze that offered him some small relief. He closed his eyes and he fell asleep, alone. When he woke up, it was four in the morning. The cathedral bell above him rang out, having been hit by a bullet. The Costa Ricans were apparently still firing across the plaza, but nobody was firing back and Jameson realized that the Texans who'd been occupying the tower must have already escaped, completely overlooking Jameson's sleeping in the dark corner. Or maybe they saw him and thought he was dead. I don't know either way, but the Costa Ricans were not yet aware that their enemies had withdrawn so Jameson still had time to escape before he was captured and killed. So he crawled to the back of the cathedral, dragging his injured leg, and he pulled himself over a pile of rubble and went through the back door. Then he pulled himself up and used his sword as a crutch as he moved his way through the city. All 18,000 residents of Rivas had been hiding out in their own homes, waiting out the fighting. He made it outside the city where a group of mounted Costa Ricans passed right by him, not seeing him in the dark, and he hobbled down the road away from the city only to realize that he'd been moving south, which was the wrong direction, so he had to turn around and start moving north. With his injury, there was no way he was going to make it all the way to Granada, well north of Rivas. And he was pretty certain he was doomed to be caught and executed. But then, in his first bit of luck since the battle started, he found a pony that had been abandoned by the side of the road. He was able to ride the pony all the way back to Granada and survive so that he could leave behind the narrative that has provided a lot of this material. And again, movie makers, this guy is escaping on a pony. How is this not adapted for television yet? Anyway, Norval Walker, William's alcoholic brother, had also been left in the bell tower having passed out from his drinking. In this case, the Texans probably knew he was alive. They just didn't like him. So they didn't bother to wake him up when they left, but he was also able to slink away and escape before the Costa Ricans found him. So the sun was already up on the 11th before the Costa Ricans realized they were fighting no body. They'd actually continued firing their weapons through the entire night, not realizing that their enemies had been gone since about midnight. So finally, they emerged and started moving through the bodies and checking the buildings. And finally, they came to the Covenant. Now, what I'm about to tell you here is probably a mixture of truth and legend. As it was spread around Walker's men, and I'm sure evolving into something more than the truth is these things have a tendency to do. But when the Costa Ricans entered the Covenant, George Winters was sitting with his back to the altar, still holding his pearl-handled pistol. He fired and a Costa Rican soldier fell. Then he took down a second soldier. This much is probably true from what we can ascertain. But then according to the legend, another and another and another and another Costa Rican soldier went down all six bullets in his revolver, taking down six Costa Ricans before they could capture him. At least this is the story that the Americans would tell everybody back in Rivas. It does seem that Winters took down at least one Costa Rican, at least before they charged in on the wounded, finishing them off with their bayonets. Apparently there were five more wounded Americans who had not been brought to the Covenant and they were holed up in a house across the plaza. They were being sheltered by some friendly Rivas residents and they might have escaped had it not been for Don Francisco Ugarte informing President Mora of their presence. The soldiers dragged these five Americans into the plaza and shot them dead. Ugarte would eventually face retribution for selling them out. The second battle of Rivas, like the first, ended in William Walker's defeat, but this defeat was far less one-sided than his first battle. He had been driven out of the city but he estimated that his men took out roughly 600 Costa Ricans before they fled. Walker estimated wrong though. There had been 800 Costa Rican casualties. President Mora would announce his victory to the rest of the country, but he would not tell them the great cost of the victory. Days later, another cholera epidemic broke out and took out even more of the Costa Rican soldiers. By the time they returned to their home country of the 3,500 Costa Ricans who'd been brought to Nicaragua, only 500 returned. Shortly after they returned, I'm sure some of the people were wishing none of them had as they brought cholera with them killing more than 10,000 Costa Ricans as the epidemic spread from the soldiers to the rest of the populace. This was almost 10% of the entire population at the time, by the way. So if Walker couldn't take back Rivas in San Juan del Sur with an army, cholera did the job for him. General Conniss left his dead and dying soldiers behind for Walker to deal with when he reoccupied the cities. For the six soldiers he abandoned, he left a note for Walker saying, quote, I expect your generosity will treat them with all the attention and care their situation requires. I invoke the laws of humanity in favor of these unfortunate victims of an awful calamity, end quote. For all his faults, Walker did treat his enemy better than they would have treated his men and he set his doctors out to treat any enemy soldiers they could help. When he was back in Rivas though, he would not show this generosity for Ugarte who he had been informed had sold out his soldiers. For his crime, Ugarte was hanged. The cholera epidemic that wiped out the Costa Ricans turned Walker's defeat into a victory. In the press, some people actually said that he was a military genius who deliberately lured the Costa Ricans into the trap, which is ridiculous of course, but the good press didn't hurt his cause as new recruits from the United States continued to show up. But Walker's provisional government for the Republic of Nicaragua was turning against him. Remember that the provisional president, Patricio Rivas, had been a legitimateista appointed on the recommendation of Ponciano Corral after the peace treaty was signed and it was discovered not long after that, Corral was a traitor. So it's surprising that Walker had allowed Rivas to keep his position this long, but now Walker was unwilling to risk keeping Rivas in any position of power. So he dissolved the provisional government and scheduled new elections for June 29th. The recently ousted Rivas canceled the election in several provinces and declared Walker an enemy of Nicaragua, but in the southern provinces that Walker controlled, the elections were held to decide on the new president and Walker himself was on the ballot winning a majority of the votes. William Walker was now the official president of the country which he was now calling the independent Republic of Nicaragua to distinguish it from the Republic of Nicaragua that he had just dissolved. Walker had really always been the one in charge of course, but now he had the title. There was no figurehead. But now that Rivas was officially out, he was free to take the Nicaraguans loyal to him and join with the other Latin American countries. This is when they formed the alliance between Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Costa Rica and Nicaragua's Legitimistas. The five countries called themselves the Allies. With Walker as officially the president of the new government he'd established, some new changes took place. US ambassador to Nicaragua, John Wheeler read a statement issued by the Secretary of State William Marcy on July 19th. He read Marcy's words quote, I am directed by the president of the United States to notify you that I am instructed to establish relations with the state. The government of the United States hopes to unite cordially with you in the fixed purpose of preventing any foreign power that may attempt to impede Nicaragua's progress by any interference whatever. The great voice of my nation has spoken. Its words must not be unheeded, end quote. The statement was read in front of a group of Americans celebrating the new country with Walker and they cheered at hearing that the United States was so openly supporting them. But Wheeler was being dishonest. He read the statement as it was written but he knew that the crowd cheering him were misinterpreting the words. It's true that Franklin Pierce approved of Walker's ambitions but he was not willing to go to war with nations the US was at peace with such as Costa Rica and the other Allies. So Marcy's statement was not meant to establish relations with Walker's government in Nicaragua, it was meant to establish relations with Rivas, the recently ousted provisional president who now led a rival government that was allied with the rest of the country surrounding Nicaragua. And John Wheeler knew that this was what Marcy meant in the statement but he took advantage of the ambiguous wording to make it seem like the United States was fully supporting William Walker and his filibusters. But most importantly, Walker wanted to do everything he could to bring in more Americans. He was hosting some fairly prominent guests in his new home in Granada such as General William Casnu who helped Texas gain its independence from Mexico and saw Walker's ambitions as not unlike Sam Houston's some decades earlier when he became the president of the Republic of Texas. So Walker announced that he was going to put policies in place that would help Americanize Nicaragua. Walker himself didn't care whether he attracted Northerners or Southerners and he received volunteers from both sections of the country but the South was clearly his target market and his policies reflected this. He began issuing bonds to be sold in the US that were backed by land in Nicaragua. He abolished the existing import tariffs in the country and replaced them with licensing taxes. He confiscated property of his enemies providing available land for the Americans willing to work on it. He executed Nicaraguans who were caught giving aid to the opposition government working with allies such as Democratic leader Mariano Salazar who'd been caught by calendar Irving Faisu who is one of the survivors of Narciso Lopez's filibusters in Cuba. But the most significant policy Walker introduced was the one regarding slavery and this is where we can relate our Nicaraguan detour back to the subject of this series. If you remember the end of my two episodes on the Cuban filibuster, I talked about the formation of the Order of the Lone Star which was a pro-slavery Southern expansionist organization. Its president was Pierre Soleil, a Louisiana planter and politician. He had recently come to Nicaragua and he made a compelling case to William Walker about the need to reintroduce slavery into the country. Slavery had been abolished in Nicaragua in 1826 and if Walker didn't undo that, Soleil argued, he would have a hard time finding Southerners willing to come here to work the land he was offering them. The climate in Central America was one that was perfectly suited for the slave economy but Southern slave owners would need security and their human property to be willing to make such a move. And if Walker did open the country to slavery, Soleil promised to sell $500,000 in bonds to Southerners. But Walker, if you remember, had a pretty anti-slavery history. He wasn't an abolitionist but he had written editorials advocating the complete abolition of slavery not too many years before but he also knew that he needed Southern support. He was fighting a war and the South was responsible for the majority of the military volunteers in the recent Mexican American War despite having a smaller population than the North. He was happy to receive volunteers from New England, of course, but he would have been naive to think he would attract as many New Englanders as he would Southerners and his current army of filibusters demonstrated this as a majority of them had come from the South already. Now historians aren't in complete agreement on whether or not Walker reintroduced slavery into Nicaragua. Those who include Nicaragua as part of the prelude to the American Civil War simply claimed that he repealed the prohibition on slavery and reinstituted the South Speculier Institution. Stephen Dando Collins gives a more complex explanation saying that Walker's slavery decree, which he issued on September 22nd, was never intended to permanently bring slavery into Nicaragua. And Walker's own accounts of Nicaragua, which you can still find pretty cheaply on amazon.com, he claimed that this is exactly what his decree intended to do. He said that he annulled the previous prohibition of slavery in order to quote, bind the Southern States to Nicaragua. But he wrote these memoirs partly as a propaganda piece while he was back in the United States trying to find more recruits to bring back to Nicaragua to continue waging his war a few years after episodes in this story take place. So Dando Collins cites evidence that Walker had only ever planned to temporarily reinstate slavery on the indentured servitude model like what had originally been employed by the colonists from England in the 17th century. And he worded his decree an ambiguous legalese with this in mind. But I don't think any of this matters in trying to decide whether or not Walker's filibustering exploits can help us to understand the North-South sectional divide prior to the Civil War. Because even if Walker himself had no intention of permanently reinstating slavery in Nicaragua, it is clear that he issued his decree to give Southern minds the impression that this was exactly his intention. And in doing so, he gained Southern support while new recruits from the North started to dry up. So in my mind, the filibuster campaigns of Narciso Lopez and William Walker most certainly belong in any explanation of the sectional divide of the 1850s and organizations such as the Order of the Loan Star and Knights of the Golden Circle, which were explicitly pro-slavery and pro-expansionist and pro-Southern cannot be understood without knowing the context of the filibusters. But if I simply wanted to demonstrate that William Walker had a place in the North-South controversy over slavery, I wouldn't need more than a single episode to do that. So the only reason I'm spending so many episodes on Nicaragua is because it is just such a fantastically entertaining bit of history. So I am going to close out this story before returning to the United States to talk about John Brown and Harper's Ferry. So we are leaving off today with William Walker instituting yet another new government in Nicaragua in which he himself served as president and he has opened slavery to the country in order to appeal to Southern planters. But he was now at war with five Central American nations who were backed financially by Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose personal wealth exceeded all five of these nations combined at the time. So this war was heating up and I'm certainly not going to leave you hanging so we will continue this story in the next episode. For more content like this, visit mesus.org.