When researching William Walker for this project, his legacy and how it has changed and evolved over the years has fascinated me. His supporters who were with him in Nicaragua venerated him, and many saw him as a hero spreading American values in foreign lands. However at the same time, Walker had his fair share of enemies during his life and as time went on his reputation diminished. The following three sources will help contextualize William Walker and the legacy of his filibustering. The first two by Laurence Greene and William Scroggs go together, because Greene references Scroggs a lot in his book and they were written only a couple of years apart. As well, Scroggs looks at the filibusters from an economists’ perspective. The third source by Andreas Beer is a more modern scholarship compared to the others which looks at Walker’s filibusters from an international perspective, and wishes to shed more light on Walker’s opposition’s perspective. These three sources look at Walker’s life and add something new and different to his legacy in order to better build the narrative of his filibusters.
Laurence Greene’s The Filibuster: The Career of William Walker recounts Walker’s career as a filibuster, starting with his time in Mexico with the invasion of Sonora, going through his time in Nicaragua, and ending with his execution. Greene is not at all trying to be an objective historian with this work, as his opinion of Walker is very obviously stated throughout the text. Not much can be found on Laurence Greene, besides some of his other works such as America Goes to Press, Headlines of the Past which looks at the history of the United States up to the year it was published (1936) by looking at the press and newspapers. Greene makes use of Walker’s writings and works and relies heavily on the work by William Scroggs that tells Walker’s full life story, which was written earlier in 1916. The reason he is so reliant on Scroggs’ work is because Greene claims that there are not a lot of reliable secondary sources besides Scroggs. This is because Greene has very strong opinions on Walker and is not afraid to express this. He consistently slanders Walker throughout the entire work. He opens telling Walker’s story with saying: “This is the chronicle of a paradoxical little man who was inspired by a desperation of restless ambition.”[1] His argument is different in that he is not afraid to openly slander Walker and make it obvious in doing so. This is fascinating to my research, as this was written less than a hundred years after Walker’s filibustering. Greene seems like he is attacking a contemporary narrative that redeems Walker’s legacy and instead wishes to shatter his treatment as a hero. In terms of his reliability, the fact that he relies mostly on Scroggs and states that he does not believe Walker’s retelling of events is not a good sign initially. However, his work serves well as an example of someone combatting Walker’s legacy.
Filibusters and Financiers by William Scroggs was published in 1916, and as mentioned before is heavily sourced by Laurence Greene. Scroggs was an economist from the University of Louisiana, and offers a different perspective on the Walker and his filibusters. His primary goal is to give a history of Walker’s exploits, but he also puts focus on some of the economic aspects of Walker and his filibustering. For instance, he looks at how Walker was financed for the filibusters, the companies that supported him, the economic impact of filibustering, and so on. Scroggs heavily relies on primary sources in order to tell Walker’s story, with sources from both the side of Walker and his affiliates and his opposition. One of the more important things that this source offers is Walker’s early life, which Greene ignores almost entirely. This is very helpful to my research, as Walker’s early life is often not focused on in a lot of the works I have come across. Scroggs’ work ultimately provides a different perspective on the filibusters in focusing on both an economic and political view that adds more context to my research. From what I know Scroggs was one of the first to give any kind of academic secondary perspective on the Walker filibusters as he rarely references any other secondary sources. He states this in his preface: “The accounts of Walker’s various enterprises appearing in general works on American history are always meagre, and in many cases are actually misleading. The usual explanations of his motives are much too simple.”[2] As well, Scroggs’ source has been sourced several times in the other secondary sources that I have looked at.
The last source, A Transnational Analysis of Representations of the U.S. Filibusters in Nicaragua, 1855-1857 by Andreas Beer, looks at Walker and the filibusters from a transnational perspective. Meaning, looking at the international impact of the filibusters and looking at more perspectives than just the U.S. perspective. Andreas Beer is a German historian from the JFK Institute for North American Studies in Berlin. Beer’s main goal is to put into perspective the filibusters of the mid-19th century from an international standpoint, as he feels that they are looked at from a U.S.-centric perspective. Therefore, he focuses mostly on Nicaraguan sources. He makes a big point of using the press of both Nicaragua and the U.S. as well in order to contextualize this time period. Beer feels that certain parts of the narrative of the filibusters in Nicaragua have been neglected, and he wishes to fill this gap: “Although the filibusters were never completely absent from the US collective memory or its national historiography, they have suffered from a focus on a limited, exclusively US-American set of actors, with the aforementioned William Walker as the main protagonist… As a cultural studies scholar by trade, I am interested in the processes the notion of culture was used during this episode to describe a conflictual contact situation, and I concentrate on tracing these processes in one specific medium: newspapers.”[3] This source proves helpful in looking at Walker and the filibusters from an international media perspective.
These three secondary sources all provide three different perspectives on the filibusters of William Walker. Laurence Greene’s retelling is a perfect example of an academic who openly slanders Walker and his actions. He is unafraid to express how he really feels about Walker, and attacks his legacy in order to form a new legacy for him. Greene uses the source by economist William Scroggs extensively, which to my knowledge was one of the first secondary sources of the Walker filibusters that I have found so far. Scroggs provides context of Walker’s early life which a lot of Walker secondary sources do not do, and he also provides an economists’ perspective on the filibusters. Andreas Beer’s work looks at the Nicaraguan filibusters from a transnational point of view, with his goal being to include more than just U.S. sources in order to accurately tell the story of the filibusters. Ultimately, these three sources take Walker’s legacy and shift it in different ways. Scroggs was one of the first academics to formally study Walker, Green attacks Walker’s legacy openly with hostility, and Beer looks at Walker’s filibuster with a more international perspective beyond just the American outlook on it.
[1] Greene, 20.
[2] Scroggs, William. Filibusters and Financiers: The Story of William Walker and His Associates. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1916, v.
[3] Beer, Andreas. A Transnational Analysis of Representations of the U.S. Filibusters in Nicaragua, 1855-1857. New York: Nature America, 2016, 2-3.