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Encyclopedia Britannica - Main :: VIR-WAT |
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WALKER, WILLIAM (1824-1860) , Amencan adventurer, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, on the 8th of May 1824. After graduating from the university of Nashville in 1838, he studied law, was admitted to the bar, and subsequently spent a year in the study of medicine at Edinburgh and Heidelberg. He practised medicine for a few months in Philadelphia and then removed to New Orleans, where he engaged in journalism. In 185o he migrated to California and engaged in newspaper work at San Francisco and later at Marysville, where he also practised law. On the 15th of October 1853 he sailed from San Francisco with a filibustering force for the conquest of Mexican territory. He landed in Lower California, and on the 18th of January 1854 he proclaimed this and the neighbouring State of Sonora an independent republic. Starvation and Mexican attacks led to the abandonment of this enterprise, and Walker resumed his journalistic work in California. On the 4th of May 1855, with fifty-six followers, Walker again sailed from San Francisco, this time for Nicaragua, where he had been invited by one of the belligerent factions to come to its aid. In October Walker seized a steamer on Lake Nicaragua belonging to the Accessory Transit Company, a corporation of Americans engaged in transporting freight and passengers across the isthmus, and was thus enabled to surprise and capture Granada, the capital and the stronghold of his opponents, and to make himself master of Nicaragua. Peace was then made; Patricio Rivas, who had been neutral, was made provisional president, and Walker secured the real power as commander
control of that corporation , then dominated by Cornelius Vanderbilt, and they advanced him funds and transported his recruits from the United States free of charge. In return for these favours, Walker seized the property of the company, on the pretext of a violation of its charter, and turned over its equipment to the men who had befriended him. On the 2oth of May 1856 the new government was formally recognized at Washington by President Pierce, and on the 3rd of June the Democratic national convention expressed its sympathy with the efforts being made to " re-generate " Nicaragua. In June Walker was chosen president of Nicaragua, and on the 22nd of September, from alleged economic necessity, and also to gain the sympathy and support of the slave states in America, he repealed the laws prohibiting slavery.Walker managed to maintain himself against a coalition of Central American states, led by Costa Rica, which was aided and abetted by agents of Cornelius Vanderbilt, until the 1st of May 1857, when, to avoid capture by the natives, he surrendered to Commander
Paulding
See Walker's own narrative, accurate as to details, The War in Nicaragua (Mobile, 186o) ; William V. Wells, Walker's Expedition to Nicaragua (New York
York
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