Character of Walker — A private's devotion — Anecdote — After fate of the filibusters — Henningsen's epitaph — Last Cuban expedition — The Virginius tragedy — An Englishman to the rescue — Finis.

As Walker was the last, so he was the greatest of American filibusters. He was not a great man, nor by any means a good one; but he was the greatest and the best of his class. His fault was ambition. It was a fault with him because it was a failure. From such a verdict there is no appeal. No apology can be offered for ambition ungratified; and successful ambition needs none. But the world's estimate of his personal character and actions has been needlessly severe. He was not the insatiable monster of cruelty that his enemies have painted. He was a man of deep, if narrow, learning, fertile resources, and grand audacity. He was calm and temperate in words and actions, and mercilessly just in exacting obedience from the turbulent spirits who linked their fortunes with his. He lacked worldly wisdom; nothing could induce him to forego the least of his rights to gain a greater ultimate advantage. He would maintain the dignity of his office, though it cost him the office itself. The lawyer belittled the lawgiver in his attempt virtually to confiscate the lands of Nicaragua by the help of an unworthy legal device; while his design for the restoration of slavery was as impolitic as it was futile, unjust, and barbarous. The action was, doubtless, the result of an honest belief in that "divine institution," as well as of a desire to show his sympathy with his devoted friends in the United States; but the effect was only to put another weapon into the hands of his foreign enemies, without materially strengthening him at home. It was a defiance to his powerful British opponents, and a wanton outrage upon the free states of Central America, alienating the sympathies of all who hoped from the evil of conquest to extract the good of civilization. Judged, as he wished to be judged, by his public policy, Walker was unequal to the office of a Liberator. It would be unfair to criticize the domestic administration of one who held his office by the sword, yet it is true that he preserved order and enforced justice with more success than any ruler of Nicaragua who has filled the position since the independence of the country. Doctor Scherzer, the intelligent German traveller, writing at a time when Walker's success seemed assured, heartily rejoices in the new and grand career opening before Central America. He warmly commends Walker's administration of justice, without palliating his errors, and sees "the morning star of civilization rising in the Tropic sky."

Walker was humane in war, and allowed retaliatory measures to be taken against the Costa Ricans only after the latter had shamelessly abused his lenity by repeated massacres of defenceless prisoners and non-combatants. The tales of his cruelty to his men have uniformly proceeded from the lips of worthless and disgraced adventurers, who were mainly deserters. Had he been the cold and haughty tyrant painted by his enemies, the infatuated devotion of his followers is unaccountable by any human rule. Neither ambition nor recklessness can explain the conduct of men who followed him through life, with unswerving loyalty. "Private Charles Brogan" is recorded among the surrendering men at the end of the Sonora campaign. As "Private Brogan" his name figures among the Vesta's passengers. So again, it appears on the army register and in the lists of wounded, all through the Nicaraguan campaign. Yet again, in 1857, when the second descent on Nicaragua ended ingloriously at San Juan del Norte, "Private Charles Brogan" heads the list of captured rank and file. Did he see his chief perish bravely at Trujillo? or had he himself gone before and escaped the tragic sight? This chronicler knows not, and history, alas! has forgotten greater men than the poor follower of the half-forgotten filibuster. All honour here to thee, Private Charles Brogan, whom no vision of fame or fortune tempted to serve so loyally and long the ill-starred chieftain of a contraband cause!

The truth is, Walker's attitude towards his officers of high rank was one of studied formality, which the necessities of his position made imperative. Familiarity in his intercourse with such volunteers would have been death to discipline. But towards his humbler followers he showed the kindness and consideration of a friend, and won their respect by sharing their dangers. "I have known him," says Henningsen, "to get up from a sick bed, ride forty miles to fight the Costa Ricans, whipping soundly a force of thrice his numbers, and then, after giving his horse to a wounded soldier, tramp back his forty miles, without, as the boys used to say, 'taking the starch out of his shirt collar.'" The men who did their duty spoke well of him always; but it was, of necessity, the knaves and cowards, mainly, who survived such bloody campaigns, and returned to defame their comrades. Few even of these accused him of selfishness, save in his ambition. For money he cared nothing; and the soldiers of fortune complained of hard fighting and no pillage.

He had a certain grim sense of humour, which finds occasional expression in the pages of his book. Of Guardiola's attempt to fire the hearts of his men by plying them with aguardiente before an engagement, in which they were ignominiously routed, he says: "The empty demijohns which were picked up on the road after the action looked like huge cannon-balls that had missed their mark." There is wisdom as well as humour in his remark, that "the best manner of treating a revolutionary movement in Central America is to treat it as a boil; let it come to a head, and then lance it, letting all the bad matter out at once." The pompous pretence of his native friends and enemies amused the shrewd judge of men, who possessed a happy knack of epitomizing a character in a single phrase, as when he calls the native custom of indiscriminate conscription, "an inveterate habit of catching a man and tying him up with a musket in his hand, to make a soldier of him." Kinney "had acquired that sort of knowledge and experience of human nature to be derived from the exercise of the mule trade." He mentions his enemy Marcy only with a contemptuous allusion to the blunder of that statesman in referring to Nicaragua as a country of South America, and dismisses Mora from his notice with the qualified clemency: "Let us pass Mora in exile, as Ugolino in hell, afar off and with silence."

His sense of the ridiculous was too keen to allow him ever to depart from the rigid simplicity of manner and dress which was in such striking contrast with the gaudy attire and pompous demeanour of his native friends. His uniform consisted of a blue coat, dark pantaloons, and black felt hat with the red ribbon of the Democratic army; his weapons were a sword and pistols buckled in his belt, and these he carried only in battle, where they were rather for use than ornament.

His character is in many respects like that of Cortez. Both were unlicensed conquerors; both were served by volunteers; served well by the faithful and brave, and obeyed through fear by the knavish and cowardly. Bodily fatigue or danger had no terrors for either, nor were they chary of demanding equal courage and endurance from their followers. Cortez triumphed over his enemies in the field; but barely succeeded in defeating the machinations of his foes in the Spanish Cabinet. Had Walker been a Conquistador he would have conquered Mexico as Cortez did. Had Cortez been a Californian filibuster he might have conquered Nicaragua, but he would assuredly have succumbed to Marcy and Vanderbilt.

Unquestionably Walker was carried away by his firm belief in his destiny. He never doubted, until he felt the manacles on his wrists at Trujillo, that he was destined to play the part of a Cortez in Central America. He had risked death a hundred times in battle and skirmish without fear or doubt. Possibly he welcomed it, when at last it came, and was sincere in hoping that it might be for the good of society.

So died, in his thirty-seventh year, the man whose fame had filled two continents, who had more than once imperilled the peace of the world which remembers him only in the distorted and false character of a monster and an outlaw. The country which gave him birth, and little besides, save injustice, forgot amid the bloody conflict into which it was soon plunged, the fame and fate of the filibusters. Into the vortex of civil war were swept many of the restless spirits who had survived the sanguinary fields of Central America, and in it perished some of the bravest and ablest who had learned their first lesson in that stern school.

As most of them were of Southern birth, so they generally joined the ranks of the Confederacy. At the first call to arms, Henningsen offered his services to the seceding states, and was given a regiment in Wise's Legion of Northern Virginia. Frank Anderson went with him as lieutenant-colonel, and did good service for the lost cause. He was one of Walker's oldest veterans, having served in both the expeditions to Nicaragua. At the first battle of Rivas he was wounded three times, and left on the field for dead, but managed to drag himself into hiding before his comrades were all massacred, and so escaped to rejoin his command.

Henningsen served throughout the war; but, in spite of his experience on many fields, and the marked ability with which he filled his subordinate position, he never rose to distinction in the Confederacy. He was a natural leader in irregular warfare, as might have been expected of a pupil in the schools of Zumalacarregui, Schamyl, and Walker; and the scientific campaigning of the Peninsula gave no scope for his talents. But he had espoused the cause with honest convictions of its justice, and he supported it faithfully to the end. When that end and ruin came he returned to private life, a man without a career, and lived quietly and unobtrusively until his death in June, 1877. In his later years he was a devoted adherent of the patriots who were waging a fruitless war for freedom in Cuba. Once he visited the island in connection with a projected uprising, but saw no promise of success in the attempt. His death was sudden. He had been ill but a few days; a faithful friend, Colonel Gregg, a soldier who had fought against him in the Civil War, watched by his bedside. The sick man slept, while the tireless brain dreamed, what dreams who can say? of the chequered career about to close forever. Suddenly his eyes opened, and in them was something of the old fire, as he half sat up in his bed, and pointing to a print on the wall of the arms of "Cuba Libre," said, "Colonel, we'll free Cuba yet!" The ruling passion found voice in his last words—the next instant he fell back dead.

Henningsen was considered to have been the military genius of the Nicaraguan campaign by the detractors of Walker, who could not deny the wonderful success of the latter. But Henningsen himself always repudiated the undeserved fame, and was foremost in awarding to his chieftain whatever of glory was won in that profitless field. He died as he had lived, a true, simple-hearted gentleman, a knight-errant born centuries too late. Colonel John T. Pickett, a kindly philosopher, and one who in his heyday followed a filibuster's luckless banner, has engraved upon the tomb of Henningsen the apt motto from Gil Blas: "Inveni portum. Spes et fortuna valete! Sat me lusistis…. Ludite nunc alios."

The filibusters whom the winds had blown from every quarter of the earth to the sunny vales of Nicaragua were drifted back, when the storm had broken and spent its fury, to the world of peace and prose. A few only of the worthier survive to recall that strange page in life's romance. Rudler, who was with his leader in all his campaigns, and who was sentenced to four years' imprisonment after the surrender in Honduras, returned to share the fortunes of the seceding South, as did also Wheat, Hicks, Fayssoux, Hornsby, and many others. In the vicissitudes of American life a few, like Doubleday and Kewen, even achieved wealth, which is perhaps as strange a climax to the career of a filibuster as any that could be conceived. The two O'Neils were men of invincible courage. Both died in battle, Cal, the younger, at the age of twenty-one, after making a reputation for heroism that was marked even among that valiant group. Reluctantly we part with the wild band, Homeric heroes in more features than one; with Henry and Swingle, the inventive gunners, Von Natzmer, the Prussian hussar, Pineda, the great-hearted native of an unworthy country, Hornsby, Rawle, Watters, and the Fifty-six who were "Immortal" for a day.

That most entertaining cosmopolitan, Laurence Oliphant, came very near adding the distinction of being a filibuster to his other experiences. He did, in fact, join an expedition which set out from New Orleans in December, 1856, for San Juan del Norte, with the intention of reinforcing Walker at Rivas. But the good steamer Texas reached her destination too late, Spencer and his Costa Ricans having closed the Transit. Among the adventurous spirits in the company was one who had taken part in the last ill-fated expedition of Lopez to Cuba, and spent a year and a half in a Spanish dungeon. "The story of his escape from a more serious fate," says Oliphant, "was characteristic of many other stirring narratives of a similar description, with which on moonlight nights we used to beguile the evening hours." He had served as an officer on General Lopez's staff during one of the expeditions to Cuba. When that officer, together with many of the more prominent members of the expedition, after a desperate resistance, was captured by the Spanish troops, my friend, who was one of the number, found himself with many of his countrymen thrown into the Havanna jail, and informed that he was to prepare for his execution on the following day. As an act of grace, however, permission was given to all the captives to indite a farewell letter to their friends, informing them of their approaching execution. Most of his fellow-victims could think of some one belonging to them to whom such a piece of information might prove interesting; but the poor captain racked in vain the chambers of his memory for a solitary individual to whom he could impart the melancholy tidings without feeling that his communication would be what in polite society would be called an 'unwarrantable intrusion of his personal affairs upon a comparative stranger.' He could think of nobody that cared about him; revolving this forlorn state of matters in his mind, ashamed to form the only exception to the general scribbling that was taking place, he determined to choose a friend, and then it flashed upon him, that as all the letters would probably be opened, he had better choose a good one. Under his present circumstances, who more appropriate than the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at Washington, then Daniel Webster? Not only should he make a friend of him, but an intimate friend, and then the Spanish Governor might shoot him if he chose, and take the risk. He accordingly commenced:

"Dan, my dear old boy, how little you thought when we parted at the close of that last agreeable visit of a week, which I paid you the other day, that within a month I should be "cribbed, cabined, and confined" in the infernal hole of a dungeon from which I indite this. I wish you would send the Spanish minister a case of that very old Madeira of yours, which he professes to prefer to the wines of his own country, and tell him the silly scrape I have got myself into, if indeed it be not too late, for they talk of sending me to "the bourne" to-morrow. However, one never can believe a word these rascals say, so I write this in the hope that they are lying as usual,—and am, my dear old school-mate, your affectionate friend, ——.' For once the absence of friends proved a real blessing. Had the captain been occupied by domestic considerations, he never would have invented so valuable an ally as was thus extemporised, and he was rewarded for his shrewd device on the following morning, by finding himself the only solitary individual of all the party allowed to 'stand over.' In a couple of hours Lopez and his companions had gone to the bourne, to which our captain so feelingly alluded; and when, at last, the trick was discovered, the crisis was past, and the Spanish Government finally condemned him to two years' confinement in chains in the dungeon at Ceuta, which was afterwards commuted to eighteen months. He had just returned from this dismal abode in time once more to gratify the adventurous propensities which had already so nearly cost him his life; and it is due to him to say, that even the daring and reckless spirits by whom he was surrounded, agreed in saying that he placed an unusually low estimate on that valuable possession."

There is little to add to the history of filibusterism, which may be ranked among the dead industries or the lost arts, just as one chooses to regard it. Contrary to the predictions of the prophets, the disbandment of a million of men at the end of the American Civil War was effected without trouble. The European Powers breathed more freely when it was accomplished, satisfied that the aggressive "Yankee" was not so grasping as he had been painted. Maximilian of Mexico slept peacefully, and his late unruly subjects renewed their fraternal quarrels, undisturbed by interference from abroad, and finally settled into uninteresting peace and prosperity. Filibusterism died because, in sooth, it had no longer a reason for being. To "extend the area" of an abolished slavery were as paradoxical as Quixotic. Nevertheless, the peculiar institution chanced to prove the cause of yet one final, fallacious, and ghastly episode.

Cuba, once coveted as an ally by the slaveholders of the United States, was now the only spot on the civilized globe afflicted with the barbarous stain. The "ever-faithful isle" was trebly cursed with slavery, foreign rule, and martial law. Like a spendthrift come to his last penny, Spain, having squandered a continent, clung with tenacity to its remaining possession in the Western world. Thrones were set up and knocked down at home, republics were born and strangled, but no change for the better was ever felt in the wretched colony. Rather, it suffered from every change, since each involved a change of masters. Hungry, avaricious masters they were, spurred on by the uncertain tenure of their office, to reap as rich plunder as might be got out of the hapless colony, ere a new turn of the cards at home should force them to make room for other needy patriots. The power of the Captain-General is almost absolute at the best of times. In such times as those it is well-nigh omnipotent. The colony was denied representation in the Cortes, while taxed beyond endurance to support the government, and robbed by an army of officials appointed to rule over her without her consent or choice.

Cuba at last rebelled. The planters who found themselves robbed of the fruits of their industry as fast as they were gathered, and who saw the system of slavery develop into the most intolerable of all wrongs, the wrong unprofitable, at last determined to strike for their liberty. They freed and armed their slaves. They burned their plantations, and in September, 1868, hoisted the lone star flag in the mountains and bade defiance to the Spaniard. The leading insurgents were all men of wealth and influence, while their followers were necessarily ignorant and undisciplined. But success meant freedom to both classes; and they threw themselves into the unequal struggle with sublime desperation. All, or mostly all, of the leaders perished during the long and bloody contest, which ended only after it had lasted eight years, at a cost to Spain of two hundred thousand lives and over seven hundred million dollars. The figures are those of Governor-General Don Joaquin Javellar.

The Junta of Cuban patriots in New York sent out several cargoes of war material, and enlisted many American adventurers; but no regular expedition was at any time organized. Among those who participated in the guerilla conflict were Domingo de Goicouria, once Minister of Hacienda in Nicaragua, and Colonel Jack Allen, also not unknown to filibuster fame.

The culminating tragedy came to pass in October, 1873. On the 23rd of that month, the steamer Virginius, a former blockade-runner, cleared from Kingston, Jamaica, for Port Limon, Costa Rica, with passengers to the number of a hundred or more. Her true destination was the island of Cuba, her mission the transportation of arms and filibusters. Among the passengers were the patriot leaders, Cespedes, Ryan, Varona, and Del Sol. The steamer touched at Port au Prince, received her cargo of arms, ammunition, medicines, and equipments, and made sail for Cuba. She was seen and chased by the Spanish gunboat Tornado, which, by a curious coincidence, was also a former blockade-runner and a sister ship of the Virginius—a favoured sister, since she speedily overhauled and captured her prey.

The Virginius, though flying the American flag on the high seas, was made a prize and carried into the port of Santiago de Cuba. Captain Fry, her commander, an American citizen and former officer in the United States and Confederate navies, protested in vain against the outrage. He was denied communication with his consul, and thrown into prison, with all his passengers and crew. The four insurgent leaders were first tried by summary court martial on board of the Tornado, before General Buriel, Governor of the province, and sentenced to death. The sentence was promptly executed, at sunrise on the 4th of November, five days after the capture, before the walls of the Slaughter House, infamous in the annals of Cuba for over thirty years. It lies in the suburbs, about half a mile from the main wharf and on the edge of a swampy tract, beyond which are the sluggish waters of the bay and the blue, barren mountains, dark, desolate and forbidding. Some squalid huts are scattered along the sides of the road. The vegetation is scanty and the stunted palm trees are few and far between. The four walls of the Slaughter House grounds are each about 400 feet long and twelve or thirteen feet high, built of brick covered with stucco. The front gate is a rather pretentious work with ornamental pillars and strong iron pickets. Between it and the extreme left, as you face the structure, is the place set apart for executions. It bears to-day this inscription, surmounted by the Lone Star and two crossed palm-branches, with, on one side, "1868," and on the other, "1898":

Tu que paseas descubrete; este lugar es tierra con segrada. Durante treinte aÑos benedicida ha sido con sangre de Patriotas immolados por la tirania.

"Thou who passest by, uncover; this spot is consecrated ground. During thirty years it has been hallowed with the blood of Patriots immolated by tyranny."