45 Men and a Flag: William Walker’s Invasion of Baja California

On the night of October 16, 1853, a 29-year-old American lawyer named William Walker slipped out of San Francisco harbor under cover of darkness on the schooner Caroline. He had 45 men with him. He had no maps of the territory he was about to invade. He had neglected to bring sufficient food. He had no military experience. He did have, however, an extraordinary sense of personal destiny and a flag he’d designed himself for the country he was about to create. The country was Baja, or Lower California. Never mind that Baja California was part of Mexico, the plan was to conquer it, declare it an independent republic governed by the laws of Louisiana – which meant slavery was legal – and eventually petition for annexation by the United States. The plan was insane. It nearly worked.

William Walker is one of the most remarkable yet most forgotten figures in American history, a testimony to the stories we choose to forget. He was born in Tennessee in 1824, the son of a non-slave owning family, and grew up to become a physician, then a lawyer, then a newspaper editor, graduating from all three professions with the particular confidence of a man who has been told repeatedly that he is brilliant. He stood five feet, two inches tall. He had pale gray eyes described by contemporaries as unsettling, the kind of eyes that don’t blink quite often enough. He had been shot in at least two duels and survived both. He had, somewhere in the course of all this doctoring and lawyering and newspaper editing, become absolutely convinced that the destiny of the United States required the expansion of white, slaveholder civilization into Latin America. He was not alone in this belief. The 1850s were the high noon of what Americans called Manifest Destiny, the quasi-religious conviction that the United States was ordained by God to expand across the continent and perhaps beyond it. The Mexican-American War had just ended in 1848, delivering to the U.S. more than half of Mexico’s territory: Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado. The appetite had not been satisfied. Men like Walker – called “filibusters” after the Spanish filibustero, or pirate – raised their own private armies and invaded sovereign nations, not on behalf of the U.S. government but in the spirit of it, testing boundaries, claiming territory, daring Mexico to fight back. Walker decided to start with Baja California and Sonora. He had actually traveled to Guaymas in the summer of 1853 to ask the Mexican government for a land grant in Sonora. Mexico said no.

He went back to San Francisco, recruited 45 men – many of them Gold Rush veterans who had missed the fortune they came for and were looking for the next opportunity – and stole a second ship when the U.S. Army seized the first one. Walker’s schooner, the Caroline, arrived at Cabo San Lucas on October 28, 1853, paused for water, then sailed up the Gulf to La Paz. He arrived on November 3 flying the Mexican flag, a deception that gave him the element of surprise in a town of approximately 1,000 people who had no reason to expect an American invasion before breakfast. It took thirty minutes. Walker’s men captured the governor, Colonel Rafael Espinosa, at gunpoint. They hauled down the Mexican flag and ran up Walker’s own: three horizontal stripes, red and white, with a single star. Walker stepped off the boat, looked around the small, sun-bleached capital of one of Mexico’s most remote territories, and declared himself president. “The Republic of Lower California” he announced in a proclamation immediately dispatched to California newspapers, “is hereby declared Free, Sovereign, and Independent, and all allegiance to the Republic of Mexico is forever renounced.” He decreed free trade with the world. He decreed that the laws of the state of Louisiana would govern his new nation. Louisiana’s laws included slavery. Walker had just introduced the institution to a country that had abolished it 25 years earlier.

In San Francisco, the news landed like a firework. A local paper hailed the filibusters for “releasing Lower California from the tyrannous yoke of declining Mexico.” A recruiting office opened; within hours, hundreds of men had signed up. The era of Manifest Destiny was such that a private citizen could invade a foreign country with 45 men, declare himself its president, and be celebrated as a patriot in the American press. Walker’s problem was not public relations. His problem was logistics. Walker had no maps and no food, and Baja California in 1853 had no roads and very few people willing to help him. Within three days of his glorious proclamation, he abandoned La Paz – partly from fear of Mexican counterattack, partly because there was nothing useful there – and retreated to Cabo San Lucas. Three weeks later he moved again to Ensenada, 1,600 kilometers to the north, dragging prisoners with him in a wagon across terrain he did not understand toward a border he could barely locate. The promised supply ships from California were late. When reinforcements finally arrived – around 230 additional volunteers – they brought almost no provisions and less knowledge of how to survive the Baja desert. Walker’s men were living off livestock seized from local ranches, for which Walker issued IOUs that no one would ever collect.

On January 10, 1854, apparently feeling that conquering one non-existent country was insufficient, Walker issued a new decree: Baja California was now annexed to the Republic of Sonora. He had not set foot on the Mexican mainland, but he was now president of two countries. He began marching north toward the border, hoping to find a passage east into Sonora. His men were deserting in substantial numbers. Those who stayed were dying of dysentery and dehydration. The local population – the rancheros and farmers and fishermen of the Baja peninsula – were actively hostile, refusing to sell him food and in several cases taking
up arms against him under a Mexican officer named Antonio Meléndrez, who harassed Walker’s retreating column relentlessly through the thorny, waterless mountains of northern Baja.

By May of 1854, Walker had fewer than 35 men left. He tried to reach San Vicente – the administrative seat of Baja California about 90 miles south of the US border – but found Mexican troops had taken it. He tried to cross into the United States but found Mexican soldiers blocking his path and American soldiers waiting on the other side. In the end, the Mexican fighters stepped aside and let him cross and he surrendered on May 8, 1854. His invasion of Baja California and Sonora had lasted eight months, cost the lives of unknown numbers of men on both sides, and accomplished absolutely nothing. Back in San Francisco, Walker was tried for violating the Neutrality Act, which prohibited American citizens from waging private war against nations at peace with the United States. The jury deliberated for eight minutes and acquitted him. The era of Manifest Destiny was such that it only took eight minutes for twelve people to conclude that invading Mexico was fine. Walker, characteristically, took the acquittal as an endorsement. He immediately began planning his next invasion. In 1855 he went to Nicaragua with 60 men, exploited a civil war to seize control of the country, declared himself president, reinstated slavery (which Nicaragua had abolished), and made English an official language. U.S. President Franklin Pierce formally recognized his government. Walker ruled Nicaragua for almost a year. A coalition of Central American armies drove him out in 1857. He tried twice more to return. In 1860, the British Navy captured him in Honduras and handed him to local authorities. He was executed by firing squad on September 12, 1860, at age 36. He died, witnesses reported, without flinching.

Walker’s adventure had consequences for Baja California that echoed for decades. The invasion accelerated Mexican determination to populate and militarize the peninsula. Over a third of Baja’s already sparse population reportedly left the territory during and after the invasion, fleeing the chaos. The Mexican government responded by pushing settlers in from the mainland and establishing garrisons at key points along the peninsula. The modern effort to make Baja actually Mexican, rather than just technically Mexican, began in part as a direct response to Walker. In Mexico, Walker appears in third-grade history primers. In the United States, he is largely forgotten, a minor footnote in the history of Manifest Destiny, which itself has been largely laundered out of the national memory. William Walker, president of two republics that never existed, is dust.