Galveston: A History of the Island

Chapter 9

9 IN THE DECADE before the Civil War, Galveston became a genuine city, the first in Texas. Merchants began importing ornate iron fronts for their buildings, and the town council constructed sidewalks , installed gaslights, and paved primary streets with shell. For the first time the Strand took on the appearance of a modem eastern city, an affectation that galled Houstonians. The New York Sun reported that the streets of Galveston were wide and straight, and that their cleanliness was about on a par with New York-"which is no compliment," the reporter added. But the Island was not at peace with itself. Tempers ran high, and hypocrisy piled deep. It was a time of Manifest Destiny, of jingoism and muscle-flexing. People talked about "liberating" our neighbors in Cuba and Central America from the "imbecile race," meaning liberate them from themselves. Old patriots like David G. Burnet, first president of the Republic, General Sidney Sherman, and even, for a short time, Sam Houston delivered speeches declaring that it was the right, nay the duty, of the United States to expand its influence throughout the Americas. They were not advocating invasion, understand, merely filibustering expeditions. The word came from the French flibustier, meaning a citizen who declares a private war on a country with the intent to overrun and occupy: it had a common etymology with freebooter or pirate. One cynical diplomat of the day observed that "the acquistion of Texas 86 Gary Cartwright has taught these gentlemen how to acquire territory by cheap and facile means." But this really wasn't about acquiring territory, it was about slavery. "Filibustering" became a euphemism for reopening the slave trade. Apowerful bloc of southern politicians, investors, planters and shippers looked on Cuba, Nicaragua, and other Caribbean and Central American republics as potential way stations for the slave trade, and even dreamed ofpopulating the republics with good southern stock, and eventually confering statehood on them. Slave statehood, to be sure. The point man of this grandiose scheme was a cult hero and selfstyled revolutionary named William Walker. When word reached Galveston in the summer of 1856 that Walker and his mercenaries had invaded and conquered Nicaragua, he was accorded instant hero status. Newspapers burbled on about the "Nicaraguan Filibuster " and the "grey-eyed man of destiny," and urged Islanders to emigrate to the Filibuster State. The new steamship line of Garrison & Morgan offered Islanders a discount fare of $35 to Nicaragua. Groups met in church basements and gathered on the courthouse steps to discuss Walker's victory, and wealthy Islanders held a fundraiser in Walker's behalf at the Tremont Hotel. William Walker was a pious and dangerously deluded man who cultivated his image as carefully as any contemporary television evangelist. In an earlier, unsuccessful attempt to conquer the Mexican state of Sonora, Walker had bestowed on himself the title of colonel. After his invasion of Nicaragua, he promoted himself to generalissimo, and later el presidente. Born in Nashville, the eldest son of a banker who had immigrated from Scotland, William Walker was the archetypical southern gentleman and aristocrat. He loved to put on airs. He did not drink or smoke or use profanity, and he considered purity of thought and deed as the first and finest duty of a Christian. William Walker was a practitioner of that unique blend of lunacy and hypocrisy that characterized the antebellum South. What attracted many of the wealthier Islanders to Walker, however , was his outspoken opinions on race and slavery: he referred to slavery as "the divine institution." In Walker's twisted view God put the black man on earth to "secure liberty and order" for the white race, which in tum was obliged to "bestow comfort and Christianity " on blacks. As proof of this, Walker pointed out that God GALVESTON 87 allowed Africa to "lie idle until the discovery of America gave a chance of utilizing the raw material of slavery." Walker believed that fighting for the institution of slavery was his destiny. Some Texans saw Walker for what he was. "Walker is not a liberator," wrote the editor of the Quitman Free Press, "he's a slaver." But many more saw him as man of extraordinary vision. Even rational men who normally exuded goodwill got swept away in the rhetoric of the times. Hamilton Stuart, editor of the Galveston Civilian-who would laterjoin the abolitionist cause and urge Texas to remain part of...