Schemers and Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico, 1848-1921 (review)

It may be surprising to some Americans (only intermittently sensitive to history) that Mexican nationalists should still resent the Yankee landgrab of 1848 , fully a century and a half later. At the other end of the scale, others may uneasily suspect that modern drug problems represent divine retribution against the Yankees or that irrepressible Mexican immigration into California and the Southwest merely evens out a continental balance disturbed during the nineteenth century.

With this account of filibustering, Stout helps fill part of the historiographic gap in the aftermath of the Mexican-American War and at least partly explains the persistence of Mexican resentment. These irregular armed expeditions of Americans sought to detach Mexican border areas and add them to the United States or set up independent principalities. Outgrowths of American frontier or Civil War violence, they sometimes entangled with Mexican revolutions and internal disorder. Filibusters reached a climax during the 1850 s and declined during and after the American Civil War, which diverted both North and South and deflated southern expansionism.

The decline continued during the 1870 s. After about 1880 , U.S. imperialism took an economic, rather than military, tact, with the expansion of dynamic northern capital into railroads, mines, and land projects. Armed expeditions were not only unnecessary, but counterproductive, for this new invasion. Mexican fears continued to surface from time to time, but cross-border violence was only sporadic, as during the Cananea copper strike of 1906 -7. This period of economic imperialism culminated with the Mexican Revolution, during which the United States government intervened and tried in vain to influence Mexican politics.

The first half of Stout's present book is largely a summary of his earlier monograph, The Liberators: Filibuster Expeditions into Mexico, 1848-1862, and the Last Thrust of Manifest Destiny (Westernlore Press, 1973). The present volume adds one additional expedition to the author's data, but the earlier publication gives a much fuller and more interesting account of the others. Schemers and Dreamers uses Mexican archival material but does not otherwise add much to the earlier bibliography. The last half summarizes the careers of a few later filibuster leaders but entirely ignores the work of railroad and mining promoters, who were as much schemers and dreamers as the filibuster leaders. The book recognizes the role of Matías Romero, a Mexican statesman who opposed filibustering but favored American developmental expansion into Mexico.

Both books are lavishly illustrated, but the most recent book omits a useful map of northwest Mexico contained in The Liberators.