In downtown Nashville there is a historic marker recognizing the exploits of a 19th century lawyer named William Walker. The marker states that Walker led invasions of Mexico and Nicaragua in the 1850s and was executed in Honduras in 1860. According to the marker, Walker was the “Gray-eyed Man of Destiny.” In the 19th century, he was known as a “filibuster.”

The word “filibuster” is derived from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, meaning freebooter. The word passed into Spanish as filibustero, which means pirate or plunderer. By the mid-19th century, the English word “filibuster” was widely used to describe a person that engages in an unauthorized military incursion into a foreign country for the purpose of fomenting or supporting a political revolution. By all accounts, the most notorious filibuster was William Walker.

Walker’s Early Career

In 1845 Walker took appropriate steps to become a lawyer by studying Tennessee legal codes, procedures and precedents in the office of Nashville lawyer James Whitworth. Always restless, Walker soon moved to New Orleans where he completed his legal studies in the office of a lawyer named Robert Mott. He passed the Louisiana bar examination in the spring of 1847 and opened an office on Canal Street.

He had trouble attracting clients, so he turned to journalism. During the next several years, he wrote articles and editorials for newspapers and magazines in New Orleans and later San Francisco and Sacramento.

While working for these publications, he became enamored of the activities of a filibuster named Narcisco Lopez, a former Spanish general who recruited volunteers and financial backers to free Cuba from Spanish rule and annex it to the United States. Things did not go well for Lopez, though. He was captured and executed by the Spanish military in 1851.

Walker should have learned a lesson from Lopez’s experience, but he did not. He was “drawn to the romantic notion of people like [Lopez] seeking their fortunes in foreign lands.” He spent the rest of his short life as a filibuster, raising funds and recruiting volunteers to invade Latin American countries.

Marker located at the corner of Fourth Avenue North and Commerce Street, near the spot where Walker lived with his family in a two-story red brick house.

Walker’s Invasions of Other Countries

Beginning in 1852, Walker assembled a group to invade the state of Sonora in western Mexico, where he allegedly sought to “protect Mexican villagers and ranchers from Apache and Comanche raiding parties and from marauding bands of Mexican and American outlaws.” He claimed to have established a new country known as the Republic of Sonora.

Walker “and his bedraggled group of insurrectionists” who had invaded Sonora were arrested by U.S. soldiers at the U.S.-Mexico border on May 8, 1854. He was subsequently tried for violating the Neutrality Act, which made it illegal for U.S. citizens to engage in hostile actions against nations with which the United States is at peace. A San Francisco jury heard the case and took just eight minutes to return a verdict of not guilty, apparently finding that “it was no crime to plot invasion of another country from U.S. soil, no matter what Congress intended.”

Walker’s next target was Nicaragua, which he sought to conquer and rule during the years 1855 through 1860. During this period, there was a furious battle taking place between several American businessmen who sought to establish pathways across Nicaragua and Panama for the passage of travelers from the eastern and southern coasts of the United States to San Francisco and other cities on the California coast. Most prominent among these businessmen was Cornelius Vanderbilt, whose seed money later led to the founding of Vanderbilt University in Walker’s hometown of Nashville. Walker became Vanderbilt’s implacable foe.

Through various machinations, Walker was “elected” president of Nicaragua. However, his “government” was not recognized by the United States and, more importantly, not recognized by other Central American nations whose leaders understood that Walker’s real goal was “to be the leader of an independent, military-controlled state composed of isthmus nations of Central America, Cuba and perhaps even Mexico.”

Walker sought to re-introduce slavery to his “new nation,” hoping to make Nicaraguan bonds more attractive to Southern investors. Ultimately, though, he was driven out of Nicaragua by the combined armies of the other Central American nations. He was tried again in the United States for violating the Neutrality Act. This time, there was a hung jury, and he was not re-tried.

His final foray in 1860 took him to Honduras, where he sought to assist rebels on the Bay Islands to gain their freedom from Honduras. His rag-tag band of soldiers was no match for the well-trained Honduran soldiers, and he was captured and finally executed by these soldiers. A recent biography of Walker describes the execution of the infamous filibuster:

Then a lone soldier stepped forward, placed his revolver a few inches from Walker’s face, and pulled the trigger, a superfluous act of savagery that left no doubt that William Walker, the ‘gray-eyed man of destiny”whose dreams of empire had disrupted three countries and led to the deaths of thousands, was now, finally, dead.

William Walker: short in stature, short of men, short of time.

Use of Filibuster in Legislative Proceedings

The first use of the term “filibuster” in its modern sense occurred in the 1850s, when the activities of William Walker were fresh in the minds of the public. According to a law review article co-authored by Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, the term was “first used to connote legislative obstruction during a debate on the floor of the House on January 3, 1853” between North Carolina Rep. Abraham W. Venable and Mississippi Rep. Albert G. Brown.

According to the same law review article, “By 1863, the practice of blocking legislation by extended debate had acquired the name [filibuster] in the Senate. When Republicans objected to a request that a vote on a bill be postponed, Democrat Lazarus Powell replied: ‘I look upon that as an imputation that our object was to do what is commonly called filibustering.”’ [emphasis added]

According to another student of the history of the filibuster, the term gained “wide currency” in the 1880s. In one testy exchange on the Senate floor in 1881, Massachusetts Sen. George F. Hoar stated, “There have been instances very numerous elsewhere, some instances here, of what is called filibustering in order to obtain what the minority deemed a reasonable and proper delay in regard to the actions of the Senate or the House…”

In a short segment devoted to the history of the filibuster on National Public Radio, Melissa Block said, “Filibustering senators were, by extension, pirates raiding the Congress for their own political gain.”

In an amusing colloquy on the Senate floor in 1907, Democratic Tennessee Sen. Edward Ward Carmack was attempting to block consideration of a bill proposed by Republican President Theodore Roosevelt by engaging in extended debate. Republican New Hampshire Sen. Jacob H. Gallinger accused Carmack of engaging in filibustering. Noting that the dictionary defined a filibuster as “a freebooter and therefore a pillager or buccaneer,” Carmack said, “Mr. President, in my career in politics I have been accused of almost everything except appendicitis, I believe, but it remained for the Senator from New Hampshire to take me from my inland home and launch me as a buccaneer and a pirate upon the sea.” Gallinger (the Republican senator) read the definition from a dictionary and said that he had referred to filibuster “in its legislative sense.” Carmack retorted that Gallinger must be using “a Republican dictionary.”

One thing is certain: the word “filibuster” is not found in the U.S. Constitution or in any statute or Senate rule. As Senators debate the use of the filibuster in modern Senate procedure, they should remember the long and very unsavory history of the term. |||

JOHN P. WILLIAMS is of counsel with the Nashville law firm Tune, Entrekin & White. He received the Justice Joseph W. Henry award for outstanding legal writing for articles published in the Tennessee Bar Journal in 2003 and 2014.

NOTES

1. The marker is located at the corner of Fourth Avenue North and Commerce Street, near the spot where Walker lived with his family in a two-story red brick house. Scott Martelle, William Walker’s Wars 10 (Chicago: Chicago Review Press Inc., 2019).
2. Walker was “a short slip of a man with light blond hair and eerily expressionless gray eyes.” Martelle, supra note 1, at 1.
3. Wikipedia entry on Filibuster (military).
4. Walter J. Oleszek, Congressional Procedures and the Policy Process (4th ed.) 269 n. 56 (Washington: Congressional Quarterly, 1996). See also Wikipedia entry on Filibuster (military).
5. Oleszek, supra note 4, at 269 n. 56.
6. Martelle, supra note 1, at 21. At that time, most people prepared to take the bar examination by studying in the office of a local attorney rather than going to law school.
7. Martelle, supra note 1, at 22, 26.
8. Martelle, supra note 1, at 30-42.
9. Martelle, supra note 1, at 33-36.
10. Martelle, supra note 1, at 51-54.
11. Martelle, supra note 1, at 54.
12. Martelle, supra note 1, at 56.
13. Martelle, supra note 1, at 59-92.
14. Martelle, supra note 1, at 111.
15. The Neutrality Act was passed by Congress in 1794 when England and France were at war with each other. They both sought the assistance of persons in the United States, but President Washington thought it best that U.S. citizens stay out of this war because the United States was at peace with both nations. He urged Congress to pass the Neutrality Act, which provided for a fine of up to $3,000 and a prison sentence of up to three years. The Neutrality Act has been amended over the years, but is still in effect. See 18 U.S.C. § 960.
16. Martelle, supra note 1, at 116.
17. Martelle, supra note 1, at 116-247.
18. Martelle, supra note 1, at 93-110.
19. Martelle, supra note 1, at 99-104, 175-179.
20. T. J. Stiles, The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt 270-327 (New York: Vintage Books, 2009).
21. Martelle, supra note 1, at 191.
22. Martelle, supra note 1, at 199.
23. Martelle, supra note 1, at 200-202.
24. Martelle, supra note 1, at 202-228.
25. Martelle, supra note 1, at 242.
26. Martelle, supra note 1, at 246-265.
27. Martelle, supra note 1, at 265.
28. The Oxford English Dictionary, Vol V, 2nd Ed., 906 (Clarendon Press, 1989) gives the following definitions for the word “filibuster”:
   a. One who engages in an unauthorized and irregular warfare against foreign states.
   b. One who practices obstruction in a legislative assembly.
   c. An act of obstruction in a legislative assembly.
29. Catherine Fisk and Erwin Chemerinsky, The Filibuster, 49 Stan. L. Rev. 181 (Jan. 1997), at 192-193.
30. Fisk and Chemerinsky, supra note 29, at 193.
31. Oleszek, supra note 4, at 269 n. 56.
32. Franklin L. Burdette, Filibustering in the Senate 47 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940).
33. NPR, “History of the Word Filibuster” (May 18, 2005).
34. For almost 100 years, a statue of Carmack stood in front of the Tennessee State Capitol. It was torn down in the spring of 2020 during the protests over the murder of George Floyd.
35. Burdette, supra note 32, at 78-79.
36. Burdette, supra note 32, at 78-79.
37. The Senate Rule that establishes a procedure allowing Senators to engage in a filibuster is Rule XXII, but the rule does not use the word “filibuster.”