Republic of Baja California

Its founder, William Walker, went on to become president of Nicaragua and died in front of a Honduran firing squad. The Baja episode is the rehearsal, and it is worth studying because it shows exactly how the machine worked — and how little it needed in order to work at all.

At a glance

What was the Republic of Baja California?

An armed expedition that seized La Paz, declared a republic and then tried to march across the Gulf of California to take Sonora. It was launched from San Francisco in October 1853 with about forty-five men, and it was illegal under American neutrality law from the moment it sailed.

Walker's purpose was not to govern Baja California. It was to hold it long enough to be recognised, to attract more men and money, and to force the United States to annex the territory — the pattern the Texans had followed in 1836 and the Americans in California in 1846. The republic was a means to annexation, not an end in itself.

Who was William Walker?

A Tennessee-born polymath of the worst kind: a physician at nineteen, a lawyer, a newspaper editor, and a man convinced that his destiny lay in founding English-speaking republics in Latin America. He was small, abstemious, physically brave and entirely without scruple, and he had a talent for persuading other men to follow him into disasters.

He had edited the Crescent in New Orleans and the Commercial Advertiser in San Francisco, and he had watched the filibusters of the early 1850s — the Cuban expeditions especially — with contempt for their incompetence rather than their illegality. Baja California was his first attempt, and it was a commercial and military failure that taught him what he needed to know for Nicaragua.

What was the filibuster movement?

A loose, noisy, well-financed campaign by American adventurers to seize territory in Latin America, Cuba and the Pacific, and turn it into slave or free states of the Union. It drew on the same ideology as Manifest Destiny — that American institutions should spread by any means — and on a specific legal fact: the neutrality laws of 1818 made it illegal to launch a military expedition from the United States against a country at peace, and those laws were almost impossible to enforce against a popular hero.

The filibusters had newspapers, bankers, recruiters, veterans of the Mexican War and a sympathetic public. Their expeditions failed almost every time, and each failure produced memoirs, trials and more recruits. Walker was the most successful of them, in the sense that he actually governed a country for a year — Nicaragua — before he lost it.

What happened in 1853?

He sailed from San Francisco in mid-October 1853 — cleared on 15 October, and at sea on the night of 16–17 October according to the closest accounts, though two contemporary chroniclers give 15 October — with about forty-five men and a small schooner. He touched at Cabo San Lucas on 28 October, took La Paz on 3 November, and issued a proclamation the same day declaring Baja California independent.

The proclamation promised a "republic" with liberty, property and religion guaranteed, and invited immigration. It was followed by decrees on 7 November and an address on 30 November, and by a march north when the expected reinforcements and supplies failed to arrive. The Mexicans resisted, the Americans in California did not rally, and by January Walker was at the border of Sonora with a dwindling force.

What did he actually claim?

More than he held. On 18 January 1854, at a camp he named Fort McKibbin, he issued four decrees: renaming the territory the Republic of Sonora, annexing Sonora to it, dividing the whole into two states — Sonora and Baja California — with defined boundaries, and appointing himself president. Neither state existed under his control; Sonora was never entered by his force.

The flag was a barred design with two stars, one for each claimed state — Horace Bell called it "triple-barred and twin-starred", and contemporaries called the venture the "Twin-Star Republic". It is a good emblem of the whole affair: a flag for two states, one of which he never set foot in.

Why Baja California and Sonora?

Because they were close, weak and empty — in the American imagination. San Francisco was full of men who had come west for gold and found nothing, and Baja California was a week's sail away with a small population and no garrison worth the name. Sonora added silver mines, fertile river valleys and a route to the Gulf of California.

The filibusters also believed that the locals would welcome them, or at least not resist. That belief was wrong in every case. The Mexican population of Baja California was small but not passive, and the expedition's arrival united the local authorities against it. Filibustering was a project built on contempt for the people it proposed to govern, and contempt is a poor guide to intelligence.

How was the expedition organised?

In the open, in San Francisco. Walker recruited publicly, sold shares in the venture's expected land, bought a schooner and provisions, and sailed with the connivance of local officials who did not enforce the neutrality laws. The San Francisco Herald and other papers covered the departure as an adventure; the Mexican consulate protested, and the federal authorities in California moved slowly.

The force was small because the money was short. Some forty-five men sailed, most of them veterans of the Mexican War or of earlier filibusters, with a handful of officers — including Burton, a captain, not the general that some accounts make him. When they landed, they found no supplies waiting, no friendly population, and a Mexican garrison that knew they were coming.

Why did it fail?

Because filibustering required money, men and a blind eye, and Walker had none of them in sufficient quantity. The expedition was small, its supplies ran out, the Mexican authorities resisted, and the expected American volunteers did not appear — partly because the news from Baja was bad, and partly because the United States was enforcing its neutrality laws more seriously than the filibusters had hoped.

The force split, and Walker retreated to San Diego, where he surrendered to American authorities on 8 May 1854. His men were paroled — the parole document carries thirty-three signatures — and the republic ended not in battle but in a border town, with a legal argument about whether he had broken the law.

What was the Mexican response?

Prompt and local. The authorities in Baja California had few troops, but they had the population, the terrain and the warning that an expedition was coming, and they harassed Walker's column as it moved north. The Mexican government protested to Washington, which was embarrassed: the United States was at peace with Mexico, and the expedition was a private war launched from an American port.

The contrast with Texas is instructive. In 1836 the Mexican state was collapsing and the settlers had numbers; in 1853 Mexico was a functioning republic with an army, and Walker had forty-five men. Filibustering worked against weak or distant states, not against a government that could send a column.

What happened to Walker?

He was tried in federal court in San Francisco for violating the neutrality laws, and the jury acquitted him in eight minutes. The trial was the movement's real triumph: it established that a filibuster could launch an illegal war and face no consequence, which is why the expeditions continued.

Walker went to Nicaragua in 1855, made himself president in 1856, was driven out in 1857, and returned twice more before he was captured by the Royal Navy and handed to the Hondurans, who shot him at Trujillo in September 1860. The phrase "the grey-eyed man of destiny" was coined in Nicaragua in 1856, in the newspaper El Nicaraguense — not in Baja California, where nobody called him anything so flattering.

What did contemporaries think?

Two things at once. The American press treated the filibusters as reckless but romantic — the trial's eight-minute acquittal is a verdict on public opinion as much as on the evidence — while the Mexican and Latin American press treated them as pirates, which is the word Bancroft used. Britain and France, whose shipping and commerce were at risk, regarded filibustering as a violation of international law that the United States refused to suppress.

The Baja episode was reported in San Francisco as a failure, not a scandal. Walker lost men, money and the territory, and the public read about it as an adventure that had gone wrong. The legal question — whether an American could launch a war from American soil — was answered by the acquittal, and the answer was yes.

Was it a slavery conspiracy?

Historians have argued about this, and the answer is: partly, and not only. The older literature — Scroggs (1916) and Wyllys (1933) — rejected the idea that the Baja expedition was a slaveholders' plot, noting that Walker's own proclamations said nothing about slavery and that his backers were expansionists of various kinds. The later work — May's 2006 lecture especially — restores slavery to the picture: the filibusters' vision of new slave states, and the support they received from Southern interests, were real.

The honest position is that Walker's motives were personal and political rather than sectional, and that the movement he belonged to was deeply entangled with slavery. He was not sent by the South; he was useful to it.

What did it leave behind?

A precedent, a phrase and a warning. The acquittal showed that the neutrality laws were unenforceable against a popular adventurer, and the expeditions that followed — Walker's own in Nicaragua, and the others in Cuba, Honduras and Mexico — drew on the same network of financiers, newspapers and veterans.

Bancroft's verdict is the one that has lasted: Walker "dwells in memory as a pirate". The republic he declared has no institutional legacy at all — no constitution, no laws, no administration, no recognition — which is exactly what its founder intended: it was a claim to be traded, not a state to be governed.

The episode also marks a turning point in American expansion. The Mexican War had ended in 1848 with the annexation of half of Mexico; the filibusters tried to continue that expansion by private means, and they failed. The Civil War, four years later, ended the movement by consuming the men, money and political energy that had sustained it.

Baja California therefore belongs with the Texas republic and the Bear Flag as a frontier experiment, and with the later filibusters as a symptom of a republic that could not stop its citizens from making war. It is the smallest of them and the most nakedly mercenary: a country invented on a piece of paper at Fort McKibbin, with a flag for two states and an army of forty-five men.

Common myths about the Republic of Baja California

Timeline of the Republic of Baja California

What the map shows next

At 1853 on the map the republic is a fortnight old, and the Bear Flag is seven years in the past.

At 1856 on the map Walker is president of Nicaragua, and the Confederacy is five years away.