In the 1850s, Californians’ disregard for domestic law, as seen in vigilantism, was mirrored in breaches of international law as well. Such breaches were evidenced in the many unauthorized, illegal, and aggressive expeditions on the part of the state’s filibustering citizens in foreign countries throughout the Pacific Basin. Filibustering was not uniquely a Californian phenomenon; adventurers from other states as well were involved. Yet the Golden State assuredly had more than its share of intruders on foreign soil. Nearly all of the state’s filibustering exploits were launched from San Francisco and were of a maritime nature, occurring in areas accessed by Pacific waters. These areas included Sonora, Baja California, Hawai’i, Central America, and Ecuador. Though not necessarily intending to extend the state’s influence across borders and into these areas, filibusterers nevertheless had the effect of doing just that - in a sense, fashioning a greater California.
Joseph C. Morehead was California’s first filibusterer. As a former military supply officer, he had access to surplus goods, including the ship Josephine. In the spring of 1851 he sailed southward with some 200 men to La Paz, expecting to seize Mexican land for the United States. After engaging in some trading there, his force dispersed. A second attachment of Morehead’s men traveled overland through Los Angeles toward the Sonora frontier. It, too, disbanded. Morehead, himself, led a third, seaborne, contingent headed for Mazatlan that narrowly escaped arrest in San Diego. Mexican officials awaited him, though on arrival they found no weapons or munitions aboard Morehead’s vessel. Nothing came of the ill-fated venture.
In November 1851, San Francisco filibusterers again targeted Sonora. This time 88 Frenchmen from that city sailed for the Mexican harbor at Guaymas, on the Sea of Cortes. The anchorage was a gateway to the Sonora frontier. On arriving they established a mining and agricultural colony, which aimed also at pacifying the Apache, who soon ran off with the colony’s livestock. The settlement dissolved, only to be succeeded by another venture involving San Franciscan Frenchmen. Still looking for a colony to buffer Apache attacks and invest in a French mining enterprise, some Mexican officials in Sonora again invited French filibusterers in San Francisco to establish a settlement in their frontier province. The Mexican population of the province was not pleased about this seeming foreign invasion. In 1852, 240 or so filibusterers disembarked at Guaymas, and marched headlong into strong resistance from Sonorans. Count Gaston de Raousset-Boulbon, the French group’s reckless leader, thereafter shuttled between Guaymas, San Francisco, and Mexico City, preparing for yet another incursion. This time he sailed southward to Mexico with 400 men aboard an overloaded schooner. Their defeat in the Battle of Guaymas on July 13, 1854, dealt the final blow to French filibustering from California.
In November 1851 Sam Brannan of San Francisco led a filibustering expedition of some 25 Californians, who sailed aboard the clipper Game Cock to Hawai’i. They believed false rumors that King Kamehameha III wanted to abdicate and sell his kingdom. News of their plans leaked out. At the request of the Hawaiian cabinet, the warship U. S.S. Vandalia was kept at Honolulu to defend the island kingdom against the California filibusterers. The intruders found that the king would not see them, native Hawaiians would not help them, and American whalers in the islands opposed their plans. The undertaking ended in a fiasco. During the next three years a number of Californians immigrated to Hawai’i. Officials in the islands viewed these arrivals as restless, ambitious men with revolution in mind. Their presence probably contributed to the ongoing rumors buzzing about Hawai’i of new filibustering expeditions being outfitted in California.
While the credibility of such rumors remains doubtful, what is certain is that in the early 1850s some Golden State members of Congress urged the American annexation of Hawai’i to defend the West Coast and, especially, advance the California-Pacific-China trade. California Representative J. W. McCorkle, for example, stated in a House speech on November 22, 1852: “It is essential to our Pacific interests that we should have the possession of the Sandwich Islands [as they were often called then], and upon this point the people of California will speak with one voice.” By the 1850s, in short, filibustering was merely one link in an ever-growing California-Hawai’i connection.
Perhaps the most publicized of California’s filibustering expeditions were those of William Walker in Central America. The so-called “grey-eyed man of destiny,” Walker practiced both medicine and law in the South before relocating to San Francisco, from where he launched a number of forays into lands south of the border. Though he intruded in Baja California and Sonora, his name is most closely linked with Nicaragua, where from 1855 to 1857 he attempted to establish himself as a dictator. His original force of 56 armed men eventually grew to over 2,000 American mercenaries who heeded his promise of pay and land bonuses. Transportation magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt employed Walker’s army briefly in hopes of stabilizing Nicaragua’s politics sufficiently for Vanderbilt and his business partners to rake in profits from their shipping and rail transit service across the Central American nation. When Walker proved conniving and unreliable, Vanderbilt aided disaffected Nicaraguans in overthrowing him in the so-called revolution of 1857. Undaunted, the filibusterer made two attempts to retake the country. Both failed, followed by his capture off the coast of Honduras by a British sea captain who turned him over to the Hondurans. On September 12, 1860, they summarily shot and killed him.
A few years earlier, farther southward along Latin America’s Pacific Coast, a band of Californians intervened in Ecuador’s politics. A former president of that nation, Juan Jose Flores, had been overthrown, and in 1852 he attempted to regain his office. Forty or so Californians voyaged to that troubled land to reinstate Flores. An explosion aboard their vessel took the lives of half of the force, and the venture thereafter petered out.
So ended some but by no means all of the inglorious escapades of Californians in foreign parts of the Pacific region. In the mid-nineteenth century few, if any, other states had populations as restless at home and as meddlesome abroad as California. Meanwhile, a great clash of arms was about to erupt on America’s eastern seaboard. Though distant from where the battles would be waged, California’s role in the impending hostilities would be consequential.
World History
