The would-be nation builder carved out private fiefdoms in Central America before falling to a Honduran firing squad. (Photo from Our First Century, by R.M. Devens, C.A. Nichols & Co., Springfield, Mass., 1876)

'The spectacle of a man still in his 20s, with some two-score social misfits as his total support, solemnly explaining to 25 million people why he had seen fit to create a new nation on their borders, needs the pen of a Cervantes to do it full justice'

For a man who assembled personal armies, invaded foreign lands and even carved out his own countries, William Walker wasn't much to look at. At 5 feet 2 inches and 120 pounds, with a slender frame and thinning hair, he appeared frail, and with his somber dress and mild manner he was easily mistaken for a man of the cloth. The last thing one might take Walker for was a fighting man. And yet, as one contemporary noted: "Anyone who estimated Mr. Walker by his personal appearance made a great mistake. He arrested your attention with the first word he uttered, and as he proceeded, you felt convinced that he was no ordinary person." Charismatic almost in spite of himself, William Walker dramatically embodied the adventuresome spirit and philosophy of 1850s America.

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Born in 1824 in Nashville, Tenn., Walker was a prodigy. He attended the University of Nashville, graduating at the top of his class at 14. He studied at the universities of Heidelberg, Edinburgh and Paris and earned a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania at 19. Walker practiced medicine in Philadelphia, grew weary of it and moved to New Orleans to study and practice law. Tiring of that, he became a founding partner in the New Orleans Crescent, at which he employed an aspiring young poet named Walt Whitman.

Walker was ill at ease staying long in one place, and when his fiancée died during a cholera epidemic, he moved to San Francisco. The year was 1849, and the Gold Rush was in full swing. Adventure seekers, fortune hunters, gamblers and rogues flooded California, and the peripatetic 25-year-old was right at home. He briefly resumed his newspaper career, then again practiced law.

In 1853 Walker decided to establish a republic of his very own, inside Mexico.

He could not have picked a more auspicious time to try his hand at nation-building. American independence was scarcely 60 years old, and the brash young American eagle was spreading its wings. The nation had fought two wars with Great Britain and, as one early chronicler noted, "Success in the struggle for existence had produced unbounded egotism and self-confidence." Many Americans believed that territorial expansion was not just a right but an obligation. Bombastic newspaperman and Democratic rabble-rouser John L. O'Sullivan gave a name to this belief in the rightness of unbridled national acquisition: Manifest Destiny.

The United States had already taken huge pieces of land from Mexico, adding Texas and California to the Union, and had purchased the vast Louisiana Territory from France. Central America now beckoned, as did the islands of Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Cuba. And while the United States had signed a treaty with Great Britain, ensuring a hands-off policy in Central America, American adventurers regarded the agreement as merely a minor impediment. These men came to be known as "filibusters."

For most modern Americans, the term "filibuster" evokes images of long-winded senators seeking to drown opponents' legislation in a sea of words. In the 1840s and 1850s, however, filibuster had a different, darker and more exotic meaning. The term is derived from the Dutch word vrijbuiter, which translates as "freebooter." The Spanish corrupted the term, and from their filibustero came the English version, which meant plunderer or pirate. In the words of a former filibuster, it came to mean "adventurers who, during the decade preceding the Civil War, were engaged in fitting out and conducting under private initiative armed expeditions from the United States against other nations with which this country was at peace." Some of these adventurers meant to annex their new kingdoms to the United States, and as the Southern states particularly supported and encouraged the filibusters, the newly acquired lands would join the Union as slave states. Others merely sought the opportunity to carve out private fiefdoms by force.

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