Filibustering

America's most successful and most notorious filibuster, William Walker (1824-1860).

​About a month ago ten individuals were shot or detained by Cuban authorities just off the northern coast of Cuba. Officials claimed the group was attempting to infiltrate Cuba, with unspecified “terrorist” aims in mind. Among the dead was a US citizen, one other US citizen was apprehended. Apparently the rest of the group were permanent US residents of one sort or another. There has been only sporadic follow-up reporting on what appears to be a highly unusual incident: a small party of armed Americans attempting to invade a sovereign foreign country inside the Western hemisphere.
 
For students of US diplomatic history, the affair is really not so unusual at all:

​If one is conspiracy minded, this Cuban incursion may seem to resemble the break in at the Watergate Hotel: bumbling street-level hoods, obviously in over their depth, caper their way into a much larger crime of which they themselves are hardly aware. But for folks knowledgeable about nineteenth century US history, there is a plainer, if no less ludicrous, antecedent in the activities of American adventurers known as filibusters.
 
Most Americans know the word “filibustering” as it pertains to the traditions of the US Senate—the determination by a steadfast opponent of a piece of legislation to hold the Senate floor in debate and thereby stall further action on a despised bill. The word, however, actually derives from the Dutch vrijbuiter (literally, “free looter”) and means something close to “pirate” or “buccaneer.” It has been borrowed several times, and eventually made its way back into English to denote the obstructionism and illegitimacy that opponents of legislative filibustering sought to discredit.
 
In the nineteenth century, the word was applied with less poetic license to swarms of American adventurers who, like the buccaneers they were, sought to invade and conquer foreign lands, usually on the cusp of, and as early avatars of, American expansionism. This is a story of which I suspect many Americans are unaware, but the practice caused significant concern, generated much domestic and foreign policy (including helping to bring on the Civil War), and defines and symbolizes important elements of American culture still with us.
 
Between 1800 and 1860 thousands of American men sought foreign adventure, riches, and a name for themselves by staging invasions of foreign lands. Many of these adventures never went beyond the planning stage, and all that did ended in dismal failure. The most famous example, perhaps, was the abortive and still-unclear adventure proposed by Aaron Burr after he left the vice presidency. Burr seems to have concocted a plot whereby, using his influence and international connections, he would foment a war between the US and the Spanish empire, thereby somehow carving out an independent nation—governed by himself, of course—in the newly acquired and still disputed lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Burr was tried for treason, though eventually acquitted. Despite the outcome of the trial, the affair was prelude to a half-century’s worth of ambition, greed, and romance within a United States where the institutions of governance remained weak and the myths of endless opportunity strong.

The trial of Aaron Burr.

​No doubt many were inspired by Andrew Jackson’s questionable incursion into Florida in 1817, for which he dubiously claimed official sanction from Washington. Filibustering attained its preeminence in the 1830s and 40s and helped fuel at least some of the political pressure that led to the Mexican-American War of 1846. In one well-publicized adventure, Narciso López attempted to invade Cuba in 1850 and overthrow Spanish rule on the island. He was executed by Spanish authorities for his troubles.

Depiction of the fateful landing of Lopez.

​The most successful filibustering incursion was undoubtedly the one led by William Walker. In the earlier part of the 1850s Walker had organized failed filibustering expeditions to take parts of Mexico. In 1855 he set his eyes on Nicaragua, leading a successful military takeover there. Walker actually achieved the presidency of Nicaragua for about a year, 1856-7 and the Pierce administration recognized Walker’s government as legitimate. But Walker ran afoul of powerful American commercial interests as well as earning the odium of the British government. He was forced to resign in 1857 but he never gave up his ambitions and sought again to put together a fresh invasion in the isthmus. Arrested by British authorities, Walker was tried and executed by Honduras. Hollywood made a strange and uneven movie out of Walker’s life starring the magnetic Ed Harris, but one thinks that the material is ripe for a revisit.

Depiction of the execution of William Walker.

Mexico, ​Cuba, and Nicaragua were the usual targets, but not every greedy eye looked south. There were filibuster expeditions to Canada, seeking to complete the northern annexations which the formal war strategies of 1812 had failed to achieve. Rensselaer van Rensselaer led a series of violent incursions across the US-Canadian border in 1837, hoping to lead a revolution that would dislodge the British government from the continent. Hundreds of Americans participated in a listless campaign that lasted several years before petering out.
 
As Robert E. May points out, it wasn’t merely economic opportunism that motivated the filibusters. These were usually unlettered men, many without better prospects, who grew up in a romantic age, inspired by the chivalrous courtly tales of Walter Scott and the myths and legends of their own forebears. They saw themselves as knights-errant, brave trailblazers opening the future for their more timid countrymen.  
 
Filibusters did not operate in a political vacuum. Many filibustering expeditions claimed official patronage from state and federal governing authorities. Well-known Mississippi politician John Anthony Quitman, active in state politics throughout the 1830s and 40s, was serving as governor of Mississippi when he sponsored López’s Cuban expedition. Quitman was tried for violations of the 1818 Neutrality Act but avoided conviction and returned to politics as a member of the House of Representatives in the 1850s. The line between private ambition and public authorization was never perfectly clear for the filibusters. As May writes, “there were occasions when federal authorities found it convenient to overlook, or even assist, filibuster plots in the expectation that they might eventuate in US territorial growth” (May, Manifest Destiny's Underworld, 7).

While federal authorities generally tried to stamp out filibustering, the fact is that filibustering expeditions derived from the same cultural and economic impulses that drove US foreign policy throughout the era, and beyond. Despite the scruples of some officials, the line between public policy and private initiative blurred beyond recognition. Jackon’s adventures, the territorial ambitions of the Mexican War, Matthew Perry’s forced “opening” of Japan in 1854, the Spanish-American War of 1898 were all acts of aggression and expansion that, though conducted under the color of law, breathed the spirit, even the impulsiveness, of the filibusters. Buccaneering enforcement and acts of expansion continued well into the twentieth century. Under the Wilson and Coolidge administrations, expeditions to Haiti, Nicaragua, and elsewhere continued apace throughout the 1920s. The Kennedy, Johnson, and Reagan administrations followed suit.
 
Emily Rosenberg has much to say about how by the twentieth century the expansionist impulse was absorbed by more respectable commercial interests. But the impulse itself, of voracious expansion with little real interest in legality or morality, has hardly gone away. The White House’s current real or perceived threats to Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, Palestine, and Iran seem strangely familiar for all their outrageous bellicosity. Venture capitalism and the boundless imaginations of the tech sector embody the not-dormant filibustering impulse: Consider Elon Musk’s mission to Mars, from which a considered public debate seems wholly absent.
 
Filibustering is a synecdoche of the larger American imperial ethos which it both illustrates and motivates: the refusal to face problems at home, the determination to export those problems abroad.
 
We’ll discuss filibustering in greater detail in my upcoming module on US diplomatic history. For now, I highly recommend Robert E. May’s Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America (North Carolina, 2002). It’s fast-paced, colorful, and highly illuminating.
 
—David J. Snyder