Australian Anxieties about the Neighbourhood: 19th Century French New Caledonia, an Uncomfortable Presence in a “British Lake”

Posted on by Sloane Snodgrasse
International Relations, Political geography, Racial politics, Regional History

These days the Australian government it seems welcomes the French presence in New Caledonia. Canberra offered a tacit endorsement of France’s retention of its colonial hold over New Caledonia following the recent referendum which voted for a second time against independence for the French Pacific colony. From a geopolitical standpoint it seems that it is in Canberra’s interest for the French, a Western naval power, to continue to have a stake in the Pacific…as it constitutes the existence of a “significant counterweight” to the uncertain but fluid intentions of China in respect of the western Pacific [‘Australia is part of a Black region; it should recognise Kanaky ambition in New Caledonia’, (Hamish McDonald), The Guardian, 25-Oct-2020, www.theguardian.com].

Noumea, NC ▵

A look back into history reveals that Australia hasn’t always been as sanguine about the French settlement in its near Pacific island neighbour. The French connection with New Caledonia formally began in 1853 when it established a colony, settling a small expat population from Metropolitan France. Prior to this time the British through its colony in New South Wales had assumed a sort of “titular control” of New Caledonia❋. As well as being within the British-Australian sphere of influence, there was a pre-existing triangular trade between Australia, the New Caledonian islands and China… Australian merchants traded iron and metal utensils and tools and tobacco for sandalwood with the native (Kanak) population, which the merchants then exchanged with China for tea [‘The Perils of Proximity: The Geopolitical Underpinnings of Australia’s View of New Caledonia In The 19th Century’, (Elizabeth Rechniewski), Portal. 2015. Vol 12, No 1. http://doi.org/10.5130/portal.V12i1.4095].

France’s decision to annex New Caledonia (NC)—a further sign to the British of French imperial designs in the south Pacific after its earlier acquisition of Tahiti—prompted a considerable degree of commotion within the Australian colonies. They criticised the colonial office in London for being lax in not having secured the colonisation of NC by Britain to block just such a takeover by the French. Australian newspapers like the Moreton Bay Courier had been warning for some time of NC’s suitability as an ideal location for a naval station from which to attack the Australian coast (Rechiewski).

Pacific pénitentaires◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌Australian concerns and anxieties grew exponentially in 1864 when the French turned NC into a penal colony using Britain’s penal system as a model – prisons were established at two locations, at Île Nou (Noumea Bay) on Grande Terre (NC’s main island), and a second pénitentaire on Île des Pins (Isle of Pines, or Kunié in Melanesian culture)✪. The outcry from the press in Australia and from some politicians against the French presence intensified…a NSW colonial secretary urged Britain take diplomatic action to discourage Paris from continuing the transportation of “these scum of France”.  The intensity of Australian hostility to the NC penal colony, has led one historian to suggest that the fierceness of the opposition may have reflected an element of post-convict shame” within Australian society itself, given that transportation to Australia had only recently been ended [Jill Donohoo, ‘Australian Reactions to the French Penal Colony in New Caledonia’, Explorations: A Journal of French-Australian Connections, 54, 25-45, www.isfar.org.au].

▿ Isle of Pines: vestiges du Bagne (Photo: Marco Ramerini/www.colonialvoyage.com)

19th century “boat people”: Apprehensive eyes looking west ◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌ ◌◌◌◌ In the last quarter of the century the principal external anxiety, especially for Queenslanders and New South Welshmen, was the fear of ‘invasion’ from bagnards or forçats (convicts) in NC. Many east coasters on the mainland were fixated on the threat of convicts—either having escaped from the NC colony or whose sentences had expired or had been pardoned—coming to Australia. Although perhaps exaggerated in actual numbers involved, the incidence of arrivals was more than merely perception, with periodic if isolated boatloads landing mainly on the Queensland coast (also in NSW and some reached New Zealand). With France flagging its intent to increase its transportation of habitual criminals to NC in the 1880s, anxieties further intensified. An additional concern was that in the event of a war erupting between France and Britain, France might unleash boatloads of the most dangereux kind of convicts in menacing numbers onto coastal Australian towns. A French proposal at the time to up the annual transportation numbers of bagnards including lifers to NC and to extend transportation to the adjoining Loyalty Islands as well, did nothing to abate Australian apprehensions [‘The problem of French escapees from New Caledonia’, (Clem Llewellyn Lack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 5, No. 3, 1954].

Queensland’s northward anxieties◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌At the same time the Queensland colonial government in particular was equally anxious about imperial German ambitions in the region. Fear of German intentions to annex the eastern half of New Guinea to its immediate north, prompted Queensland first to push the colonial office in London to ratify a British protectorate over the southern portion of  eastern New Guinea, and then to unilaterally and rashly plunge ahead with its own plans for annexation in 1883 [‘Queensland’s Annexation of Papua: A Background to Anglo-German Friction’, (Peter Overlack), Journal of the Royal Historical Society of Queensland, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1979].

Conditions in the Île des Pins were of an extreme nature, the bagnards were subjected to cellular isolation, material deprivation and endemic disease, and worse, they were brutalised, beaten and tortured by the guards. The severity of their treatment was conceivably aggravated by the invidious situation of the wardens who themselves were in a kind of “occupational neverworld” (Toth). Entrapped in a low pay, no future work environment, the  guards were looked on by both administrators and prisoners as merely “loathed turnkeys” [‘The Lords of Discipline. The Penal Colony Guards of New Caledonia and Guyana’, (Stephen A Toth). Crime, Histoire and Sociétés. Vol. 7. No. 2, 2003. Varia. http://doi.org/10.4000/che.544].

Memorial to 1871 political deportes, Île des Pins

By the time France ceased transportation to the Nouvelle Calédonia pénitentaires in 1897—a decision prompted by the economic failure of using bagnard labour to colonise NC rather than by any humanitarian motives—anywhere up to a total of 40,000 convicts had been transported since 1864. This included some 5,000 political prisoners – the Communards, transported for their involvement in the Paris Commune revolt at the end of Napoleon III’s disastrous 1870 war with Prussia (Lack).

Spying for the nation, the first tentative steps ◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌◌ Nouvelle Calédonia and other Pacific islands played a role in the formative days of Australia’s espionage history. In 1902 Major William Bridges, acting on orders from the commander of the Australian land forces General Hutton, undertook a military spy mission to NC with the purpose of ascertaining the strength of fortifications in the French Pacific colony. Bridges came to this task already with experience of intelligence work having been on a mission to Samoa in 1896 to suss out German designs for the island [‘The growth of the Australian intelligence community and the Anglo-American connection’, (Christopher Andrew), Intelligence and National Security, Vol. 4, 1989 – Issue 2, 218-256, http://doi.org/10.1080/02684528908431996; Richard Hall, The Secret State: Australia’s Spy Industry, (1978)].

Aside from having French and German ambitions in the region to worry about, the Australian colonies from the 1890s had a new threat to preoccupy them, Japan. Through a series of bold and aggressive moves—annexing Formosa (Taiwan) and Korea , establishing a foothold on the Chinese mainland, and in defeating Tsarist Russia in a Pacific war—Japan signalled it’s arrival as a force in the Asia/Pacific region, and a rival to British-Australian (or Australasian) dominance in the western Pacific. As the 20th century progressed Australian anxieties about the “Japanese menace” would reach a level of hysteria. 

  PostScript: New Hebrides – contested ground ◌◌◌◌◌ ◌◌By the 1880s the Australian colonies’ concern about the French in NC had extended to elsewhere in Oceania, especially its ambitions for nearby New Hebrides (NH). Some in Australia feared that France might use NC as a base to annex Nouvelles-Hebrides and energies in Australia were directed at ensuring the British government blocked any French attempts to plant the French tricolour on the island group. In 1886 France did just this, establishing military posts with small detachments of troops at two ports, Havannah and Sandwich. The Queensland government, alarmed that this presaged French intentions to also use NH as a convict dump, pressured London into securing assurances from Paris to the contrary (Lack).

Condominium compromise Notwithstanding this, the French maintained a presence in NH and tensions between the British and French on the islands persisted, including some violent exchanges between the two groups. In 1904-06 a curious solution of sorts was reached with an accord in which both sides made concessions⚉, future governance of NH was to comprise an Anglo-French Condominium. This created a dual system with separate administrations (known as residencies) in Port Vila, police forces, prisons and hospitals▣. The French and British residencies had control over their own ressortissants (‘nationals’) with separate Francophone and Anglophone communities – which led to the inevitable communication difficulties. All of this administrative duplication proved unwieldy and at times unworkable. In the middle of what some cynics tagged “the Pandemonium” rather than the Condominium were the disadvantaged indigenous population of NH, the Ni-Vanuatu who were left stateless (proving difficulties for some of them later trying to travel overseas when they found that they lacked a proper passport) [‘New Hebrides’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org; Lack]. The unique if bothersome governance arrangement continued until 1980 when the island state finally gained independence as Vanuatu.

↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜↝↜

❋ the island chain’s first visit from a European was by Captain Cook in 1774 who gave it its name but didn’t formally claim if for Great Britain

✪ prior to colonising New Caledonia France had shown an interest in the southwestern region of Australia as a possible repository to offload criminals from overcrowded French jails [Bennett, B. (2006). In the Shadows: The Spy in Australian Literary and Cultural History. Antipodes, 20(1), 28-37. Retrieved November 2, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org./stable/41957504]. A few French convicts were despatched to a spot in the Pacific even more remote, Tahiti

⚉ France recognised the British occupation of Egypt in return for recognition of its interests in Morocco

▣ though there was a Joint Court established for all residents

Germania: From Nazi Showcase Airport to the People’s “Symbol der Freiheit”

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Built Environment, Heritage & Conservation, Regional History

Few places in Germany and Berlin have experienced the journey of change and transition that Tempelhof Airport (Flughafen Berlin-Tempelhof) has. The Nazis commenced the construction of its colossal showcase airport in 1936 on the site of a pre-existing (Weimar Republic-built) airport. Even in its pre-airport days, it’s land use had a nexus with aviation – from 1887 it was home to a balloon detachment of the Prussian Army.

⇡ der Berliner Garnison

Prior to it becoming an airport in the 1920s Tempelhof Field was used primarily as a military parade ground, and in addition it played an early role in the development of Berlin football (the pioneering BFC Fortuna club). It’s next brush with aeronautical endeavour came in 1909 when US aviator Orville Wright took the brothers’ bi-plane, the ‘Wright Flyer’, for a spin around the field.

A mega-scale marvel of civil engineering
Built on a scale❋ to be in synch with the values of strength and power projected by the rest of Hitler’s Germania building ‘Fantasia’^^, Tempelhof—the name derives from it having originally been land occupied by the medieval Order of Knights Templars—was an “icon of Nazi architecture: (with a complex of) huge austere buildings in totalitarian style (in the shape of a quadrant up to 1.2 km in length), replete with imposing imperial eagles made from stone” [‘Berlin: A historic airport reinvents itself’, (Eric Johnson), Julius Bär, 28-May-2019, www.juliusbar.com]. Designed for the Führer by Ernst Sagebiel, the out of all proportion complex boasted 9,000 rooms, multiple entrance doors, reliefs and sculptures including a giant aluminium eagle head◰.

Located just four kilometres south of Berlin’s central Tiergarten, the Nazi airport was notably innovative in its day – eg, separate levels for passengers and luggage; windows spanning the floor-to-ceiling to convey as much light as possible inside the terminal [‘The story of Berlin’s WWII Tempelhof Airport which is now Germany’s largest refugee shelter’, (Sam Shead), The Independent, 20-Jun-2017, www.independent.co.uk].

⇡ The vast and cavernous main hall
(Tempelhof Projekt GmbH,www.thf-Berlin.de)

Tempelhof Airport was only ever 80% completed (constructed halted in 1939 with the outbreak of war), and ironically, never used by the Nazis as an airport (they continued to use the original terminal for flights). Instead, the regime used it for armament production and storage, and during the war it served as a prison and a forced-labour plane assembly factory [‘A brief history of Tempelhofer Feld’, (Ian Farrell), Slow Travel Berlin, www.slowtravelberlin.com].

Cold War Tempelhof
After WWII the airport was placed under the jurisdiction of the occupying American forces (under the term of the Potsdam Agreement which formally divided Berlin into four distinct occupation sectors). The airport played a key role in the Berlin Airlift (1948/49) and throughout the Cold War was the main terminal used by the US military to enter West Berlin. To increase Tempelhof’s civil aviation capacity US engineers constructed new runways. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification, the American military presence in Berlin wound up (formally deactivated in 1994). Tempelhof continued to be used as a commercial airport but increasingly it was being used primarily for small commuter flights to and from regional destinations [‘Berlin Tempelhof Airport’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

(Photo: www.urban75.org/)

A post-aviation future space
In 2008 Tempelhof, partly derelict, was discontinued as an airport. Berliners were polled about its future with the majority wanting to keep it free from redevelopment, a free space for the community. Accordingly, the land was given over to public use. Once a symbol of Nazi brutalist architecture, today its grounds are open to the citizenry as an expression of their freedom. The place is regularly a hive of multi-purpose activity, Berliners engaging in a range of leisure, exercise and cultural pursuits – jogging, cycling, roller-blading, skateboarding, kite-flying, picnicking, trade and art fairs, musical events, etc…the former airport has also been used as film locations (eg, The Bourne Supremacy, Hunger Games) and even as the venue for Formula E motor-racing⧆.

⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅⑅
^^ see the previous post, ‘Germania: Mega-City Stillborn: Hitler’s Utopian Architectural Dream’

⌓⌓⌓   ⌓⌓⌓   ⌓⌓⌓

❋ the terminal is 300,000 square metres including hangar space, with an inner, 306- hectare airfield (Tempelhofer Feld)

◰ “the mother of all modern airports” (British architect Norman Foster)

⧆ at other times it has been a shelter for refugees

Germania, Mega-City Stillborn: Hitler’s Utopian Architectural Dream we

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Built Environment, International Relations, Regional History, Society & Culture

In Robert Harris’ speculative novel Fatherland—a “what if”/alternative view of postwar European history set in 1964—Adolf Hitler is very much alive, having won the Second World War. Through his “Greater German Reich” the Führer rules an empire stretching from “the Low Countries to the Urals” with Britain reduced to a not-very-significant client state. In the novel’s counterfactual narrative Hitler’s architect Albert Speer has completed part of Hitler’s grand building project for Berlin – including the 120m high “Triumphal Arch” and the “Great Hall of the Reich” (the “largest building in the world”). We know that none of the above scenario came to fruition, but we do know from history that part of Hitler’s plans post-victory (if he won) was to radically transform the shape and appearance of his capital city Berlin.

Weltreich or Europareich?
Under a future German empire, Berlin, to be known as Germania※, would be the showcase capital. Historians are divided over whether the Nazis’ ultimate goal was global dominance (Weltherrschaft)—in which case Germania would be Hitler’s Welthauptstadt (‘world capital’)—or was more limited in its objective, intent on creating a European-wide reich only (as posited by AJP Taylor et al). Either way, Hitler’s imperial capital was to be built on a monumental scale and grandeur which reflected the “1,000-Year Reich” and its stellar story of military conquests and expansion – in effect a theatrical showcase for the regime [‘Story of cities #22: how Hitler’s plans for Germania would have torn Berlin apart’, (Kate Connolly), The Guardian, 14-Apr-2016, www.theguardian.com].

Nazi utopia  
Showing off Germania to the world for the Führer was all about one-upping the capitalist West. Immense buildings symbolising the strength and power of Nazism convey a message of intimidation, a declaration that Hitler’s Germany could match and exceed the great metropolises like New York, Paris and London. Accordingly, the Hamburg suspension bridge had to be on a grander scale than its model in San Francisco, the constructed East-West Axis in Berlin had to outdo the massive Avenida 9 de Julio in Buenos Aires [Thies, Jochen, ‘Hitler’s European Building Programme’,  Journal of Contemporary History, July 1, 1978, http://doi.org/10.1177/002200947801300301].

Hitler & Speer: (Source: www.mirror.co.uk)

The architect/dictator
Hitler put Speer in charge of the massive project but always fancying himself as having the sensibility of an architect, Hitler retained a deep interest in its progress✪. Rejecting all forms of modernism▣ Hitler’s architectural preferences were rooted in the past – “Rome was his historical model and neoclassical architecture was his guiding aesthetic” [Meng, M. (2013). Central European History. 46 (3), 672-674. Retrieved October 24, 2020, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/43280636]. The Germania building projects writ on a gargantuan scale, were an unmistakable statement, a means for the dictatorship “to secure (its) place in history and immortalise (itself) and (its) ideas through (its) architecture [Colin Philpott, Relics of the Reich: The Buildings the Nazis Left Behind, (2016)].

(Source: http://the-man-in-the-high-castle.fandom.com/wiki/)

On the Germania drawing board
Taking pride of place, the architectural centrepiece of the Germania blueprint, was the Volkshalle (‘People’s Hall)✦, a staggeringly large edifice inspired by the Pantheon in Rome—a dome 290m high and 250m in diameter—which had it been completed would have been the largest enclosed space on Earth, capable of holding up to 180,000 people. Linking with the Volkshalle via an underground passageway similar to a Roman cryptoporticus was to be the palace of Hitler (Führerpalast). The monolithic domed People’s Hall would have dwarfed and obscured the close-by, existing structures, the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate.

Among a host of other uncompleted buildings in Germania was the Triumphal Arch (Trumpfbogen), at over 100m high three times the size of the iconic arch in Paris it was modelled on. Hitler’s utopian Berlin metropolis was scheduled for completion in 1950, the onset of war however delayed construction which then ceased for good after the Wehrmacht suffered serious setbacks on the Russian Front in 1943 [‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’, (Documentary, UKTV/SBS, 2020]. The Nazis planned thousands of kilometres of networks of motorways spanning the expanding empire (linking Germania with the Kremlin, Calais to Warsaw, Klagenfurt to Trondheim, etc). These too remained unrealised under the Third Reich (Thies). Another project reduced to a pipe dream was the Prachtallee (Avenue of Splendours), a north-south boulevard which was intended to bisect the East-West Axis.

Model of ‘Germania’

Costing Germania
The projected cost of all the regime’s building projects has been estimated at in excess of 100 billion Reichsmarks (Thies). But for the Nazis, how to bankroll a building venture of such Brobdingnagian proportions, was not a major concern. Their reasoning was that once victory was attained, the conquered nations would provide all of the labour and materials necessary for the construction projects (Connolly).

A slave-built Germania
German historian Jochen Thies’ pioneering study, Hitler’s Plans for World Domination: Nazi Architecture and Ultimate War Aims’ (English translation 2012), argues that as well as reintroducing the architectural solutions of  antiquity for its mega-city, the Nazi elite sought to replicate “the society and economy of that time, i.e. a slave-owning society”, as the basis for Hitler’s “fantasy world capital” (Thies). For a venture of such scale the program firstly needed ein großer Raum (a large space), requiring thousands of ordinary Germans, both Jews and Gentile, to be forcibly evicted from their homes which were then bulldozed✮. Concentration camps were established deliberately close to granite and marble quarries to facilitate the building projects…in proximity to Berlin, the Nazis used Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp (Oranienburg) for the slave and forced labour force⌖ [‘Inside Germania: Hitler’s massive Nazi utopia that never came to be’, Urban Planning’, (Chris Weller), Business Insider, 24-Dec-2015, www.businessinsider.com].

Germania – a Nazi utopia to see but a nightmarish dystopia to live in
The plan if it had been realised would have seen huge swathes of the city torn down to make way for the mega-construction mania. With a multiplicity of ring-roads, tunnels and autobahns, Germania would have been pedestrian-unfriendly, lacking in amenities for city-dwellers, sterile, not green (outside of the grand stadium there was no parks or major transit lines)…a city almost completely bereft of human dimension – what was once an attractive living space would have disappeared under the Third Reich’s urban planning imperatives (Roger Moorhouse in Weller).

Nuremberg: Macht des dritten Reiches (Source: The Art Newspaper)

Of course Berlin wasn’t the only city in the German Reich singled out to get an extreme physical makeover. Four other cities were also awarded special Führer City Status and earmarked for the same grandiose Nazi treatment – Linz (where Hitler grew up), Hamburg, Munich and Nuremberg. The last city, made famous for holding the mass Nuremberg party rallies, its Zeppelin Field Grandstand, now a racetrack, had a capacity for up to 150,000 party faithfuls.

Endnote: A neo-German city on the Vistula
The newly acquired lands of the empire were also subjected to the NSDAP urban transformation template. Warsaw was to be rebuilt as a new German city (the Pabst Plan⊞) – a living space for a select number of ‘Ayran’ Germans, while its more numerous, “non-Ayran” Polish residents were to be shepherded into a camp across the River Vistula, a separate but handily located slave labour force for the ‘renewal’ (i.e. rebuild) of Warsaw…had the Pabst Plan proceeded historic Polish culture in the city would have been obliterated in the upheaval (‘Hitler’s World: The Post War Plan’).

⧾𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪𝄪⧾

 

※ ‘Germania’ was the name ascribed to the lands of the Germanic peoples in Ancient Roman times

✪ Hitler had always been intrinsically interested in architecture, back in his Linz days the failed artist had been advised to take up architecture instead

▣ the same applies to art, Hitler rejected the modern movements like Cubism, Surrealism and Dada, labelling them “degenerate art”

✦ also known as the Große Halle, the ‘great hall’

✮ leading to a housing crisis in Berlin, aggravated by some over-zealous officials who destroyed houses prematurely and unnecessarily, simply in the hope of earning the Führer’s approval (Thies)

⌖ as demands for labour intensified, the Nazis widened the pool of forced labour to include PoWs and anyone deemed deviant by the state, ie, beggars, itinerants, Gypsies, leftists, homosexuals  (Connolly)

⊞ Pabst was the Nazis’ chief architect for Warsaw

The Filibustering Fifties: American Armed Incursions into the Mexican Frontier

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
International Relations, Military history, Regional History

Filibuster: a soldier of fortune who engages in military adventurism in a foreign country or territory to foment or support a revolution (flourished 1840s/1850s) [‘Filibuster (military)’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Also known as ‘freebooters’, they were privately organised, irregular soldiers or militia used to try to effect regime change or exploit a power vacuum. 

 

The 1850s coincided with a surge of filibuster activity launched from within the United States and targeted at Mexico. The majority of the filibuster expedition participants were Americans of Anglo-Saxon or Anglo-Celtic descent but there were other nationalities involved including French expeditions (eg, de Pindray, Raousset)✱.

What accounts for the massive spurt in filibuster ventures at this time? Conditions on both sides of the US and Mexican borders were conducive to their prevalence. A contributing factor was the inability or unwillingness of both sets of authorities to curb the filibusters. 

∆ “Republic of Sonoro” flag

An accessible and porous Mexican frontier
The area of the western border region—separating the new American state of California and the Territory of New Mexico (including Arizona) from the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonoro—was largely frontier land, lacking effective natural boundaries and sparsely populated at the time. The northern Sonoro part of the frontier in particular was a bit of a “no man’s land” and thus considered a “lawless zone”. The Mexican government lacked the resources and men to patrol the northern border properly. Indian raids from US territory into the Mexican frontier were common [Scott Martelle, in ‘Hundreds of 19th Century Americans Tried to Conquer Foreign Lands. This Man Was the Most Successful’, (Sarah Pruitt), History, 07-Mar-2019, www.history.com]. The government in Mexican City was doing little to redress the northern vulnerability, a plan to colonise (thus strengthening) Sonoro’s northern frontier, the Paredes Proyectos in 1850, was rejected by the Mexican National Congress. To the American filibusters, all of this made the prospect of invading Mexican territory more appealing.

∆ Filibuster militia in training (Source: Britannica).

US turns a blind eye to filibusters
Official complacency and a reluctant to commit effectively also prevailed on the US side. Hamstrung by a small army, the troop commitment by Washington to the border, which stretched 3,200 km from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, was in perpetual shortfall. With insufficient numbers to police the borders and ports, the government’s response to private filibuster ventures was confined to threats [‘The US Army on the Mexican Border: A Historical Perspective’, ((Matt M. Matthews), (The Long War Series Occasional Paper 22), www.apps.dtic.mil/]. Various neutrality acts forbid Americans from engaging in warfare with foreign countries, however its enforcement by Congress was sporadic and selective. At best, the US approached the task of curbing the wave of filibusters in a half-hearted fashion, ‘Feature the Filibuster Movement’, PBS, www.pbs.org/].

President Fillmore (Whig Party) was not not inclined towards expansionism himself, but he did little to curb the filibuster raids on Mexican soil. His successor Franklin Pierce (Democrat) was more open in his expansionist policies including attempting, unsuccessfully, to purchase Cuba from Spain (which many, especially Southern Americans thought would open the way to it becoming a pro-slavery state) [Joseph Allen Stout, Schemers and Dreamers: Filibustering in Mexico, 1848-1921, (2002)].

Southern comfort to the Filibusters
The filibuster movement elicited strong support from the South – in troops and in financial backing. Wealthy Southern landowners and agriculturalists helped finance expeditions into Mexico. José Carbajal, a Tejano, recruited Anglo-Texans including Texas Rangers for his 1851 armed incursion across the Rio Grande into Tamaulipas. Carabajal’s inducement to gain Texan participation was the opportunity to capture runaway slaves from Texas✪ [José María Jesús Carbajal‘, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org].

Texas, expanding slavery and the filibusters
As with US’ designs on Cuba, Texan land barons saw the prize of land south of the border as a means of securing independent, slave-owning states, thus tipping the balance in favour of pro-slavery states in the US. Chunks of Mexico and other Latin American countries such as Nicaragua were desirable to Texans as viable trading stations for the African slave trade, and as a cheaper source of labour than Texas [‘Texans and Filibusters in the 1850’s’, (Earl W. Fornell), Southwestern Historical Society, LIX(4), April 1956]. The model for an American colony in northern Mexico took inspiration from Sam Houston’s ‘liberation’ of Texas from Mexico [‘How Tennessee Adventurer William Walker became Dictator of Nicaragua in 1857′, (John E. Norvell), Middle Tennessee Journal of Genealogy and History, Vol. XXV, No 4, (Spring 2012), www.thenashvillecitycemetery.org].

∇ The Walker story gets the Hollywood treatment (1987)

William Walker and the “Independent Republic of Sonoro”
The best known of the American filibusters in the 1850s was William Walker. Tennessean Walker’s idea was to colonise Mexican territory in Baja California and Sonoro, where he sensed there was a power vacuum. With an armed force comprised mainly of Tennesseans and Kentuckians, Walker tried to establish first one then another self-declared (but unrecognised) republic. Walker’s attempted takeover was short-lived, meeting unexpected stiff resistance from the Mexican army and local citizens (Norvell).The Tennessean chancer’s venture ultimately floundered on poor planning (logistics problems, shortages of supplies, unfamiliarity with the territory). Forced to return to California Walker was put on trial for violating the US/Mexican Neutrality Act, but with American sympathy running high for Walker and for filibusterers in general he was swiftly acquitted in a travesty of a trial (Pruitt)🀾.

Nicaraguan adventure
This was a green light for Walker to roll the dice again in the hemisphere filibuster game, turning his attention to Nicaragua in 1855…this time however it wasn’t to end as happily. With a small army of mercenaries he invaded the Central American country and did succeed in usurping power and installing himself as “Dictator of Nicaragua”, and even securing recognition from President Pierce for his regime. However from that point on it went badly “pear-shaped” for Walker. By 1857 Walker had alienated locals as well as American shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. A combined force from Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua, bankrolled by Vanderbilt, routed Walker’s army and banished him. Imprudently, Walker made two more coup attempts in Central America before his notoriety caught up with him. The British, concerned that Walker’s fomenting of rebellion might destabilise its colonies in the Greater Caribbean, handed him over to the Honduran government who promptly executed him in 1860 [‘William Walker: King of the 19th Century Filibusters’, (Ron Soodalter), HistoryNet, www.historynet.com/].

(Source: www.wsj.com)

Endnote: Filibusters and Manifest Destiny
William Walker’s personality has been described as “a mix of hubris, ambition and nascent white supremacy” (Martelle, cited in Pruitt). The military men who followed him and other filibuster leaders were motivated by several considerations – a love of adventure, greed for personal gain and ideology. They like many contemporary Americans believed in the doctrine of “Manifest Destiny”, in the 19th century ingrained in American culture. This embodied the belief that it was an inalienable right of Americans to extend their civilisation across the continent (‘Feature the Filibuster Movement’)⎈.

PostScript: Historian Brian E May has made the interesting observation that the plague of filibustering expeditions had an counter-effect hampering the United States’ best efforts to empire-build in the hemisphere. The activities of filibusters, though they had widespread support within the US, he notes, damaged US foreign policy and limited its territorial expansion, almost in defiance of the locomotive of Manifest Destiny. The rebound from the filibusters’ intervention engendered hostility from foreign countries such as Canada and Great Britain, and Hispanic-Americans, who pushed back against US expansionism [A. James Fuller. ‘Reviewed Work. Manifest Destiny’s Underworld: Filibustering in Antebellum America, by Robert E. May, Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 22, No 4 (Winter 2002), pp.722-724. www.jstor.org/stable/3124776]🃗.

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✱ many of these has been lured to California by the prospect of gold discovery, these hopes disappointed, they turned their eyes south to other potential sources of enrichment, eg, news of gold and silver finds in Baja California

✪ Mexico abolished slavery in 1829, if Texan filibusters could capture territories in northern Mexico, it would make the reintroduction of slavery possible

🀾 Henry A Crabb, a schoolmate of Walker’s, followed him in a filibuster foray into Mexico, also making a failed attempt to colonise part of Sonoro in 1857 – claiming to “liberate the people of Sonoro” and suffering the same fate as Walker, execution at the hands of Mexican troops

⎈ as Nelson put it, “filibusters epitomised the romantic, muscular spirit of American adventure”, a sense of mission inspired by Manifest Destiny (Nelson)

🃗 May also reminds us that the increasing intensity of the criticism of the filibusters by the Federal government hardened Southern resolve to ultimately secede from the Union (Nelson)