Filibuster (military)
A filibuster (from the Spanish filibustero), also known as a freebooter, is someone who engages in an unauthorized military expedition into a foreign country or territory to foster or support a political revolution or secession.
The term is usually applied to United States American citizens who incited rebellions/insurrections across Latin America with its recently independent but unstable nations freed from royal control of the Kingdom of Spain and its Spanish Empire in the 1810s and 1820s.
Filibusters are irregular soldiers who act without official authorization from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure.
With the end of the era of Caribbean / West Indies piracy in the early 18th century, the term of reference "filibuster" fell out of general currency for a while.
[6] The term was revived in the following mid-19th century to describe the actions of adventurers who tried to take control of various Caribbean / West Indies islands, Mexican, and Central American territories by force of arms.
In 1806, the general Francisco de Miranda launched an unsuccessful expedition to liberate Venezuela from Royal Spanish rule with volunteers from the north in the United States recruited in New York City.
For example, the journalist John L. O'Sullivan (1813–1895), who coined the related phrase "manifest destiny" for the movement of American westward expansion, was put on trial for raising money in America for López's failed southern filibustering expedition in Cuba.
A number of journalists were sympathetic towards filibusters, such as John O'Sullivan and Moses S. Beach at the famous New York Sun and L. J. Sigur of the New Orleans Daily Delta.
Papers backing the Republican party's position of being anti-filibuster would use the term to denounce not just actors such as William Walker but also the abolitionist filibuster John Brown, who led a failed mission into Virginia with the aim of causing a slave revolt.
Knowing it would harm their campaign, Republicans identified the actions of Brown as originating in the same lawless ideology as the Democrat endorsed Walker or the pro slavery factions operating in the Bleeding Kansas period, and hence inherently denounced his raid.
[13] Samuel Brannan's filibustering mission to Hawaii was identified by contemporary newspapers as being little more than a colonising scheme, although they refrained from passing moral judgement and the Daily Evening Picayune revised their opinion to the tamer 'emigrating company'.
[15] The mid-nineteenth century (1848–1860) saw Southern planters raise private armies for expeditions to Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America to acquire territories that could be annexed to the Union as slave states.
[18] On the abolitionist side, John Brown was accused by both Catholic and pro Republican newspapers of being a filibuster after leaving New York and heading to Virginia to lead the raid on Harpers Ferry.
[13] Many future Confederate officers and soldiers, such as Chatham Roberdeau Wheat, of the Louisiana Tigers, obtained valuable military experience from filibuster expeditions.
Rather than return to Nicaragua, French spent several months spending his spoils, enjoying a lavish lifestyle that included staying in luxury hotel suites and entertaining the press and politicians with cigars and champagne.
[21][22] In the traditional historiography in both the United States and Latin America, Walker's filibustering represented the high tide of antebellum American imperialism.
His brief seizure of Nicaragua in 1855 is typically called a representative expression of manifest destiny with the added factor of trying to expand slavery into Central America.
[23] Historians such as Gail Bederman and Amy Greenburg have noted the influence of masculinity of filibustering, particularly the form of "martial manhood" that many filibusterers adopted during the period.
Greenburg uses primary sources to examine the appeal to masculinity in the recruitment campaigns of filibuster missions, focusing on how the deteriorating working class conditions enabled locations such as Nicaragua to be advertised as a space for men to celebrate their strength.
[24] Bederman, meanwhile, emphasises the importance of nostalgia for the American frontier, and draws together notions of race, masculinity and gender to display how people felt insecure in their identities so reverted back to the typical ideal of what it meant to be a white man.
[15] It ought to be emphasised, however, that filibustering was predominantly used to refer to mid 19th century missions contained within the Americas, and that applying the term outside of this context risks being anachronistic.
John Quitman's daughter Louisa used anti-Spanish rhetoric as she saw fit so that the Spanish deserved to be punished for what they had done to Narciso López and his men after they had been taken prisoner.
[citation needed] Season 1 episode 8 of The High Chaparral is titled "The Filibusteros" and depicts a fictional group of post–Civil War Confederate soldiers in Mexico.
