Music City Sparked Both Sides of Nicaragua’s Civil War (yes, you read that right)
By Johnny Epstein, Legal Intern
In June 1856, after unilaterally dissolving a wartime government, a young man boasted to all of Nicaraguan society that he was their newly-minted emperor and president.
He was not a politician or military leader from Nicaragua, or even any Central American nation. He was, in fact, a Nashville, Tennessee blue blood. University of Nashville graduate, lawyer, and mercenary-for-hire William Walker had arrived in Nicaragua only fourteen months earlier. He clutched a legal contract for his paramilitary services endorsed by a United States District Attorney and the Partido Democratico of Nicaragua.
In the mid-1800s, the ideology of Manifest Destiny raged, and hundreds of young, rich, white men like Walker tried their hand at colonization in the rush to expand the territory of the United States, venturing south and west in search of gold, slaves, and property. The prime targets were often nations, like Nicaragua, with which the United States had technically been at peace.
Walker’s term as “emperor” was brief. His interference with Nicaraguan politics, and perhaps more dangerously, with other American business interests, caught up with him. In 1860, he was captured in Trujillo, Honduras, by a coalition of Nicaraguan exiles and other Central American military forces. The firing squad that executed Walker was funded by railroad tycoon Cornelius Vanderbilt – yes, the founder of Nashville’s Vanderbilt University. Nicaragua was by then engulfed in a full-blown civil war, thanks in part to interference by the two Nashville aristocrats.
As Central American families make their way north in 2023, it is crucial to recognize that our own nation had a hand in creating the violence, oppression, and instability they are fleeing.
The arc of history is not a chain of singular, isolated causes and effects. Nevertheless, without foreign interventions in Central America, perhaps the conditions of those families’ hometowns would be improved. Perhaps there would be less violence and political volatility in the region without the imperialist escapades of William Walker in Nicaragua, the 1954 American-backed coup against Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, or the 1980s massacres by the U.S.-trained Atlácatl Battalion in El Salvador.
Today, people arriving here from Central America are fleeing deadly conditions including poverty, state violence, and gang violence. In one USAID study, 70% of immigrants from the Northern Triangle Countries of Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador cited economic reasons as the primary reason for leaving their home countries. 41% of that same group identified crime and violence as another key reason to migrate. In Nicaragua, low wages and an increasingly authoritarian government make stability inaccessible for many. The region’s frequent hurricanes and earthquakes disproportionately harm the most vulnerable, deepening pre-existing inequalities.
As the Nashville community welcomes newcomers from all over the world, we must not forget the legacy of US interventionism and how young imperialists helped spark the migration patterns we see today from our southern neighbors.
Every person deserves safety and a chance to thrive, and often our stories are more intertwined than we even realized.