He had a certain grim sense of humour, which finds occasional expression in the pages of his book. Of Guardiola's attempt to fire the hearts of his men by plying them with aguardiente before an engagement, in which they were ignominiously routed, he says: "The empty demijohns which were picked up on the road after the action looked like huge cannon-balls that had missed their mark." There is wisdom as well as humour in his remark, that "the best manner of treating a revolutionary movement in Central America is to treat it as a boil; let it come to a head, and then lance it, letting all the bad matter out at once." The pompous pretence of his native friends and enemies amused the shrewd judge of men, who possessed a happy knack of epitomizing a character in a single phrase, as when he calls the native custom of indiscriminate conscription, "an inveterate habit of catching a man and tying him up with a musket in his hand, to make a soldier of him." Kinney "had acquired that sort of knowledge and experience of human nature to be derived from the exercise of the mule trade." He mentions his enemy Marcy only with a contemptuous allusion to the blunder of that statesman in referring to Nicaragua as a country of South America, and dismisses Mora from his notice with the qualified clemency: "Let us pass Mora in exile, as Ugolino in hell, afar off and with silence."
His sense of the ridiculous was too keen to allow him ever to depart from the rigid simplicity of manner and dress which was in such striking contrast with the gaudy attire and pompous demeanour of his native friends. His uniform consisted of a blue coat, dark pantaloons, and black felt hat with the red ribbon of the Democratic army; his weapons were a sword and pistols buckled in his belt, and these he carried only in battle, where they were rather for use than ornament.
His character is in many respects like that of Cortez. Both were unlicensed conquerors; both were served by volunteers; served well by the faithful and brave, and obeyed through fear by the knavish and cowardly. Bodily fatigue or danger had no terrors for either, nor were they chary of demanding equal courage and endurance from their followers. Cortez triumphed over his enemies in the field; but barely succeeded in defeating the machinations of his foes in the Spanish Cabinet. Had Walker been a Conquistador he would have conquered Mexico as Cortez did. Had Cortez been a Californian filibuster he might have conquered Nicaragua, but he would assuredly have succumbed to Marcy and Vanderbilt.
Unquestionably Walker was carried away by his firm belief in his destiny. He never doubted, until he felt the manacles on his wrists at Trujillo, that he was destined to play the part of a Cortez in Central America. He had risked death a hundred times in battle and skirmish without fear or doubt. Possibly he welcomed it, when at last it came, and was sincere in hoping that it might be for the good of society.
So died, in his thirty-seventh year, the man whose fame had filled two continents, who had more than once imperilled the peace of the world which remembers him only in the distorted and false character of a monster and an outlaw. The country which gave him birth, and little besides, save injustice, forgot amid the bloody conflict into which it was soon plunged, the fame and fate of the filibusters. Into the vortex of civil war were swept many of the restless spirits who had survived the sanguinary fields of Central America, and in it perished some of the bravest and ablest who had learned their first lesson in that stern school.
As most of them were of Southern birth, so they generally joined the ranks of the Confederacy. At the first call to arms, Henningsen offered his services to the seceding states, and was given a regiment in Wise's Legion of Northern Virginia. Frank Anderson went with him as lieutenant-colonel, and did good service for the lost cause. He was one of Walker's oldest veterans, having served in both the expeditions to Nicaragua. At the first battle of Rivas he was wounded three times, and left on the field for dead, but managed to drag himself into hiding before his comrades were all massacred, and so escaped to rejoin his command.
Henningsen served throughout the war; but, in spite of his experience on many fields, and the marked ability with which he filled his subordinate position, he never rose to distinction in the Confederacy. He was a natural leader in irregular warfare, as might have been expected of a pupil in the schools of Zumalacarregui, Schamyl, and Walker; and the scientific campaigning of the Peninsula gave no scope for his talents. But he had espoused the cause with honest convictions of its justice, and he supported it faithfully to the end. When that end and ruin came he returned to private life, a man without a career, and lived quietly and unobtrusively until his death in June, 1877. In his later years he was a devoted adherent of the patriots who were waging a fruitless war for freedom in Cuba. Once he visited the island in connection with a projected uprising, but saw no promise of success in the attempt. His death was sudden. He had been ill but a few days; a faithful friend, Colonel Gregg, a soldier who had fought against him in the Civil War, watched by his bedside. The sick man slept, while the tireless brain dreamed, what dreams who can say? of the chequered career about to close forever. Suddenly his eyes opened, and in them was something of the old fire, as he half sat up in his bed, and pointing to a print on the wall of the arms of "Cuba Libre," said, "Colonel, we'll free Cuba yet!" The ruling passion found voice in his last words—the next instant he fell back dead.
Henningsen was considered to have been the military genius of the Nicaraguan campaign by the detractors of Walker, who could not deny the wonderful success of the latter. But Henningsen himself always repudiated the undeserved fame, and was foremost in awarding to his chieftain whatever of glory was won in that profitless field. He died as he had lived, a true, simple-hearted gentleman, a knight-errant born centuries too late. Colonel John T. Pickett, a kindly philosopher, and one who in his heyday followed a filibuster's luckless banner, has engraved upon the tomb of Henningsen the apt motto from Gil Blas: "Inveni portum. Spes et fortuna valete! Sat me lusistis…. Ludite nunc alios."
The filibusters whom the winds had blown from every quarter of the earth to the sunny vales of Nicaragua were drifted back, when the storm had broken and spent its fury, to the world of peace and prose. A few only of the worthier survive to recall that strange page in life's romance. Rudler, who was with his leader in all his campaigns, and who was sentenced to four years' imprisonment after the surrender in Honduras, returned to share the fortunes of the seceding South, as did also Wheat, Hicks, Fayssoux, Hornsby, and many others. In the vicissitudes of American life a few, like Doubleday and Kewen, even achieved wealth, which is perhaps as strange a climax to the career of a filibuster as any that could be conceived. The two O'Neils were men of invincible courage. Both died in battle, Cal, the younger, at the age of twenty-one, after making a reputation for heroism that was marked even among that valiant group. Reluctantly we part with the wild band, Homeric heroes in more features than one; with Henry and Swingle, the inventive gunners, Von Natzmer, the Prussian hussar, Pineda, the great-hearted native of an unworthy country, Hornsby, Rawle, Watters, and the Fifty-six who were "Immortal" for a day.
That most entertaining cosmopolitan, Laurence Oliphant, came very near adding the distinction of being a filibuster to his other experiences. He did, in fact, join an expedition which set out from New Orleans in December, 1856, for San Juan del Norte, with the intention of reinforcing Walker at Rivas. But the good steamer Texas reached her destination too late, Spencer and his Costa Ricans having closed the Transit. Among the adventurous spirits in the company was one who had taken part in the last ill-fated expedition of Lopez to Cuba, and spent a year and a half in a Spanish dungeon. "The story of his escape from a more serious fate," says Oliphant, "was characteristic of many other stirring narratives of a similar description, with which on moonlight nights we used to beguile the evening hours." He had served as an officer on General Lopez's staff during one of the expeditions to Cuba. When that officer, together with many of the more prominent members of the expedition, after a desperate resistance, was captured by the Spanish troops, my friend, who was one of the number, found himself with many of his countrymen thrown into the Havanna jail, and informed that he was to prepare for his execution on the following day. As an act of grace, however, permission was given to all the captives to indite a farewell letter to their friends, informing them of their approaching execution. Most of his fellow-victims could think of some one belonging to them to whom such a piece of information might prove interesting; but the poor captain racked in vain the chambers of his memory for a solitary individual to whom he could impart the melancholy tidings without feeling that his communication would be what in polite society would be called an 'unwarrantable intrusion of his personal affairs upon a comparative stranger.' He could think of nobody that cared about him; revolving this forlorn state of matters in his mind, ashamed to form the only exception to the general scribbling that was taking place, he determined to choose a friend, and then it flashed upon him, that as all the letters would probably be opened, he had better choose a good one. Under his present circumstances, who more appropriate than the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs at Washington, then Daniel Webster? Not only should he make a friend of him, but an intimate friend, and then the Spanish Governor might shoot him if he chose, and take the risk. He accordingly commenced: