Manifest Destiny's Underworld

the long version

"In this book, Robert May uncovers the surprising and often tragic story of America's once notorious but now forgotten "filibusters" - the reckless freebooters and adventurers who in the years before the Civil War defied their own government and the military might of the European powers by launching private military expeditions against foreign countries. Not only did an American, William Walker ("the gray-eyed man of destiny"), succeed in conquering Nicaragua and becoming its president, but other American groups attacked Cuba, Mexico, Ecuador, Honduras, and Canada. So frequent became these invasions and reported plots that U.S. filibusters were feared throughout Latin America and in many other places, even in distant Hawaii. On several occasions, they nearly embroiled the U.S. government in unwanted wars with foreign nations.". "May investigates the changing conditions in America, especially in its port cities, that caused thousands of men to risk their lives in these criminal schemes, how they were financed and organized, and why the U.S. government had little success in curtailing them. Surveying antebellum popular media, he shows how the filibustering phenomenon infiltrated the American psyche in newspapers, theater, music, advertising, and literature. Condemned abroad as pirates, frequently in language strikingly similar to modern American denunciations of foreign terrorists, the filibusters were often celebrated at home as heroes who epitomized the spirit of Manifest Destiny."--BOOK JACKET.