In 1854, the USS Cyane burned Greytown, a dusty community on Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, to the ground.

The pretext for the assault was to assist a white U.S. citizen threatened with arrest by local authorities for the murder of a Black man.

The backstory was that Cornelius Vanderbilt wanted to gain monopoly control for his steamboat and stagecoach business, which was conveying travelers rushing across Nicaragua for California gold. [...] President Franklin Pierce defended the ruin: Greytown was “a pretended community,” Pierce said, [...] comprised mostly of “blacks and persons of mixed blood.” Greytown, the president said, could expect nothing other than to be treated as a “piratical resort of outlaws or a camp of savages.” Washington was also competing with Great Britain for a [Central American] canal [...]

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A year later, in 1855, William Walker sailed out of San Francisco with a detachment of fifty-five soldiers, whom he called La Falange Americana, toward Nicaragua. A Tennessee mercenary who earlier had tried and failed to seize territory from Mexico, Walker was backed by both Southern slavers and Northern investors, including Vanderbilt [...]. Spanish Americans across the hemisphere were horrified when Walker, after a five-month war, grabbed power and proclaimed himself Nicaragua’s president. Even more so when he reestablished slavery, in a country that had abolished the institution three decades earlier.

Walker was popular in all the United States [...]. Nicaragua, a play celebrating Walker's conquests, opened at Manhattan's Purdy's National Theatre [...]. Migrants from the United States flocked to Nicaragua to settle [...]. Walker offered them hundreds of acres of land and Vanderbilt sold them discount tickets [...]. President Franklin Pierce quickly recognized Walker’s government. [...]

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United States gunboats were sailing further in Latin American waters than ever [...]. In February 1855, Paraguayan soldiers fired on the USS Water Witch, killing its helmsman.

The U.S. Senate was already annoyed with Paraguay for drawing up a commercial treaty that had contained the phrase the United States of North America. And so, in response to the attack and to satisfy congressional demands that Latin American nations refer to the U.S. by its proper name, President James Buchanan dispatched a fleet of nineteen ships carrying twenty-five hundred men and two hundred guns to deliver a revised treaty, with the word North struck out. Such a show of force left Paraguay little option but to sign the treaty, which opened the nation’s waters and markets to the United States. [...]

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The idea [...] of convening an assembly of “all the American States of Spanish origins from Mexico to Chile,” wrote U.S. ambassador to Colombia James Bowlin, is a “ridiculous farce.” Bowlin dismissed the “mad pranks, and silly nonsense of pretended Statesmen.” [...]

[In Paris] on June 22, 1856, at a gathering of Spanish American exiles, [Chilean philosopher Francisco] Bilbao gave a speech proposing to hold a congress [...] to create a Latin American confederacy. [...] If not, no resistance to Washington would be effective. “Look,” he said, “you can see the smoke from the campfires getting closer. Listen, the soldiers’ footsteps are ever nearer.”

Panama, then a province of Colombia, was strategically important as the potential site of a interoceanic canal or railroad. Bilbao called it “the fulcrum that the Yankee Archimedes is using to lift South America and suspend it over the abyss,” so to “devour the continent in pieces.” [...] “Walker is the invasion. Walker is the Conquest. Walker is the United States,” he said. [...] Central Americans [from Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and El Salvador] did finally unite to drive out Walker in 1860 [...].

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Libreria Acqua Alta is a bookshop in Venice.