Historians of United States–Latin American relations have tended to pass quickly over the Central American expeditions of William Walker and his armies of filibusters—Americans of no particular political affiliation who enlisted with Walker to conquer foreign countries. In surveys or textbooks, these expeditions appear most typically as ephemeral—if, perhaps, particularly grotesque—examples of the racism and rapaciousness that would become trademark dimensions of United States involvement in the countries to its south. The most famous of Walker's exploits was his brief accession to the presidency of Nicaragua in 1856 and 1857, a feat he accomplished after successfully inserting his private army into a Nicaraguan civil war. The most well known of his acts as president of Nicaragua, in turn, was the re-legalization of slavery, previously outlawed in the country for more than three decades. As if wishing to erase even the slightest possible doubts about his ideological motivation, in 1860 Walker published a memoir in which he described his expedition as part of a race war in which the white race, as the strongest, was destined to end up on top.

Against the weight of this evidence, Michel Gobat's new book makes the claim that Walker and most of his filibusters were motivated not primarily by racism or the desire to make Nicaragua a slave state. Instead, they were motivated by their liberal and democratic convictions. It is an audaciously revisionist interpretation that rests in equal parts on Gobat's close reading of the Nicaraguan political context and on the writings of Walkers’ followers and sympathizers in the press. As indicated in the book's title, Walker entered the Nicaraguan civil war “by invitation.” Who invited him? Nicaragua's Liberal Party.

Nicaragua's Liberal Party believed in racial equality (leading figures came from the mulatto quarter of León, a Liberal stronghold), and its most radical faction—among whom Walker would find his most dedicated allies—were democrats who had long called “for the abolition of the property and income requirements that excluded most male Nicaraguans from elections” (63). One reason for their willingness to make a deal with Walker was their admiration for the democratic system of Walker's homeland. Most importantly, however, the Liberal Party sought in Walker an ally for their project of making Nicaragua the site of an interoceanic canal, an endeavor that they hoped would bring progress and prosperity to their poor and struggling country.

With hindsight, the Liberals’ belief in the democratic principles of their North American allies might seem impossibly naïve. But Gobat shows that it rested on a reading of those allies’ motivations that remains plausible today. For his expedition to Nicaragua, Walker found followers from all over the United States, with convictions that ranged across the political spectrum. Some were Southern expansionists or other advocates of slavery (it was these whom Walker tried to rouse with his slavery decree and, later, his memoir). But many more were working-class men (and some women) drawn to Central America by the Liberal Party's promise of land for United States supporters. Yet others were seasoned political radicals, European Forty-Eighters who flocked to Walker's cause because they believed “that democracy was universal and could be spread by force” (128). Louis Schlesinger, for example, described by Gobat as “a Jewish veteran of the Hungarian Revolution,” joined Walker to defend what he called “the glorious principles of Freedom and true Democracy” (129).

It would be going too far to say that most of Walker's men did not also view their Nicaraguan enterprise through a racist lens. Even among the political radicals, there were many who believed, in the words of one, that “energetic and inventive Anglosaxons” like Walker were destined to bring enterprise and civilization to the “indolent Spanish-Indian mixed race” (132). To what extent such attitudes could be compatible with the filibusters’ liberal state-building project remains open to debate. Gobat stresses the radicalism of Walker's policies—in particular his attempt at land reform, which won him the allegiance of the popular classes, or at least of strongmen claiming to represent the popular classes—and argues for the (partial and temporary) success of Walker's political project. His “most overlooked feat,” according to Gobat, was “the creation of a functioning state” in Nicaragua (165).

It is possible to read Gobat's book and come to different conclusions. The filibusters’ land reform turns out to have consisted entirely of the expropriation of the properties of political enemies, and there is no evidence that any of those properties were distributed to poor Nicaraguans (232–36). Nor did Gobat convince me that Walker's achievements in state building amounted to much more than the usurpation of central government authority, a feat that then allowed him to adjudicate some local conflicts while weakly overseeing the actions of local-level government agencies (as previous Nicaraguan presidents must have done before him). Although Gobat mentions that local Walker allies also attempted to raise new police forces (172), he gives no evidence of those forces’ effectiveness or modus operandi.

That readers will be left with some doubts may be inevitable for a book as bold and ambitious as this one. Gobat is never less than a scrupulous guide through his evidence, giving readers the tools to challenge his interpretations. The result is a book that undergraduates will enjoy reading, graduate students will want to add to their comp lists, and historians of United States and Latin American international relations will debate for a very long time.