On February 1, 1861, three days before delegates from six slave states gathered in Montgomery, Alabama, to create the Confederate States of America, an angry Republican newspaper up north engaged its readers with a cynical editorial. In a flight of fancy entitled “Died too Soon,” the Chicago Tribune imagined the late William Walker taking measure of America’s sectional crisis “from the spirit land.” How frustrated the filibuster would be, the paper mused sarcastically, having forfeited his life commanding a “ragged handful” of men, when he could be still on earth serving the new nation. Were he alive, he might even become “Military Dictator of the Southern Republic.” It was such a disturbing thought, the Tribune editors confessed, that they would hesitate to attend a séance, lest Walker’s spirit appear to “rap” out “his vehement sympathies with Secession.” Surely Walker must feel cheated, “taking off” for the spirit world when he could have had “a scrimmage” under his own flag had he stuck around.

The Tribune’s back-to-the-future moment seems bizarre, but the paper had cause to link William Walker’s invasions of Central America with the formation of the Confederacy. In 1858, the filibuster had attracted press attention by appearing with Alabama’s leading secessionist, William L. Yancey, at the Bethel Church in Montgomery for a rally that initiated a constitution for a Montgomery chapter of the so-called League of United Southerners, a never fully launched organization dedicated to the formation of an independent slave state republic. Certainly, the Tribune’s Republican readers would have grasped the message since their party from its founding had dedicated itself not only against southerners’ spreading slavery westward but also acquiring slave plantation lands in the Caribbean.