An Arizona 'Royal'
$7
An Arizona 'Royal' highlights the life and times of 19th century Arizona legend named King S. Woolsey. Woolsey was bigger than life...As an Indian fighter, succesful rancher, talented innovator, and respected statesman, Woolsey helped Arizona on its road to statehood.
70 pages/Published in 2009
From the Beginning…
King S. Woolsey was born in either 1831 or 1832. Some historians say late 1831, some historians say perhaps early 1832. Either way, he was born sometime around that time period. Where Woolsey was born is also somewhat of a mystery. Most accounts list his birth state as Alabama. But there are also other accounts listing Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, or Arkansas as being the state of his birth. I could chase my tail around the room and tell you about various Woolsey families (according to shaky census reports) that resided in or around Alabama or Louisiana, but in the end, no one really knows whether these families were King S. Woolsey’s family or not. Therefore, I won’t speculate or guess as to whether or not any of the reports are true…Or simply hogwash. It is believed that Woolsey’s family relocated to Louisiana shortly after King was born. Although I’m sorry to say, the exact location in Louisiana is again, very hazy. One recollection lists the family plot as straddling the Alabama/Louisiana border. That would be plausible only if the two states actually shared a border…But they obviously don’t.
Just know that Woolsey was a southerner born sometime in the early 1830s. Thankfully, we know exactly when and where Woolsey died, but we’ll get to that later.
The S. in Woolsey’s name is yet another mystery. Some historians claim that the S. stands for Sam or Samuel, while others state that there is simply no proof to that effect found in the surviving records. Therefore, I’ll leave the initial just the way I found it.
Woolsey is said to have been an outstanding orator and an accomplished letter writer as evidenced by his archived correspondences. The fact that he was a literate pioneer, sometimes an oxymoron itself, puzzles many historians, mainly because there are no records indicating that he ever attended or was privy to formal schooling. There is speculation that perhaps he was a student in the priesthood, but yet he never attended Catholic churches throughout his long time in Arizona.
Just about every account of Woolsey mentions a filibustering expedition to Cuba at a “very young age”. Unfortunately, that is about as much information as I can find upon the matter other than the fact that Woolsey was subsequently jailed for several months before being freed by members of the British consul. After his release, he sailed aboard a British ship bound for California.
I find it odd, that each and every historian chooses to gloss quickly over the filibustering expedition without ever mentioning what the hell a filibuster actually is. I’m quite sure that there are a great number of people out there with nary a clue as to what the term means. A filibuster is someone who takes part in a military-type expedition in a foreign country with the aim of either supporting or bringing about a revolutionary act. It is important to stress that these expeditions were not ‘officially’ sanctioned by the government or state. The term is most often associated with Americans who attempted to rile things up in Latin America during the mid-1800s. Many of the filibusters were thrill-seekering individuals hoping to profit from the insurrection in some way…Either monetarily or ideologically. Some of them just joined purely for the adventure.
The term filibuster is derived from the Spanish word filibustero, which means pirate or buccaneer. Filibusters were also referred to as ‘freebooters’ a name derived from the Dutch word vrijbuiter. These terms were first used to describe raiders in the Caribbean such as Sir Francis Drake; an Englishman who preyed on the Spanish ships laden with gold from the New World bound for Europe. George Rogers Clark (in Louisiana and Mississippi), James Long (in Texas), William Blount (in Florida), and Gregor MacGregor (in Florida and South and Central America) were early American filibusters.
Two of the most famous and colorful filibusters active during the 19th century were William Wallace and Narciso Lopez. Wallace invaded Mexico and eventually, Nicaragua. His exploits can be perused in one of my earlier books: Man On The Scene…Malfeasance in Motion, in the first chapter of the book, entitled From the Shadows of Revolution arose a Bearded Monkey…
Narciso Lopez conducted expeditions to Cuba in the mid-1800s. Lopez, a Venezuelan by birth, participated in many battles against Simon Bolivar as a member of the Spanish military. The Spanish eventually lost Venezuela (along with every other country in the Americas) and Lopez drifted to Cuba, where he married and had a child while undertaking several failed business operations. He later became a partisan member of an anti-Spanish faction which sought to rid the island of Spanish control. He was forced however, to flee Cuba in 1848, amidst the roundups and arrests of those causing trouble for Spanish authorities. He fled to the U.S., where he wasted little time in organizing an expedition to liberate Cuba from Spanish control. Lopez sought the advice of John O’Sullivan, the expansionist known for coining the term ‘Manifest Destiny’, which had to do with the absorption of the territories of Texas and Oregon into the United States. He also enlisted Cuban exiles in New York City and miscellaneous adventurers (freebooters) from all over the U.S.
Lopez planned to attack Cuba simultaneously from New York and New Orleans in 1849, but the plan was squashed when President Zachary ‘Old Rough and Ready’ Taylor, under a policy forbidding filibustering, ordered a naval blockade and seized Lopez’s ships ending the expedition.
But Lopez wasn’t about to give up on Cuba. He traveled from New York City to New Orleans, where he set up a base of operations. In New Orleans, he used Southern sympathy toward slavery as a way to recruit filibusters willing to join his cause. The thought was…If Cuba could become a state; perhaps the balance of slave-versus-non slave states could be disrupted. He tried recruiting Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee to his cause but was unsuccessful in his attempts. He did however attract the attention of other prominent politicians in the South, including Mississippi Governor, John Quitman.
The second expedition, complete with an estimated six-hundred men, arrived safely on the island of Cuba in May, 1850. Lopez and his fellow filibusters took the town of Cardenas, carrying a flag designed by Lopez, which would eventually become the modern-day model for the flag of Cuba. Unfortunately for Lopez, the locals weren’t so infatuated by his dreams of liberation. In fact most of them joined the Spanish troops and soon had Lopez and his band beating a hasty retreat to Key West, where he immediately instructed his filibusters to quickly disband and disappear in order to avoid federal prosecution under the U.S. Neutrality Law of 1818. (Read more, buy the book)