Early Life
Walker was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1824 to James Walker and his wife Mary Norvell. His father was a son of a Scottish immigrant. His mother was a daughter of Lipscomb Norvell, an American Revolutionary War officer from Virginia. One of Walker's maternal uncles was John Norvell, a US Senator from Michigan and founder of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
William Walker graduated summa cum laude from the University of Nashville at the age of fourteen. He spent the next two years in Europe, studying medicine at the universities of Edinburgh, Heidelberg, Göttingen, and Paris. The revolutions of 1848 took place during his stay in Europe; the political minds of the time, which include Garibaldi, Marx, Mazzini, Feuerbach, and Blanc, influenced his filibustering aspirations. At the age of 19, he received a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and practiced briefly in Philadelphia before moving to New Orleans to study law.
He practiced law for a short time, but quit to become co-owner and editor of the New Orleans Crescent. In 1849, he moved to San Francisco, California, where he was a journalist and fought three duels, in two of which he was wounded. Walker now conceived the idea of conquering vast regions of Latin America, where he would create new slave states to join the federal union. These campaigns were known as filibustering or freebooting.
Read more about this topic: William Walker (filibuster)
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