Background
Alexander Walker was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the son of Alexander and Susan Walker. His father was a merchant.
Alexander Walker was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, the son of Alexander and Susan Walker. His father was a merchant.
The boy attended Fredericksburg Academy, and, after a brief experience teaching school, entered the University of Virginia in 1836. Here he studied ancient languages, mathematics, and natural philosophy. He was out the next year, but returned to study law during the session of 1838-39.
In 1840 he opened a law office in New Orleans, during the heat of the Harrison-Van Buren campaign. He at once offered his services to the Democratic leaders and made many speeches in the campaign. He was later a member of nearly all the antebellum Democratic conventions. Indeed, his interest in politics and journalism prevented his law practice from becoming extensive. He became one of the managers of the Jeffersonian of New Orleans, the chief Democratic organ of the state. By appointment of Governor Johnson, he was judge of the city court in New Orleans from 1846 to 1850. Walker was a firm believer in "manifest destiny" and heartily sympathized with those who were seeking to unite all the countries of the continent into one nation. In 1845 he urged the annexation of Texas; he was one of the supporters of the noted filibuster, William Walker, and in 1851 he was a backer of the disastrous expedition of Gen. Narciso Lopez to Cuba. During the Mexican War he was connected with the New Orleans Daily Delta. In 1852 the Delta office published his City Digest. His unsigned account of the yellow fever epidemic in New Orleans appeared in Harper's Magazine in November 1853. From 1855 to 1857 he edited the Cincinnati Enquirer, then the leading Democratic paper in the West. In 1856 he published Jackson and New Orleans, a very full account of the achievements of Jackson and the American army in 1814-15. Four years later he added a chapter to this book and changed its title to The Life of Andrew Jackson (1860); in this form it was reissued in 1866 and again in 1890. From Cincinnati he went to Washington, D. C. , but after a short stay returned in 1858 to New Orleans and the Daily Delta. He was a member of the Louisiana secession convention in 1861 and was subsequently with Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston's army in Tennessee; he wrote a graphic account of the battle of Shiloh, which appeared in the Delta and in H. C. Clarke's Diary of the War for Separation (1862). When New Orleans was captured he was sent for a short time as a prisoner to Ship Island. After the surrender of Lee at Appomattox he returned to New Orleans. With Henry J. Labatt he compiled a work called The Bankrupt Law (1867). He edited the New Orleans Times until its suspension by Judge E. H. Durell during the controversy between Henry Clay Warmoth and P. B. S. Pinchback over the governorship in 1872; he then helped establish the Herald, which was merged with the Daily Picayune in 1874. He continued to edit the Picayune until 1875. Thereafter, although not again an editor, he was a frequent contributor to the daily press. He wrote on New Orleans duels, on the Myra Clark Gaines case, and on other matters of local history and tradition. In 1884 he contributed to the Times-Democrat a series of articles on General Butler in New Orleans. He wrote zestfully, with a fluent style. Journalism was his chief interest, his social inclinations enabling him to get a peculiarly rich satisfaction out of newspaper experiences. He died, survived by two sons, at the home of the younger, in Fort Smith, Ark.
In 1842 he married Mary Elizabeth McFarlane, daughter of Dr. James S. McFarlane, head of the Marine Hospital in New Orleans.