He was born on February 27, 1812 in Lexington, Kentucky, United States, the son of Lewis Sanders, who was locally noted as a breeder of fine horses, and of Ann (Nicholas) Sanders, daughter of Col. George Nicholas. As a youth, he was associated with his father as a trader in stock.
In November 1843, at Ghent, Ky. , he engineered a political meeting which authorized him to correspond with presidential candidates on their attitude towards the annexation of Texas. About 1845 he went to New York City where he engaged in political wire-pulling and financial promoting, furthering his ends, in political conventions and the lobbies of hotels, legislatures, and Congress, by fair means and foul. His numerous enemies insisted that as agent of the Hudson's Bay Company he had reaped questionable rewards when he adjusted its claims in the Oregon country, but he was nevertheless in perpetual debt. His correspondence with Stephen A. Douglas indicates that he was a go-between for Eastern capitalists who were speculating in Chicago real estate.
As the agent of George Law, he made a deal whereby Law took over forty thousand antiquated muskets from the war department to sell to the French revolutionists of 1848, but Sanders arrived in Paris too late to conclude the sale. Committed by conviction as well as by financial interest to the revolutionary cause in Europe, he became, in the early fifties, the leader of a movement known as "Young America" (M. E. Curti, in American Historical Review, October 1926).
Sanders in 1851 acquired the United States Magazine and Democratic Review (thereafter simply the Democratic Review), and in a series of vindictive articles beginning in January 1852 excoriated the political rivals of Stephen A. Douglas, erratically championed the program of "Young America, " and greatly added to the number of his enemies.
In 1853 he received a recess appointment to the London consulship. He went over before the appointment was confirmed and his house became the headquarters of Kossuth, Garibaldi, Herzen, Ledru-Rollin, Mazzini, and other exiles. He also influenced Buchanan in issuing the Ostend Manifesto. As a result of his reckless activities and of bitter attacks at home, the Senate refused to confirm his appointment.
In 1857 he was given a recess appointment as navy agent at New York, which was confirmed. Although he probably had no connection with the assassination of Lincoln, President Johnson, on May 2, 1865, offered $25, 000 for his arrest.
Sanders spent much of the later part of his helter-skelter life in Europe. During the siege of Paris he was deep in the counsels of the radicals, and his enthusiastic friends gave him a great popular ovation at the Hotel de Ville.
He later returned to the United States soon before he died in 1873 in New York.
He was involved in the Young America Movement and was an editor for the "Democratic Review. " During the Civil War, Sanders played an audacious role as a Confederate agent in Europe and Canada. His grandiose imagination led him to plot various schemes to outwit the Federal blockade. He was also a member of the Niagara Peace Conference. He was believed to have some involvement in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.
He engaged in wild dreams and bizarre plots, promising the revolutionaries American financial support, sending their secret communications to the Continent in the dispatch bags of the American embassy, and writing fulminating letters to London newspapers advocating the assassination of Napoleon III.
He contended that a crusade for European republicanism would divert attention from sectional controversies, open European markets to American surplus, and fulfil the American mission of furthering the cause of democracy and freedom throughout the world.
Half idealist, half charlatan, impulsive and prodigal, he had the talent of making and keeping warm friends and bitter enemies. He was a large-framed, powerful man with radiant blue eyes, dishevelled hair, and unkempt appearance.
After a courtship conducted by correspondence, he married, a week after their first meeting, Anna Reid, editor of a weekly literary paper in New York. Her unusual accomplishments added much to the lavish entertainments for which her husband was noted.
