Conservatives allied themselves with Salvadoran-Honduran troops and ended liberal control, making conservative José León Sandoval president. State monopoly on alcohol led to rebellions against cane planters and the government (1849), and Indians rebelled against land seizures by mestizos and whites. Conservatives defeated liberals in 1849. Coffee cultivation was introduced.
Liberals, seeking to overthrow conservatives, obtained aid from a group of U.S. financiers hostile to Vanderbilt. Liberals hired William Walker who, with a small army, invaded Nicaragua, quickly defeating his opponents.
Walker discarded his liberal allies, legalized slavery, and sent inquiries to Washington about Nicaragua's joining the Union as a slave state. U.S. legation recognized Walker as president of Nicaragua. An opposition coalition included the British, Nicaraguan conservatives, Vanderbilt, and conservative regimes of the other four Central American nations.
CONSERVATIVE ERA. Liberals, discredited by their early association with Walker, remained out of power. Conservatives monopolized the presidency: Tomás Martínez (1858–67), Fernando Guzmán (1867–71), Vicente Cuadra (1871–75), Pedro Joaquín Chamorro (1875–79), Joaquín Zavala (1879–83), Adán Cárdenas (1883–87), Evaristo Carazo (1887–89) and Roberto Sacasa (1889–93). Coffee growers became the most influential social sector. A law called for the alienation of communal lands (1859). Indians unleashed the war of the comuneros against encroachment by coffee planters (1881).
