He spent most of the 1850s on the staffs of the American embassies in Belgium and Mexico, then joined the Confederate diplomatic corps when the Civil War broke out in 1861 [REF].
Thomas C. DeLeon, who knew the young man in Mobile, saw Walker as a "courtly, gifted and accomplished man, who gave earnest of the later high acquirement which made him a marked type of the southern gentleman and diplomatist."[REF] .