Born enslaved on January 12, 1850 in New Madrid County, Missouri, Waller became free during the Civil War and settled with his family on a farm in Tama County, Iowa.  While working as a barber in Cedar Rapids, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1877, moving to Kansas a year later.  There through the 1880s he acquired a string of barbershops, founded Lawrence’s first black newspaper, and immersed himself in state politics.  An active Republican, Waller championed values of middle-class thrift, racial uplift, and laissez-faire economics.  His Kansas experience also seems to have convinced him that expanding frontiers offered opportunities for black progress, leading him to defend the “New Manifest Destiny” of the 1890s.  After an abortive attempt to gain his party’s nomination for state auditor, he obtained an appointment as U.S. consul to Madagascar in 1891.

Waller spent three years with the consular service, during which time he explored the possibility of African-American colonization--a type of “Black Empire”--in Madagascar.  In 1894, the native monarchy granted him a concession of 150,000 acres of rubber-rich land.  This collided with the goals of French imperialists who had long eyed the island for its natural wealth.  Following an invasion and subsequent treaty with the Malagasy government, French authorities repudiated the concession and arrested Waller as a spy, sentencing him to twenty years hard labor.  “The Waller case” provoked outrage in the U.S. among black leaders and expansionary nationalists who pressured the Cleveland administration to protect the rights of American citizens abroad.  After a ten-month incarceration during which his physical health greatly declined, Waller was released and returned to the U.S.  During the Spanish American War, he served as an officer with the Twenty-Third Kansas Volunteers.  Waller died of pneumonia in Yonkers, New York in October 1907.