By Keli Holt
In April 1861, Confederate soldiers fired upon Fort Sumter in South Carolina, beginning the bloodiest war in American history. While U.S. President Abraham Lincoln was preoccupied with America’s Civil War, another war began to the south of America. The French Emperor, Napoleon III, the nephew of the Napoleon Bonaparte, tried to reconstitute a French Empire in North America. While the United States cleaved itself in two, the French seized their opportunity and installed Maximilian I as the Emperor of Mexico.
It’s true that Mexico had achieved independence from Spain in 1821, after almost 300 years of colonial rule. However, freedom from Spain did not translate into prosperity or stability for the Mexican people for the next several decades. To start, Mexico City inherited Spain’s perpetual conflicts with the powerful Native nations in northern Mexico (the American states of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and California), an empty treasury, and insecurity brought on by the westward expanding Americans. The war over Texas independence (1835-1836) and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) shrunk not only the size of Mexico but also further bankrupted its treasury.
By the time of the American Civil War in 1861, the president of Mexico, Benito Juárez, stopped all loan payments to Mexico’s European creditors – the Spanish, French and British – to save money. All three nations had once controlled, and mostly lost, enormous empires on the North American continent.
France had once controlled large swaths of what is now the American Midwest, from French Canada in the north, following the Mississippi River to New Orleans in the south. Yet, the French lost their foothold to the British in the French and Indian War of 1756-1763. Despite its ouster from the continent in 1763, France still controlled several Caribbean islands, the most profitable of which was Saint Domingue, modern-day Haiti, made rich by its slave-operated sugar plantations. The Haitians themselves, in the only successful slave revolt in history, completed the eviction of the French in the 1790s.
Britain had founded not only the 13 colonies along the Atlantic seaboard, but also ruled all of Canada and several of its own Caribbean sugar islands, of which Jamaica and the Bahamas were the wealthiest. Britain lost its 13 colonies after American Independence in 1783, but it still controlled all of Canada, its islands, and maintained a presence in what would become the states of Oregon and Washington.
Spain had the longest history of empire in the Americas. In the 1500s, it seized control of all of South America, with Portugal taking Brazil and most of Central America and Mexico. From Mexico, Spanish explorers pushed northward hoping to discover gold and silver like had been found in Central and South America. The only riches Spain found in America, however, were the people of various Native nations whose labor they exploited to make themselves wealthy. Following the Spanish was the horse, whose introduction into North America changed everything.
Spain initially tried to keep the horse and western technology like guns and cannons away from the already powerful Native nations in the American Southwest. However, Spain was powerless to stop French fur traders and Americans from trading with Native nations, and neither of them had qualms about spreading access to horses and technology.
The horse revolutionized life on the American plains and Southwest. Nations like the Apache, Comanche, Ute and Navajo became expert raiders targeting the isolated Spanish and later Mexican settlements in the American Southwest. Protecting remote settlements in its far-flung empire (not to mention its profligate spending in Europe) bankrupted Spain by 1800, helping spark the Mexican Wars for Independence.
When President Juárez stopped payments on loans to the British, French, and Spanish in 1861, all three colonial powers saw an opportunity to recreate some part of their lost empires. With the U.S. distracted in a Civil War, Spain seized the vital Mexican port of Veracruz in 1861. In 1862, Britain and France sent troops to Mexico in support of Spain. Initially, the tripartite powers claimed they only wanted to “encourage” negotiations with Mexico City. However, France had grander ambitions than just squeezing money out of the insolvent Mexican government, and French troops began marching toward the capital.
This was too much for the British and Spanish who were weary of getting bogged down in an expensive war, and they pulled their forces out. The French, on the other hand, were determined to reconstitute their empire in North America. So, their troops continued marching.
On May 5, 1862, Mexican forces defeated France at the Battle of Puebla in central Mexico. That date is now celebrated as Cinco de Mayo, a commemoration of Mexican heritage in defiance of European colonizers. While Cinco de Mayo was a Mexican victory, it was short-lived. The French rallied and seized Mexico City. They installed a puppet monarch, an Austrian Hapsburg prince named Maximilian I, who would rule Mexico for three years on behalf of the French.
In the next issue, we will explore Maximilian’s relations with the American Confederacy.
