By Keli Holt
On May 5, 1862, in the central Mexican city of Puebla, 5,000 Frenchmen lined up for battle. Many of these soldiers were elite infantrymen known as zouaves, who had cut their teeth in the French colonial battles in North Africa. To prove French valor, their commander ordered his crack troops to attack uphill against heavily fortified Mexican positions. Three times the French rushed the hilltop fort and were repulsed. After a day of battle, the defeated French retreated toward the coastal city of Veracruz to wait for reinforcements. The Mexican victory on May 5 is celebrated as Cinco de Mayo.
Here’s how all of that came to pass.
By 1861, Mexico was broke. Two wars against the westward expanding Americans – the Wars of Texas Independence from 1835-1836 and the Mexican-American War from 1846-1848 – had shrunk the size of both Mexico itself (by roughly 50%) and emptied its treasury. Furthermore, in the mid-1850s, Mexico fought its own civil war when liberals, who believed in separating church and state, fought conservatives, who wanted to maintain the unity of the state with the Catholic Church. When the Mexican Civil War ended in 1861, the victorious liberal president, Benito Juárez, was forced to address Mexico’s insolvency.
To fund all these wars, Mexico had borrowed heavily from European creditors – the British, French and Spanish – but in 1861, President Juárez suspended all payments. Simultaneously, the American Civil War began in April, diverting all of America’s military and political attentions. The time looked ripe for the European powers to intervene in North America.
The American Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823, had made it clear to all European Empires that they were no longer welcome in South or North America. Issued only 40 years after American independence from the British, it was a daring proclamation for an upstart democracy to make to the mighty Europeans.
Remarkably, the Monroe Doctrine was successful in keeping the Europeans at bay for almost 40 years. It certainly helped that Europe was busy, first repairing the destruction wrought by the Napoleonic Wars (1801-1815) and second by colonial expansionism with wars in India, Asia, and Africa. Once the American Civil War began, however, and Mexico defaulted on its payments, the tripartite powers jumped on the chance to intervene in the Americas.
The American Civil War was long and deadly. While most Americans learn about slavery, Gettysburg, and the Emancipation Proclamation, few realize that the Confederate States of America was at its heart an expansionist power. Leading Confederate politicians envisioned an empire of slave states ringing the Gulf of America, including the American South and Caribbean and extending west through Mexico and Central America to Brazil.
Confederate desires to expand drew on a long tradition of American extension that began almost immediately after independence in 1783. It was westward expansion in the 19th century that had exacerbated tensions between the North and South. As America grew, first with the Louisiana Purchase (a swath of territory from Louisiana to Canada), then with the lands seized from Mexico (California, Arizona, and New Mexico) Americans argued over whether slavery should be expanded into these new areas. Bitter and sometimes violent clashes between opponents and proponents of slavery expansion occurred in Congress, in the newspapers, and in new territories like Kansas and Nebraska.
By 1860 and the election of Lincoln, the South surmised that it was just a matter of time before the more economically developed and heavily populated North would dominate the federal government and be able to legislate the end of slavery. The South also chafed under the Northern economic system that relied on tariffs to protect burgeoning American industries (almost all of which were in New England). The South was a global producer of raw materials, primarily cotton harvested by an army of slaves, but also of tobacco, rice, and sugar. High tariffs meant that these Southern staples were more expensive abroad. When the South seceded in 1861, its goal was not just to keep the North from forcing it back into the Union but to establish an empire of its own built upon a free trade union (i.e. no tariffs) and slavery.
The Confederacy thus looked west and in 1862 launched the first salvo in expansionism – the invasion of the territory of New Mexico. The goal was to seize all of New Mexico, march north to the silver mines of Colorado, and then turn west to California and its gold. The Confederacy watched with great interest as the British, French and Spanish landed troops in Mexico in 1861. While Britain and Spain pulled their troops back in 1862, fearing another long colonial war, France pressed on even after its defeat on Cinco de Mayo. As France seized more Mexican territory, Lincoln became terrified of the prospect of French-controlled Mexico allying with the Confederacy and helping the South establish an independent Confederate Empire.
