LAIR: Foreign Intervention in 19th Century Mexico (October 24)

1. Excerpt from "Maximilian in Mexico" by Phil Leigh

"On Oct. 3, 1863, a Mexican delegation arrived in the Austrian port city of Trieste to officially offer Mexico’s imperial crown to the 31-year-old Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian, a scion of the Austrian branch of the Hapsburg royal family and the brother of the Austrian emperor, Franz Josef I.

For 300 years the family’s Spanish branch and its successors had, by virtue of its seat in Madrid, ruled over colonial Mexico and much of the Western Hemisphere. After Mexico won independence in 1821, it fell into a constant state of near anarchy; There were 75 government successions by the time the American Civil War started. Conservative Mexicans and wealthy ex-patriots longed for the stability that a European monarchy might provide, and some of them recalled wistfully the steady hand of the Hapsburgs.

Maximilian was interested for two reasons. The liberal-minded archduke felt he could improve Mexico. Perhaps more important, there was nothing for him at home: his brother was just two years older, and was looking forward to a long reign (in fact, he ruled until his death during World War I).

Still, Maximilian would never have ascended the Mexican throne were it not for yet another emperor, Napoleon III of France. Since Napoleon III’s famous uncle sold Louisiana to the United States in 1803, France had no major stake in the Western Hemisphere. With the advent of America’s Civil War, the French monarch sensed an opportunity to change that, with Maximilian as his puppet.

In early 1862, as America convulsed through the first year of its Civil War, France began placing troops in Mexico to collect customs duties on goods, in order to force the country to make payments on a defaulted debt to several European countries. But the Mexican government was too poor to concurrently make the payments and at the same time support the army of President Benito Juárez. Initially, soldiers from Spain and Britain joined the French, but were withdrawn once they realized Napoleon was scheming to establish a puppet monarchy. As a result, Maximilian would have no power without the presence of the 40,000-man French Army.

Napoleon had hoped to get Maximilian installed a year or so earlier, but he did not capture Mexico City until June 1863. Additionally, the archduke’s October ’63 acceptance of the crown was conditioned on “a vote of the whole country,” which was quickly achieved by gathering signatures under the glitter of French bayonets.

Still, Napoleon knew how drawn out the war was becoming and reasoned that President Abraham Lincoln would be too focused on suppressing the Confederacy to oppose him. The Monroe Doctrine would be temporarily impotent, while the future offered possibilities to render it permanently ineffective.

Although Juárez was forced out of Mexico City, he remained in the country opposing Maximilian during the entire American Civil War. Juárez quickly sided with Lincoln. Early in the war he granted the United States the right to land troops on Mexico’s west coast, where they could march rapidly into Arizona territory if needed to confront a possible Confederate drive westward. On doubtful authority the first Confederate minister to Mexico, John Pickett, countered by offering to support Mexico in the reoccupation of territories lost in the Mexican War, including the present states of California, Arizona, and New Mexico, if Juarez would cancel his deal with Lincoln.

Although Juárez declined, Washington realized that the Confederates could make a similar offer to Maximilian, turning the Mexican crisis into a proxy war. As one visitor to the archduke’s castle in Trieste wrote the Confederate minister in Paris,

Maximilian expressed the warmest possible interest in the Confederate cause. He said he considered it identical with that of the new Mexican Empire … that he was particularly desirous that his sentiments upon this subject should be known to the Confederate President.""

2. Encyclopedia Britannica's article about La Reforma:

"La Reforma, ( Spanish: “The Reform”) liberal political and social revolution in Mexicobetween 1854 and 1876 under the principal leadership of Benito Juárez.

La Reforma period began with the issuance in 1854 of the Plan de Ayutla, a liberal pronouncement calling for the removal of the dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna. After Santa Anna’s fall in 1855, Juárez and the liberals enacted the Ley Juárez, abolishing the fueros (special privileges of the clergy and the military); the Ley Lerdo (1856) ordered the sale of all church lands not used for specifically religious purposes. In 1857 the congress, in which the moderate liberals held sway, drafted a liberal, federalist constitution; it ended special jurisdiction for the clergy, limited the power of the church, placed the army under ultimate civilian control, abolished hereditary titles and imprisonment for debt, and gave Mexican citizens their first genuine bill of rights.

In 1858 the conservative clergy, military, and landowners precipitated a civil war (known as the War of the Reform or Reform War), which was won by the liberal government by 1860. By the Laws of La Reforma (1859), church property, except for places of worship, was to be confiscated without compensation, monasteries were suppressed, cemeteries nationalized, and civil marriage instituted. Confiscated church property was to be allotted in small parcels to the landless; the land policy of La Reforma was its outstanding failure, however, because by the end of the period the number and wealth of large landholders increased while the condition of impoverished, landless peasants worsened."