That Time America Threatened War with France over Mexico

Warfare History Network

History, Americas

What would have happened?

Key point: France tried to conquer Mexico and, although America was in the midst of its Civil War, Washington warned Paris to stop.

The continued presence of a handpicked French puppet emperor in Mexico, which had so worried the Lincoln administration during the Civil War, remained a sore point with American political and military leaders after the Union victory in 1865. Almost as soon as he had accepted Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Virginia, in April of that year, General Ulysses S. Grant turned his attention to Mexico and Emperor Maximilian of Austria, who now sat as pretender to the Mexican throne.

“Very Saucy and Insulting”

That May, Grant dispatched Maj. Gen. Phil Sheridan, to southern Texas to keep an eye on the “very saucy and insulting” French. Sheridan was instructed to monitor the Mexican-American border and also provide secret aid and comfort to Mexican nationalist Benito Juarez, whom Maximilian had supplanted as ruler of the country four years before.

It was delicate task, particularly for a general as naturally combative as Sheridan, and it was further complicated by the fact that Secretary of State William Seward, a national hero in the wake of his near-fatal wounding during the Lincoln assassination plot, adamantly opposed either overt or covert involvement in Mexican affairs.

The French presence in Mexico, which Grant found particularly galling, had begun within weeks of the outbreak of the American Civil War, when French, English, and Spanish forces landed in Mexico in response to Juarez’s provocative moratorium on his nation’s foreign debts. The English and Spanish soon left, but 40,000 of French Emperor Napoleon III’s best troops stayed behind to prop up his chosen representative, Archduke Maximilian, the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I.

Two Chances for War