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Article Excerpt
As the fifth year of the U.S. Civil War dawned, all indications pointed to the immediate collapse of the Confederacy. At seventy-three years of age, the veteran Jacksonian Democrat Francis P. Blair Sr. whose political ties stretched across party lines, was eager to play an instrumental role not only in arranging a peace between the North and South but also in devising a plan to oust the French army of occupation from Mexico. Having received a pass from President Abraham Lincoln to cross Union lines, Blair met with Confederate president Jefferson Davis in Richmond on January 12, 1865. Blair suggested that Davis lead a joint expedition of Union and Confederate forces to liberate Mexico. Blair's plan had two purposes. First, the Union and Confederate governments could achieve peace and unite in common victory. Second, the principles of the Monroe Doctrine would be upheld. Davis was receptive to the idea of peace talks and a joint military venture but expressed doubts about the nation's ability to mount such a campaign. Lincoln, whose only interest in the elder statesman's mission was to gauge the despondency of the rebel leader, rejected Blair's Mexican scheme as a viable option to end the war. (1)
Nevertheless, the idea of a war with France to preserve the Monroe Doctrine and restore peace between the North and South lingered. In the summer of 1865, Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant took up the issue and devised a scheme to expel the French from Mexico. Although recent studies of Grant illuminate his active role in policymaking to protect blacks, Unionists, and army personnel from the hands of vengeful southerners as well as his efforts to preserve the North's victory during Reconstruction, Grant's actions in regard to the French intervention in Mexico remain understudied. (2) Following the cessation of hostilities in April 1865, Grant directed his attention southward to the U.S. border with Mexico along the Rio Grande River. With the Americans entangled in a civil war, French emperor Napoleon III had established a colonial empire in Mexico in 1862. Under the pretense of collecting debts owed by the Mexican government, France, along with Britain and Spain, ordered a few units to land on Mexican soil as a show of force. But the British and Spanish severed their joint operation with the French when they discovered that Napoleon sought to establish a monarchy in the "New World." Grant was eager to enlist a seasoned army of Union soldiers to aid Mexican president Benito Juarez and his liberal anti-French forces, otherwise known as the Juaristas, in toppling Napoleon's puppet regime headed by Austrian prince Ferdinand Maximilian. Acutely aware that Secretary of State William H. Seward opposed U.S. military intervention, Grant sought to undermine Seward's course of diplomacy with the French government by issuing secret orders to the army to prepare for war. He kept his commander in chief and the secretary of state in the dark about his motives in increasing the number of American soldiers near the Texas-Mexican border to fifty thousand and placing the bellicose Maj. Gen. Phillip Sheridan in command of this army. Grant's Mexican policy escalated tensions between the U.S. and French governments and threatened to embroil a nation already devastated by war in another war, this one with a major European power.
Was Grant willing to take the risk, on the heels of the most costly conflict in the nation's history, to expel a European power on Mexican soil that he believed posed an immediate threat to national security or was he merely trying to bluff the French into withdrawing from Mexico? Publicly, Grant revealed little. As in all matters related to Reconstruction and political office, Grant retained an inner circle that included his wife; his most ardent political supporter, Congressman Elihu B. Washburne, his staff; and a few generals whose friendship he cherished. However, when journalist John Russell Young posed the question of the French occupation of Mexico to Grant during a world tour following his presidency, the war hero turned politician replied, "No one dreaded war more than I did. I had more than I wanted." (3) In spite of his remarks, Grant's private words and deeds seem to indicate otherwise. His decision to transfer thousands of American soldiers to the Texas-Mexican border is difficult to reconcile with his statement to Young. Evidence suggests that for several months after the Confederacy had surrendered, the fate of Mexico was uppermost in Grant's mind as he demonstrated a readiness to go to war if necessary.
The few historians who have discussed Grant's involvement in dispatching American soldiers to the Rio Grande offer various explanations for his motives. William S. McFeely argues that war "was the core of his life. Ulysses Grant was reluctant to let go of war." The battlefield offered the general an escape from the business failures that plagued his life outside of the military. McFeely contends that following the Civil War the hero of Appomattox sought another war to prevent falling back into obscurity and painful memories of hard times. According to William Hesseltine, Grant's patriotism contributed to his campaign to defend the nation's borders from European imperialist invaders. Hesseltine asserts that once Grant had notified Gen. William T. Sherman of Gen. Robert E. Lee's surrender, he rose from his headquarters table and remarked to his staff, "Now for Mexico!" Brooks Simpson maintains that Grant sought to field an army of Union and Confederate veterans to wage war against the French in part to reforge the bonds of intersectional brotherhood. (4)
In the winter of 1864-65, however, Grant did not share Blair's enthusiasm for an armistice followed by a joint military expedition to help foster sectional reconciliation. In numerous letters and conversations, he reiterated his fear that Confederates were plotting to escape across the border in hopes of gaining French military support to prolong the Civil War. Grant maintained that the French intervention was intertwined with the rebellion; therefore, a permanent peace could not be achieved until the French were driven from the continent. In a June 19, 1865, letter to President Andrew Johnson, Grant warned, "I see nothing before us but a long, expensive and bloody war, one in which the [foreign] enemies of this country will be joined by tens of thousands of disciplined soldiers, embittered against their Government by the experience of the last four years." (5)
A number of factors, including the establishment of a European colony in the Americas and a suspicion of secret negotiations among French and Confederate officials, weighed heavily on Grant in May 1865 as he issued orders to transfer American forces to the Texas-Mexican border. Grant feared that events south of the border threatened the United States' national security. Napoleon III's effort to fulfill his colonial dream directly challenged the Monroe Doctrine, which forbade foreign nations from extending their control in the American hemisphere. Moreover, rumors of an agreement struck between French and Confederate officials, in which France would provide economic and military aid to sustain the Confederacy, led Grant to link the events in Mexico with the Civil War. Furthermore, Grant maintained that a war-tested United States Army could easily overcome the estimated twenty thousand French soldiers occupying Mexico.
To be sure, Grant's aggressive posture toward Maximilian's regime stemmed partly from his abiding interest in Mexico and his genuine concern for the welfare of its citizens. The manner in which the War with Mexico had been waged by the United States in 1846 plagued Grant throughout his life. Writing forty years later in his Personal Memoirs, he called the war "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation.... We were sent to provoke a fight, but it was essential that Mexico should commence it." President James K. Polk had "provoked" the war, Grant argued, to reap political capital from a swift victory. Moreover, he believed, Democrats had supported the war to acquire territory into which slavery could expand. Grant maintained that the Civil War was in part a consequence of the U.S. government's war against Mexico: "We got our punishment [for the Mexican War] in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times." (6) Drawing a parallel between the U.S. and French interventions in Mexico, he identified with the Juaristas struggling to liberate their nation against Mexican conservatism and foreign powers to establish a liberal government.
The U.S.-Mexican War not only taught Grant valuable battlefield lessons that he applied during the Civil War but also sparked in him a passion for the Mexican nation and its oppressed people. His wartime letters to his future wife, Julia Dent, revealed his affection for the land and its people. As American soldiers marched to Mexico City, he described each region he passed through as the most beautiful in the world. Mexico, he wrote, was "truly a great country. No country was ever so blessed by nature." He relished the Mexican climate and the rich soil that could produce any crops a person desired. He told Julia that if she could leave St. Louis and join him, "I should never wish to leave Mexico." (7)
During his tour of duty Grant fraternized with people from both the middle and lower classes and thus became well acquainted with Mexican society. Wealthy Mexicans, Grant observed, "keep down the poor with a hardness of heart that is...
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