“The United States Did Not Mean to Rub Elbows with an Austrian-French Monarchy”: Cooperation and Conflict in the US-Mexico Borderlands, 1865–67

Less than a generation after the U.S. War with Mexico left the relationship between the two countries in tatters, former enemies worked together to defeat French Emperor Napoleon III’s imperial project, a flagrant violation of the Monroe Doctrine. Scholars have long contended that the U.S. focused on its civil war to the exclusion of all other conflicts. Furthermore, they assert, after the rebel surrender, the State Department occasionally prodded the French to leave Mexico, but made no serious effort to remove Emperor Ferdinand Maximilian, Napoleon’s Austrian cat’s-paw, from Mexico. However, this analysis ignores strenuous efforts, by U.S. and Mexican citizens, to throw the French and Austrians out of Mexico. President Andrew Johnson turned a blind eye to numerous violations of the Neutrality Act of 1818 by the U.S. soldiers who occupied Texas and Louisiana. These violations included U.S. officers condoning Mexican nationals recruiting for their army on U.S. soil and buying supplies in the U.S., U.S. soldiers deserting to fight in Mexico, and U.S. soldiers placing arms across the international border for Mexicans to find and employ against the French. In addition, Mexicans, from elite government officials to relatively unknown agents, fomented anti-French sentiment in the U.S. by strategically appealing to their “sister republic” to vindicate the Monroe Doctrine. In sum, during the early years of Reconstruction, anti-imperialist tendencies on the U.S./Mexico borderlands proved important because they accelerated rapprochement between the U.S. and Mexico. Had U.S. authorities in the southern states adopted some of Sheridan’s tactics, Reconstruction might have unfolded very differently.