Roy Morris Jr.
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 lead-
ers 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.
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 Maximil-
ian had supplanted as ruler of the country
four years before.
It was delicate task, particularly for a gen-
eral 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 inresponse to Juarez’s provocative
moratorium on his nation’s for-
eign 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 representa-
tive, Archduke Maximilian, the
younger brother of Austrian
Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Sheridan, with Grant’s tacit support, was
primed and ready to cross the Rio Grande
and push the French out of Mexico sin-
glehandedly. A golden opportunity soon
presented itself when Imperialist General
Tomas Mejia, commanding Maximilian’s
forces at Matamoros, refused to hand over
several pieces of captured Confederate
artillery, which Sheridan maintained
belonged by rights to the American gov-
ernment. Threats and counterthreats flew
back and forth, and the situation grew so
ominous in the summer of 1865 that Pres-
ident Andrew Johnson and his cabinet
openly discussed the chance of war with
France. Maximilian, already overburdened
by military challenges from Juarez and his
rebel forces, finally ordered Mejia to
return the disputed artillery, “varnished
over,” sneered Sheridan, “with Imperial
apologies.”
A second potential flash point arose a few
months later when a party of American fil-
ibusters made an unauthorized foray acrossthe border to Bagdad and were
promptly captured by govern-
ment forces. Under the
emperor’s longstanding “black
flag” decree, anyone caught
fighting against the empire could
expect to be summarily exe-
cuted. Again, American troops
poised for a strike across the
border to recuse their straying
countrymen but backed off at the last
moment when the men were spared.
Finally, in April 1866, Napoleon III
grudgingly began pulling French troops out
of Mexico. Unfortunately for Sheridan, the
withdrawal did not come soon enough to
prevent the death of his friend and longtime
chief of scouts, Major Henry Young, who
was killed “by a party of ex-Confederates
and renegade Mexican rancheros” while
attempting to cross the Rio Grande into
Mexico on a reconnaissance mission.
The withdrawal of French forces soon led
to the fall of Maximilian’s cardboard gov-
ernment. In June 1867, Juarez and the
nationalists captured the Austrian pretender
and, despite a last second appeal for mercy
from the American government, executed
Maximilian before a peasant firing squad.
Neither Grant nor Sheridan, who habitu-
ally referred to Maximilian as “the Imper-
ial buccaneer,” evinced much regret at the
emperor’s passing.
Roy Morris Jr.Editorial
Carl A. Gnam, Jr.
Editorial Director,
Founder
Roy Morris Jr.
Editor
Samantha DeTulleo
Art Director
Kevin M. Hymel
Research DirectorCIVIL WAR Quarterly Volume 3 Number 2
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PRINTED IN THE USAContinued French meddling in Mexico almost led to a post-Civil War
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