El Norte

by Carrie Gibson

  One of the people in New Orleans who had been paying close attention to events in Cuba was a young newspaper editor named William Walker. Around the time of López’s expeditions, Walker quit his job and headed west to try his hand at filibustering, later earning himself the nickname “gray-eyed man of destiny.” His first targets were the Mexican territories of Baja and Sonora. On November 3, 1853, he and some forty-five men landed in La Paz, Baja, where he declared himself president of Lower California, abolishing duties and establishing the territory under the legal code of Louisiana, which would permit slavery.98 He justified his actions by claiming that “the moral and social ties which bound it to Mexico, have been even weaker and more dissolute than the physical” and that to “develop of the resources of Lower California … it was necessary to make it Independent.”99

  The Mexican chargé d’affaires in the United States, Juan Nepomuceno Almonte, wrote to the U.S. secretary of state, William Marcy, expressing his outrage at these “scandalous proceedings.” Almonte reminded Marcy that President Pierce had pledged in his most recent annual message to Congress that “he would use all the means at his command in order vigorously to repress any attempts that might be made within the territory of the United States for the purpose of arming illegal expeditions against the territory of friendly nations.” He asked Marcy to “have the kindness to inform him, whether any measures have been adopted, on the part of the American government, for preventing the repetition and continuance of the piratical depredations, which have already begun to take place upon Mexican territory.”100

  The answer appeared to be negative, as Walker’s scheme survived a few months longer, despite his trouble in controlling his ragtag band of soldiers. Mexican troops forced them back to the United States by the spring of 1854 and afterward Walker was tried for violating U.S. neutrality laws, though his acquittal was rushed through by slavery sympathizers. A small slap on the wrist did little to dampen his enthusiasm for filibustering, and he decided to go farther south. By 1855, Walker was inviting fellow filibusters and potential settlers to come to Nicaragua, luring “persons of thrift and industry” with promises of land grants and no duties on imported goods. After arriving in the Central American nation and becoming embroiled in local politics, Walker declared himself president, but his scheme soon collapsed and in 1860 he was shot dead in Honduras.

  Still, the quest for northern Mexico continued. In 1857, President James Buchanan offered $15 million for parts of Chihuahua and Sonora, claiming that these more naturally belonged with the land already taken; they also contained mines and the course of the Colorado River, which flows into the Gulf of California. The offer was refused, and Mexico struggled to fortify its border with enough soldiers to effectively patrol it, while also trying to encourage more settlers to move there in order to create a stronger buffer against the United States.101

  The attempts to obtain Cuba and parts of Mexico had been humiliating failures. Animosity between slave and free states finally exploded when shots were fired at Fort Sumter, South Carolina, on April 12, 1861. The Civil War was not limited to the eastern United States: Mexican-Americans in the West would find themselves drawn into this conflict, as would Californios. Some Hispanic soldiers sided with the Union and organized themselves into Company C of the First Battalion of Native Cavalry, which patrolled the Arizona and New Mexico territories, and the California Battalion of the Second Massachusetts Cavalry ended up in the heart of battle, fighting in Virginia.102

  Slaveholding Texas, however, seceded from the Union on February 1, 1861. It was well positioned to trade with Mexicans along the border for arms and contraband goods; and the lands of northern Mexico could, in theory, later be taken in order to make real the ongoing fantasy of a southern slaveholding empire.103 By the summer of 1861, the Confederacy’s Lieutenant Colonel John R. Baylor had marched troops from El Paso up the Río Grande and into New Mexico, and on August 1, Mesilla found itself the capital of the Confederate territory of Arizona, formed of the half of New Mexico that lay south of the thirty-fourth parallel.104

  A few years earlier, in 1859, the New Mexico territorial legislature had promulgated a slave code which included in its provisions that slaves were property and allowed for runaways to be captured. The measure was taken even though the black population was very small, hovering around one hundred, and mostly free. It may instead have been the several hundred Indians, some of whom had been captured and sold from other nomadic chiefdoms in the West, whom the legislature had in mind. These Indians, while officially free, labored under a system of debt peonage, which left them bonded to their owners in slave-like conditions.

  However, there were no doubt larger political considerations—New Mexico’s desired statehood—that factored into the creation of the code. It provided a way for New Mexican politicians to try to appeal to the existing racial order, presenting themselves as “white,” through the code’s measures, such as its prohibiting black people from marrying or even testifying against a “white” person in New Mexico.105 Before the outbreak of war, the passage of the code attracted the support of southern congressmen, who in turn pledged to help New Mexico become a state.106 Two years later, and with the Confederates now in New Mexico, the territory’s legislature did an about-face, revoking the slave code and making clear its support of the Union in December 1861.107

  The Confederacy was eyeing a further southwest extension, in part to secure supply routes from the West and in part to capture valuable goldfields; in response, the governor organized the Unionist First New Mexico Volunteers Infantry Regiment, and New Mexicans were quick to join, under the command of Kit Carson.108

  On February 21, 1862, blue and gray met at the Battle of Valverde, with many losses on both sides. By March, the Confederates had taken Albuquerque and Santa Fe.109 North and South soon met again at Glorieta Pass, from March 26 to 28, in one of the most significant battles of the western theater. Around twelve hundred Confederates were forced to retreat by thirteen hundred Union troops. The Union’s success was in part due to a raid, led by Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Chavez, to set fire to a train of supply wagons. The Confederacy ended its occupation of New Mexico, and its ambition for western expansion.110

  Tejanos and Mexicans in Texas were wary of the conflict, though some Hispanic people ultimately did end up with the Confederacy—an estimated 2,550 Tejanos fought on that side, while 958 joined the Union.111 All over the West, including California, the Arizona territory, and the New Mexico territory, soldiers enlisted, and Hispanic names were found in regiments as near as Louisiana and as far away as Vermont.112 Whichever side they were on, the estimated Hispanic soldier population of 10,000 to 20,000 faced ongoing Anglo suspicion, especially in the Southwest, of being disloyal or treasonous.

  WHILE THE UNITED States was distracted by its Civil War, European powers returned to the Americas. Spain reannexed the Dominican Republic in 1861, after the island had suffered a number of internal conflicts, occupying it until 1865.113 Around the same time, another European intervention took place in Mexico, though this involved not its former colonial ruler, Spain, but rather the French. The Republic of Mexico owed millions in unpaid loans. Its woeful finances began with independence, as mining and agricultural output plummeted amid the years of warfare. It took decades—and lots of money from Britain and France—to regain a financial footing.114 The Mexican-American War did little to remedy matters, and there had been more political changes in the decades that followed, including another civil conflict, known as the Reform War (1858–60), triggered by a series of new laws that stripped away ecclesiastical powers and confiscated Church property, causing resentments that were exacerbated by a new constitution in 1857 that did not make Catholicism the national religion.

  The Conservatives, whose membership comprised the clergy, the military, and the wealthy, were quick to voice their opposition. The liberal president Ignacio Comonfort, who was elected in the summer of 1857 after serving as interim president since 1855, ended up dismiss
ing Mexico’s Congress by December. Soon afterward, a Conservative general, Félix María Zuloaga, sent Comonfort into exile and assumed the presidency. According to the constitution, however, the president of the supreme court—at that moment Benito Juárez—was the rightful successor. Now Juárez and his Liberal backers would have to fight for the presidency, and by 1858, the Reform War had begun.115

  In the United States, an article in the Democratic Review commented on this crisis, blaming Mexico’s problems not on religion or governance but on race: “She [Mexico] started with every chance in her favor except one—her people were not white men—they were not Caucasians. … There were a bad mixture of Spaniards, Indians, and negroes. … Such men did not know how to be free: they have not learned the lesson to this day.” The piece further argued that “Mexico cannot govern herself … the time has come when it is as imperatively our duty—made so by Providence—to take control of Mexico.”116 Such words were rhetorical bluster, as there was little popular support, except among a few southern slaveholders, for any such involvement with Mexico. Yet articles such as this indicated a lingering contempt for Mexico.

  The Reform War ended in 1860, with Juárez as president, but he faced numerous challenges. External pressure was now mounting from foreign lenders. Juárez, however, did not have the money to make debt repayments. Britain, France, and Spain wanted to seize the port of Veracruz so that they could continue to collect customs revenue. Rumors of an impending invasion of Mexico were moving through Europe, even prompting Karl Marx to thunder in a November 1861 New York Daily Tribune article that such an intervention would be “one of the most monstrous enterprises ever chronicled in the annals of international history.”117

  In the end France acted alone. Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, as Emperor Napoleon III, saw a much bigger opportunity than simple debt collection and a way for France to spread its influence in the Americas.118 His plan involved placing a puppet monarch in charge of Mexico, and he found in the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian Joseph a naive and pliable candidate. This was not as far-fetched as it may now seem—some Conservatives within Mexico had been discussing, if not explicitly advocating, the return to monarchy since the 1840s.119 They saw constitutional monarchy as a way to restore order after what they considered to be the failure of republican Liberal rule, as well as a means to protect their privileges and restore the Church’s position. It was a vision of a return to a hierarchical, Catholic Mexico.

  Around the same time, France, under Napoleon III, had been casting itself as part—and protector—of l’Amérique latine, a broad “Latin” America that was composed of a “Latin race.” This expression had already been in use, but the French adopted it with enthusiasm.120 For France, the “Latin” connection was the common origin of the languages of France, Spain, and Portugal, and their Catholicism, which was considered to be as much a culturally unifying force as Protestantism was for the Anglo-Saxon world.121 France’s global ambitions had been reignited in this period, and they reached far beyond this “Latin” sphere, into places like Southeast Asia (French Indochina). In the Americas, the situation in Mexico provided a favorable opportunity to add to France’s handful of Caribbean islands.

  In 1862, Napoleon III sent around thirty thousand soldiers to Mexico to place the Austrian on its throne.122 Juárez was not going to let this happen without a fight, and Mexico won a key victory in Puebla, on May 5, 1862, which was later commemorated by the holiday Cinco de Mayo. The French continued their advance and by June 1864 the Austrian had become Maximilian I, the emperor of Mexico, placed upon the “cactus throne.” Angry about this turn of events in Mexico, the U.S. president Abraham Lincoln recalled the Union’s minister there and refused to recognize the French-backed regime, while also sending more troops to Texas.123

  The Confederates, however, welcomed the French arrivals. They held a series of talks that would have given them recognition by France in exchange for support in keeping Maximilian in power. One French pamphlet, written by Michel Chevalier, a leading proponent of France’s “Latin” ideology, claimed that the purpose of the war had been “to aid the Mexicans in establishing, according to their own free will and choice, a government which may have some chance of stability.”124 Alongside this, France wanted to “oppose the absorption of Southern America by Northern America,” as well as “oppose the degradation of the Latin race.” Thus, to Chevalier, it was “the interests which compel France to sympathize with the Confederate States which have led our banners up to the walls of Mexico.”125

  With the Union victory in 1865, hundreds of Confederate soldiers left the South and headed to Mexico. One letter from Sterling Price—a general who had also fought in the Mexican-American War—spoke of the “greatest kindness” of the emperor in receiving him. Maximilian issued a decree that September allowing the ex-soldiers to settle around Veracruz, where five hundred thousand acres would be given over for the development of Confederate colonies.126 Price settled in a place they named Cordova, some seventy miles from Veracruz, with the intention of planting coffee. He presented a glowing picture of his new life “in the best climate in the world,” explaining that land cost only one dollar an acre and that he and other Confederates “are in high spirits and expect to make fortunes raising coffee.”127 It was an optimistic picture of a hard life; these settlements remained basic, and years passed before coffee beans could be harvested.128

  Mexican public hostility toward the Austrian interloper had not dimmed, and he had a poor understanding of the country he was meant to govern. Maximilian sometimes backed liberal policies—such as not returning confiscated lands to the Catholic Church—to the consternation of the Conservatives who brought him to power.129 Guerrilla warfare was continuous, aided by the covert sale of arms and ammunition from the United States to Juárez and the Liberals.130 A frustrated Napoleon III decided to pull his troops out of Mexico, taking nine thousand in the autumn of 1866 and the rest over the course of the following year. Facing the removal of the forces that propped up his regime, Maximilian considered abdication but decided to fight Juárez, backed by Mexican royalists who were outnumbered. Maximilian was captured and imprisoned by May 1867. He was tried for treason and executed by firing squad on June 19.131

  Juárez returned to power and the Confederates in Mexico realized they had once again chosen the wrong side. Those who stayed in Mexico risked incurring the wrath of Juárez and attacks by his supporters, who wanted to rid the country of meddling foreigners. Many experienced raids or harassment from their angry Mexican neighbors. Most decided to leave, though a handful took their chances and stayed on.132

  For the United States, the Maximilian episode compounded many negative ideas about Mexican politics. For many U.S. politicians, Mexico represented the antithesis of a functioning nation. By 1876, however, some people began to fear that the United States could suffer decades of similar turbulence, and this manifested itself in the brief “Mexicanization” panic. This was a shorthand and pejorative way of expressing the fear that the Civil War had weakened the nation to the point where it, like Mexico, might lurch from one internal conflict to the next.133 The term also implied endless local corruption at the ballot box.134 That year’s November presidential election between the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden was disputed, and Hayes wasn’t declared the winner until the following March. The presidential ballot had become mired in Reconstruction politics, with claims that black Republican voters in the South had been intimidated at the voting booth.

  A December 1876 edition of the Nation called Mexicanization “a disease of which frequent fights over presidencies and chief-justiceships are but symptoms in its last and most aggravated stage.”135 Such problems were not limited to Mexico, the article argued: “Among the ways in which these habits are destroyed or the growth of them prevented is the practice of treating the political party opposed to your own as a band of criminals or conspirators against the government. This practice has been cultivated in Fr
ance ever since 1790; it is firmly rooted in Mexican politics.”136

  Within the word “Mexicanization” was an implication that the forms of democracy in Mexico were somehow the result of an “inferior” people attempting to use an Anglo-Saxon model and failing—the concern now was that democracy in the United States was following suit.137 The Nation piece went on to argue that the Reconstruction South “is Mexicanized … in the present dispute over the Presidency there are actually signs, not only that we have not cured the South, but that, by nursing and manipulating the South, we have ourselves caught the contagion.”138

  TWO PIECES OF legislation that passed at the outset of the Civil War would have a significant influence once it was over. In May 1862, Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, which granted 160 acres to settlers who were prepared to work the land for five years. After the war, Union veterans could deduct the time of their service from the five-year period; this provision gave them an extra incentive to move and spurred a population boom in the West.139

  The second important bill was the Pacific Railroad Act, passed in the same year, creating the Union Pacific Railroad Company to lay track west from Omaha, Nebraska, in order to connect with a line that the Central Pacific Railroad had built between Utah and Sacramento, California; such transcontinental transport was an important symbol at a time of disunity. Fifteen years later, the Southern Pacific completed a bridge over the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona, a crucial step in its growing network connecting California with Texas and New Orleans.140