Steve Sainlaude - France and the American Civil War: A Diplomatic History

Americas Civil War was much more than a military conflict between the North and South. From the outset the American Question, as foreign powers called it, involved multiple European empires and the young nations of Latin America in matters of diplomacy, commerce, and geopolitical strategy. It soon became apparent to foreign observers that the insurrection of Southern slaveholders was not going to be easily put down and would become a protracted conflict. Though they remained officially neutral, most of the European powers were betting on the South to win, not by military prowess so much as sheer determination to outlast the North.

The aristocratic European governing classes despised Americas brand of democracy and were delighted to see the so-called Great Republic tearing itself apart, and they instantly recognized the Civil War as an unexpected opportunity for European empires to reclaim lost American colonies or otherwise project their power in the New World. From its stronghold in Cuba, Spain swept into its former colony the Dominican Republic even before the attack on Fort Sumter. Later, Spains navy provoked wars with Peru and Chile, part of a strategy to reassert Spanish power in South America. Britain nearly went to war with the United States in December 1861 after a U.S. Navy ship apprehended a British mail packet, the RMS Trent, which was carrying two Confederate envoys to Europe. While war fever reached its peak, Britain took the opportunity to send 10,000 troops to Canada and fortify its navy in the Caribbean.

In October 1861, Spain, Britain, and France sent delegates to London to create the Tripartite Alliance, a military pact whose mission was to invade and occupy Mexico, supposedly to recover debts. The Mexican republic was recovering from its own civil war, the Guerra de Reforma (185760), and was forced to suspend interest payments to creditors for two years. Napolon III, the mercurial emperor of France, had more in mind than recovering debts. He saw in Mexico the key to his Grand Design, which would have France leading the Latin race in the New World and Europe, countering the influence of Anglo-Saxons in both spheres. The Latin temperament, according to French imperial thought on this matter, was wholly unsuited to republicanism and could only be governed by a monarch sustained by the moral authority of the Catholic Church.

Mexico had been through some fifty changes of government since breaking with Spain in 1821 and had endured a long civil war in which the Conservative Party (also known as the Church Party) rebelled against the Liberal Party and its program of reform that vastly reduced the power of the church. After the conservatives lost, they sought help from Europe, which led to Napolon IIIs fateful decision to install the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Maximilian as monarch of the Mexican Empire. Napolon would never have considered such a venture were the United States not consumed by civil war. The United States feared that to oppose French intervention in Mexico might throw Napolon III into the arms of the Confederacy.

In many respects, Napolons Grand Design depended on the success of the Confederacy. John Slidell, the Confederate envoy in Paris, invited the French emperor to make war against their common enemy, the United States. Having realized that antislavery sentiment in Britain spoiled chances of an alliance, the Confederacy shifted its attention to France in 1863. Its envoys and propagandists in Europe flattered the French with the idea that the South, with its Louisiana Creole, South Carolina Huguenot, and Anglo-Norman heritage shared a natural Latin antipathy toward the fanatical Puritan zealots to their North. To sweeten the deal, the Confederacy authorized Slidell to offer a lucrative cotton bribe exclusively to France, if it would break the Union blockade and ally with the South against the United States.