VICKSBURG Chapter Seventy-Five

 

The citizens of Mexico City  (above) had been hearing echoes of the bugles from the approaching  Chasseurs de Vincinnes for a week.  It was their looming threat which drove the 12,000 defenders of the Mexican Republic to abandon their capital on the last day of May.   If the “Hunters of Vincinnes” had pushed, they could have sauntered into the capital that, Saturday, 1, June, 1863.  

Instead they took their time. The campaign had already been set back a year by recklessness and arrogance. This time French General Élie Frédéric Forey was taking nothing for granted. He judged it better for the residents of the Mexican capital to sniff the rot of anarchy first. After which the boot about to be applied to their necks, would seem a welcomed stability.

In the beginning it had all been about money. Having been forced to an expensive suppression of an 1860 rebellion by the wealthy and the church, the new reform President Benito Juarez, declared a 2 year moratorium on international debt payments. But the bankers in London, Madrid and Paris were not interested in the stability of Mexico. They dispatched ships and troops to seize the Gulf of Mexico port of Veracruz, to use as leverage.  The bankers wanted their money.

United States bankers had also made loans to the Juarez government, and the aggrieved Europeans offered to include American debt in their ransom for Veracruz. American Secretary of State William Seward (above) might have invoked the 40 year old Monroe Doctrine.  Mexico clearly fit its definition of a government, “...who have declared their independence and maintained it, and whose independence we have... acknowledged...” In such cases the United States was supposed to see any foreign intervention “... for the purpose of oppressing them, or controlling...their destiny...as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States.”

Several other beneficiaries of the Monroe Doctrine - recently liberated colonies in south and central America – sought United States leadership in a unified resistance to the Mexican intervention. And the mind boggles at the possible future of the western hemisphere if that option had been explored. But such a course of action never had a chance of being taken. The slave states' bloody Götterdämmerung precluded such a gradual political evolution on anybody's part.

The United States was consumed by a civil war costing its 19 million northern citizens $2.5 million dollars - in 1863 -  and 133 lives on average, every day.   Given that distraction, Seward and Lincoln could only respond to the European offer with a “thanks, but no thanks”, and a bit of groveling. “The President does not feel himself at liberty to question, and he does not question, that the sovereigns....have the undoubted right to decide...whether they have sustained grievances, and to resort to war with Mexico for the redress thereof...”

Both Lincoln and Seward also seemed to understand that the 3 nation alliance was unlikely to hold together for long. And even before the shooting started in the Charleston harbor, Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, aka Napoleon III Emperor of France, showed that he was more interested in empire building than in debt collecting.  The still young Queen Victoria was  driven to lecture her own foreign minister, “The conduct of the French is everywhere disgraceful. Let us only have nothing to do with them in future.”

It did not matter. When his allies pulled out of the alliance early in 1862, Napoleon carried on alone, pushing the 6,000 man army of the smug, certain Charles-Ferdinand Latrille, Comte de Lorencez (above) , up the 250 mile invasion route previously followed by Cortés. 

First he marched southwest to the town of Cotaxla on the Rio Jamapa. Then up that river to Cordoba. Another single days march took Lorencez's army to the Metlac River. 

Crossing this and turning southwest, brought him to the village of Orizaba, at the foot of the Acultzingo pass, squeezed between 10,000 foot summits. On 27 April, 1862, Lorencez pushed aside a Mexican force there, and gained access to the central “cold country”, where his men need no longer fear malaria.

By 5 May, 1862, Lorencez was facing the highland city of Peubla, founded by Franciscan monks. The local landowners and clergy assured the Comte that the city would eagerly surrender.  But the local peasants volunteered to defend their republic. Their commander, 33 year old General Ignacio Zaragoza, told his men, “Our enemies may be the world’s best soldiers, but you are the best sons of Mexico”.

Two times the French artillery pummeled the forts and three times the infantry attacked. And 3 times the Mexican peasant soldiers threw them back. 

Then, as the exhausted French retreated the last time, Zaragoza unleashed the young Porfirio Diaz and his 650 lancers. 

Without artillery support, the French were scattered and driven back in confusion. Only a sudden thunderstorm which turned the battlefield into mud, and an unexpected escarpment, blocking the Mexican cavalry, saved the French army.

The French admitted to 460 causalities, the Mexican's half that number. Cinco de Mayo became a Mexican national holiday, and the city was renamed Puebla de Zaragoza. The French retreated 90 miles back to the pass before Orizaba, where the Comte Lorencez contracted malaria. And then in September, reinforcements arrived from France, including the 59 year old professional General Forey. The fever stricken Comte Lorencez returned home.

This time Forey's army was 24,000 men strong. This time they were accompanied by 2,000 Mexican imperialist soldiers. This time the 22,000 Mexican Republicans defending Peubla were without the genius of General Zaragoza, who had died typhoid fever in February of 1863. And this time, in March, the French army surrounded the town. By 16 May, 1863 – just as Grant was grasping the city of Vicksburg in his hands - the defenders of Peubla were starved into surrender. They laid down their guns and went home. The next day, the Chasseurs de Vincinnes began a slow careful march on Mexico city.

First they turned northwest to Santa Rita, on the Rio Tlahuapan. Westward was the village of Rio Frio de Juarz , which sat at the eastern edge of the El Guardio pass, between Monte Taloc and the strato-volcano Iztaccihuati. In front of the hunters was now was the plain of Mexico City. But keeping the Cinco de Mayo of 1862 in mind, General Forey (above)  remained cautious. 

Not until 10 June, 1863, did the French army paraded through the streets of the Mexican capital. They crossed under an endless series of flowered triumphal arches, at almost every street corner. Bells rang from every cathedral and church. Priests and nuns were singing hosannas all along the parade route. The wealthy landowners and the professional businessmen were cheering. But the peasants continued to resist.

Secretary Seward was of the opinion that “...the destinies of the American continent are not to be permanently controlled by the political arrangements...in the capitals of Europe.” Moreover, he felt certain the Mexican people would never accept the imported younger brother of an Austrian Archduke as their Emperor, particularly when that choice was dictated by the Emperor of France (above). And America refused to recognize the French backed government of Ferdinand Maximilian. Worse, no European government was willing to finance the French intervention.

Meanwhile, Seward calculated the United States could prolong France's Mexican intervention through loans to the Mexican state, at least until America would “... be able to rise without great effort to the new duties which in that case will have devolved upon us.” In other words, just as soon as the rebellion of the slave states had been defeated.

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