The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln Patrick Kelly

The Journal of the Civil War Era, Volume 9, Number 2, June 2019, pp. 223-248 (Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/cwe.2019.0027

For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725678

Access provided at 5 Aug 2019 16:33 GMT from UTSA Libraries patrick kelly

The Lost Continent of Abraham Lincoln

During the U.S. Civil War, a brief period of ideological solidarity developed among the United States and the republics of Spanish America. The word “continent” was widely deployed in the geopolitical vernacular of both the United States and Spanish America to signify the revived fraternity among hemispheric republics. An important example is the first line of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.” This essay discusses the context in which Lincoln deployed the word “continent” in his immortal speech to acknowledge that the crisis of the 1860s reached beyond the boundaries of the United States to encompass its neighboring republics in the New World.

On November 19, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the Gettysburg National Cemetery, the site of one of the most decisive battles of the U.S. Civil War, just four months earlier. The Union victory at Gettysburg in July and the Confederate surrender of Vicksburg, which followed almost simultaneously, were battlefield triumphs that seemed to tilt the strategic situation of the Civil War decisively in favor of the North. By the time he spoke at Gettysburg, however, Lincoln was deeply concerned that events in Mexico offered the Confederacy a geopolitical victory in the New World that threatened to negate much of what Federal armies had accomplished in Pennsylvania and Mississippi. Lincoln’s apprehension was in reaction to the recent success of the French intervention into Mexico. Early in 1862, Emperor Napoleon III had deployed French troops into Mexico in order to implement his Grand Design in the New World, a plan designed to overthrow the institutions of republican government in Mexico in favor of a French-backed monarchical government ruled by Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian of Austria. In June 1863, just a few weeks prior to the Union victories at Gettysburg

223 and Vicksburg, the French expeditionary army occupied Mexico City and forced the government of Mexican President Benito Juárez to flee north to San Luis Potosí.1 By the time the U.S. president made his journey to central Pennsylvania, Napoleon III’s ambitious plan to reestablish a European- style monarchy in a neighboring hemispheric republic was progressing rapidly. The French advance in Mexico posed a serious security threat to the United States. The president realized that rebellious southerners, confident of Louis Napoleon’s support for their rebellion, were elated by the capture of Mexico City. Pointing to the long border shared by Confederate Texas and the states of northeastern Mexico, the Richmond Dispatch predicted on July 25, 1863, “The French will be the best neighbors for us we could possibly have. We shall strike up an immense trade with them, and the two peoples will form an alliance offensive and defensive which will set the world in defiance.”2 That same month, European newspapers reported that Napoleon III had secretly met with the South’s envoy to France, John Slidell, to discuss a possible Franco-Confederate alliance centered on the contact zone along the lower Rio Grande, which encompassed South Texas and northeastern Mexico.3 As they examined the strategic map, many northerners believed that the French expedition’s success depended on the triumph of the Confederacy. A southern victory would establish a nation-state sympathetic to France as a barrier between the anti-monarchical United States and the Mexican Empire ruled by Maximilian. Union newspapers predicted that Napoleon III’s first step in establishing a Franco-Confederate alliance would be an offer of diplomatic recognition to the South, thus cementing its legitimacy as a member of the family of nations. “Louis Napoleon,” the New York Times concluded, “has put himself in such a position in regard to this continent, he cannot very well avoid taking this step.”4 In an attempt to halt any such alliance before it could gain traction, Lincoln began expressing to his military commanders his belief that immediate action was required to reestablish Federal control along the lower Rio Grande borderlands. In late October 1863, weeks before Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address, troops from the Union army’s Thirteenth Corps came ashore in South Texas. Within days of this landing, the U.S. flag once again flew over Brownsville, the merchant community located directly across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico.5 Given his concern over the hazard posed by the presence of French bay- onets in a neighboring republic, it is noteworthy that Lincoln began his remarks at Gettysburg with the observation that “four score and seven years ago” the founders of the United States “brought forth on this continent,

224 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.”6 By the autumn of 1863, the word “continent” was commonly utilized in the geopolitical vernacular of liberal nationalists in the United States and Spanish America who viewed the U.S. Civil War and the French intervention into Mexico as interwoven conflicts pitting the New World’s republican institutions against the Old World intrigues of Emperor Napoleon III and his ally, the Confederate States of America. The shared sense of danger posed by, as the Chicago Tribune argued, “an imperial despot in league with the rebels,” created a powerful, if short-lived, moment of solidarity between the United States and the hemisphere’s Spanish-speaking republics articulated on both sides of the Rio Grande within the discourse of a politically united American continent.7 In the first line of his immortal speech at Gettysburg Lincoln, who by late 1863 never wasted a word in his public statements, acknowledged this revived moment of inter-American fraternity. The recent generation of historians who situate the U.S. Civil War in a transnational framework have convincingly demonstrated the interplay between the republican aspirations of European liberals and the democratic values, no matter how frayed, of the United States.8 Yet it is important to remember that Civil War–era northerners seldom looked across the Atlantic Ocean for lessons on the workings of democratic institutions; in the wake of the failed democratic revolutions of 1848 the grip of Europe’s monarchical and aristocratic regimes seemed tighter than ever. Instead, as Gregory P. Downs argues, “many Americans looked not east but south for models, guides and analytic openings.” “Too often,” Downs maintains, “transnationally inclined U.S. historians look to Europe for the circula- tion of ideas, and to Latin America for the movement of people and raw commodities. Latin Americanists practicing hemispheric history,” he con- tinues, “in turn overemphasize divergence between Anglo and Spanish America in a nineteenth century sometimes overlooked in the rush from an intertwined eighteenth-century Atlantic world to twentieth-century U.S. dominance.”9 One such episode of ideological convergence between Anglo and Spanish America occurred during the years of the U.S. Civil War and French intervention into Mexico. Scholars have identified two other eras of hemispheric solidarity during the nineteenth century. The first, as Caitlin Fitz has demonstrated, occurred in the decade following the War of 1812, as the hemisphere’s Spanish-speaking republics emerged from colonial rule. This moment of “inter-American ardor” reached its high point during the early 1820s but quickly waned, a casualty of the growing political tensions between the slave and free regions of the United States.10 In the late 1880s, a revitalized the lost continent of abraham lincoln 225 sense of Pan-Americanism emerged in the Western Hemisphere, initiated by U.S. politicians such as James G. Blaine. This period of hemispheric enthusiasm also proved short-lived, killed in large part by the U.S. occupation of Cuba after its victory in the Spanish-American war.11 The election of Abraham Lincoln, a moderate abolitionist who ran for the U.S. presidency on a platform that explicitly disavowed the territorial expansion of slavery, set in motion a third, often overlooked, episode of continental fraternity between the burst of inter-American enthusiasm of the 1820s and the Pan Americanism of the last decades of the nineteenth century. This revived moment of New World solidarity was reinforced by the effort of the South to create an independent slave republic, an endeavor abhorrent to Spanish American liberals, and supercharged by the French invasion of Mexico. As a result of this sequence of events, one historian of Spanish America notes, during the 1860s “the old South American republicans became, if momentarily, supportive of the United States.”12 During this tumultuous decade, hemispheric liberals redefined the word “continent” and utilized it to express the ideological solidarity of hemispheric republics. Just days after the unexpected Mexican victory at Puebla in May 1862, for example, Benito Juárez noted that the “American republics give signs of their comprehension that events of which Mexico is being the theatre reach something beyond the Mexican nationality, and that the blow which is aimed at her would strike not only one nation, but all on the continent.”13 Before speaking at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln also used the language of continental fraternity between the United States and the republics of Spanish America. In his December 1862 Annual Message to Congress, Lincoln noted, “During the last year there has not only been no change of our previous relations with the independent states of our own continent, but, more friendly sentiments than have heretofore existed, are believed to be entertained by these neighbors, whose safety and progress, are so intimately connected with our own. This statement especially applies to Mexico, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Honduras, Peru, and Chile.”14 Lincoln’s deployment of a continental discourse to signify the ideological convergence of the two Americas suggests that at Gettysburg the U.S. president acknowledged that the crisis of the 1860s reached beyond the boundaries of the United States and encompassed the Western Hemisphere, a region of the globe that the London Daily News had characterized a few months earlier as the “world of republics.”15

■ In his classic study of what he coined the “Western Hemisphere Idea,” Arthur P. Whitaker argued that the “core” of inter-American solidarity

226 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 during the early nineteenth century was a shared belief among the peoples of New World republics that they were united in “special relationship to one another that [set] them apart from the rest of the world; above all, apart from Europe.”16 The waves of rebellion against Spanish rule that erupted in the Spanish-speaking regions of the hemisphere during the first quarter of the nineteenth century reinforced the sense of ideological as well as geo- graphical separation between the New World and Europe. Seeing a reflec- tion of the United States’ own revolutionary struggle against Great Britain, U.S. public opinion enthusiastically supported the South American independence movements against Spain. One widely reprinted editorial argued that the U.S. should “contribute as much as lies in their power to hasten on the wished-for event when all the people of the American continent shall be independent of European Government and of European politics.”17 The most enduring consequence of this first era of inter-American enthusiasm was its role in shaping the Monroe Doctrine’s warning to monarchical Europe against any colonizing schemes in the Western Hemisphere.18 By the late 1820s, this period of hemispheric fraternity had waned in the United States, a victim of the emerging partisan politics between the nation’s free and slaveholding interests. Expecting little opposition, in 1825 President John Quincy Adams accepted Spanish American leaders’ invitation to send U.S. delegates to the first inter-American conference, scheduled for in Panama the following year. Much to his surprise, an alliance of politicians who would soon coalesce into the Democratic Party made its first important partisan stand by opposing the Panama mission.19 As Jay Sexton notes, “party builders in the nascent Democratic coalition” exploited “racist conceptions of Latin Americans as a means of bringing together their constituencies in the North and South.”20 A victim of the slave South’s opposition to Spanish America’s promotion of the idea of racial universalism as well as the widespread U.S. disappointment with the political violence and instability that characterized many of the new Spanish-speaking polities, the idea of an ideologically united American continent ebbed in the United States until the 1860s. In the decades between the 1820s and 1860s, the ideological gap between the United States and democratic Spanish America widened. Liberal intellectuals, or letrados, in Mexico and South America admired the political stability and economic growth of their northern neighbor but regarded the slaveholding United States as a deeply flawed democracy. Before 1860, James Sanders argues in his study of Spanish American modernity, the United States continually disappointed its neighboring hemispheric democracies “due to its imperial desires (which were anath- ema to the republican ethos), and its racial oppression.”21 The sense of the lost continent of abraham lincoln 227 two Americas—the Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, expansionist and slaveholding nation to the north and the hemisphere’s Roman Catholic, emanci- pationist, and racially universalist Spanish-speaking democracies to the south—further deepened when the United States annexed Texas in 1845 and, after the defeat of Mexico in 1848, seized over half of that nation’s territory. Adding insult to injury, in 1856 President Franklin Pierce recognized William Walker’s filibuster regime in Nicaragua, an act that both frightened and infuriated Spanish Americans.22 Before 1860, Spanish American liberals envisioned their democracies, not the slaveholding United States, as the vanguard of political modernity in the Atlantic World. Most Spanish American republics had abolished slavery after gaining independence from Spain.23 Critical of the U.S. government’s allegiance to the growth and expansion of slavery, influential letrados such as the Chilean Francisco Bilbao “took great pride in” the commitment of Spanish-speaking republics “to emancipation, racial equality, and universalism,” the idea that peoples of every race deserved the rights that came with full citizenship.24 In an implied rebuke to the United States, Mexico’s 1857 constitution opened by endorsing the rights of man and emphasizing that the institution of chattel slavery no longer existed in Mexico.25 The acceptance of the United States as a continental sister republic would not revive among Spanish American letrados until Lincoln’s renunciation of U.S. territorial expansion and Washington’s shift toward emancipation during the Civil War. In November 1860, Abraham Lincoln was elected president of the United States. It is impossible to overstate the degree to which Lincoln’s election marked an immediate and radical change in the tone of inter- American relations for the better. Mexicans, for instance, knew that Lincoln, at great cost to his early political career, had opposed the Mexican- American War. Supporters of Benito Juárez argued that the election of a Republican to the White House was a decisive rejection of the expansionist policies of the proslavery Democratic Party, the political faction that had controlled the U.S. presidency in the 1850s. In December 1860 the Estrella de Occidente, a pro-Juárez newspaper published in Sonora, Mexico, predicted, “Very soon the political relations of the United States will undergo a thorough change.” “The rule of the Democratic party—the great war-mak- ing and Slavery-extending party,” the newspaper declared, “is at an end.” This newspaper assured its readers that the election of Lincoln “will have a salutary influence on the future of Mexican affairs. Instead of occupying an aggressive policy, he will become the friend and ally of this country.”26 In January 1861 Juárez sent his envoy to the United States, the young Matías Romero, to meet with the U.S. president-elect at his home in

228 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 Springfield, Illinois. Romero reported in his diary that Lincoln “told me that during his administration he would endeavor to do anything within his power in favor of the interests of Mexico. Then I told him that Mexico rejoiced with the triumph of the Republican party because she hoped that the policy of this party would be more loyal and friendly and not like that of the Democrats who had stooped to take territory from Mexico in order to extend slavery.”27 In a note to Romero following this meeting, Lincoln offered “an expression of my sincere wishes for the happiness, prosper- ity, and liberty of yourself, your government and its people.”28 After three decades of growing antagonism between the two Americas, Lincoln’s ascen- dency to the White House revived a sense of continental fraternity between the New World’s Spanish-speaking republics and the United States. This burst of inter-American enthusiasm was apparent in the states of the U.S. North during the Secession Winter of 1860–61 and often discussed within the language of continental solidarity. Reflecting upon the expansionist aims of the southern “Oligarchs” in March 1861, the pro-Republi- can Chicago Tribune argued that the “dismemberment of the American Republic” was not the only goal of rebellious slaveholders. “Their ambition aims at nothing less than the absorption of all the remaining portion of the continent and the adjacent islands, down to the Isthmus of Darien, and the founding of a great Slave-holding Empire of such magnitude and strength that will render it the controlling power in the Western Hemisphere.” Warning that the U.S. government would use its military power to check any future slaveholder attacks on neighboring republics in the New World, the Tribune declared that the secession of southern states from the Union “will bind the remaining states with hooks of steel to all the other free governments on the Continent.” Expressing an inter-American enthusiasm that had largely disappeared from American political culture after the 1820s, this influential journal predicted, “Their interests will become mutual; reciprocity in good feeling and trade will be established between them, and they will sustain and protect each other to the last extremity.”29 The rejuvenated feelings of ideological cohesion between the United States and the New World’s Spanish-speaking republics strengthened in March 1861, when Spanish officials announced the forced reintegration of Santo Domingo as a colony of Spain.30 Spain’s attempt to reclaim Santo Domingo set off alarm bells in the entire hemisphere about the impact of the dissolution of the United States in allowing armed interventions into the American continent by Spain and other—and far more powerful— European monarchies. Acknowledging this danger in continental terms, in early April 1861 Mexico City’s El Siglo XIX wrote, “The dismemberment of the American colossus would bring to this continent the continued the lost continent of abraham lincoln 229 intervention of Europe, and recent events in Santo Domingo, should make us extremely cautious and farsighted.”31 The New York Times, owned and edited by Seward’s friend and ally Henry Raymond, also adopted a continental discourse in discussing the threat that European aggression in the New World as a result of the southern rebellion. “Our dissentions,” the Times argued, “have been welcomed by [Spain] as offering precisely the opportunity for resuming her position as a Power on the Western Continent.” “If Spain seizes St. Domingo,” the story continued, “we may speedily look for the advent of fresh fleets from Europe—and the intervention of other Powers in the affairs of the Continent.”32 Fear that the disinte- gration of the United States would allow European monarchies to launch military operations in the Americas circulated throughout the hemisphere and played an important role in reversing the deep antagonism that had marked the relationship between Washington and Spanish America during the previous decades. After taking office, William H. Seward pronounced Washington’s opposition to the Spanish recolonization of Santo Domingo by proclaiming the ideological solidarity of the American continent in the face of Old World aggression. In his famous April 1, 1861, memorandum to Lincoln, the newly appointed secretary of state urged the president to “rouse a vigor- ous continental spirit of independence on this continent against European intervention.” Perceiving an opportunity to prevent the fracturing of the United States by joining the regions of the North and South in a common cause against Old World powers, Seward suggested that Lincoln demand explanations from both Spain and—aware of the rumors that Napoleon III was contemplating the deployment of an expeditionary force into Mexico—France. If “satisfactory explanations” from those governments “are not received,” Seward continued, Lincoln should “convene Congress and declare war against them.”33 Although the secretary of state did not mention the Monroe Doctrine, his note to Lincoln suggested militarizing this decades-old U.S. policy opposing European intervention in the Americas as a means of averting a collapse of the Union. Lincoln, however, firmly rejected Seward’s call for military action and adopted his “one war at a time” strategy.34 Unwilling to risk a war with any European power while the Union struggled with the existential threat posed by the Confederacy, during the Civil War the Lincoln administration not only declined to invoke the Monroe Doctrine but also refused to discuss this policy in any of its official statements. After Lincoln summarily rejected his April 1 memorandum, Seward immediately pivoted to a new diplomatic strategy. In voicing Washington’s opposition to Old World belligerence in the hemisphere, the secretary of

230 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 state adopted a continental discourse proclaiming the administration’s belief that the U.S. national interest was linked with those of its neighboring Spanish American republics. On April 2, Seward delivered a note of protest to Gabriel García y Tassara, the Spanish minister in Washington. Seward warned that Madrid’s attempt to reestablish its sovereignty over the Dominican Republic “cannot fail to be taken as the first step in a policy of armed intervention by the Spanish government in the American countries which once constituted Spanish America, but have since achieved their independence.” “The President,” Seward continued, “cherishes a policy of peace, however it must not be anywhere supposed that he is less jealous of dangers to the republican system of government of which this continent is the principal theater.”35 On April 6, the secretary of state wrote to Thomas Corwin, his newly appointed envoy to Mexico City, that “even the dullest observer is at last able to see what was long ago distinctly seen by those who are endowed with any considerable perspicacity, that peace, order, and constitutional authority in each and all of the several republics of this continent are not exclusively an interest of any one or more of them, but a common and indispensable interest of them all.”36 Seward’s note to Corwin was an important signal that Washington would oppose European interventions into the Americas during the Civil War not with military force but with the diplomatic language of continental solidarity. On October 31, 1861, representatives from Spain, France, and Great Britain signed the Tripartite Treaty in London. Each signatory government agreed to dispatch its military to compel the Juárez government—which had suspended the payment of interest on foreign debt for two years—to repay loans owed to their citizens. In late 1861 Spanish, British, and French troops began landing in Vera Cruz. (Realizing that Napoleon III had tricked them into supporting his Grand Design in April of the next year England and Spain withdrew their soldiers from Mexico.)37 The European invasion of Mexico was a far more serious threat to the continent than Spain’s rean- nexation of Santo Domingo, a poor and isolated Caribbean nation. Fearing that events in Mexico threatened the future of constitutional government throughout the hemisphere, Spanish American politicians, diplomats, and intellectuals began a concerted campaign to persuade Washington that a European intervention on the continental landmass of the Americas required a forceful response from the United States. As a result of European intervention into the New World, a growing number of hemispheric liberals began expressing the belief that the United States’ national security interests now aligned with those of its democratic neighbors in the Americas. The shock of the French intervention the lost continent of abraham lincoln 231 convinced South American letrados such as J. M. Torres Caicedo and Justo Arosemena to rethink the possibilities of the Monroe Doctrine as a guarantor of hemispheric autonomy. Meeting in Santiago, Chile, in 1862, delegates attending the Congress of the Sociedad de la Unión Americana considered the potential of the Monroe Doctrine to create a “defensive policy against European powers” among New World republics.38 In Washington, Federico Astaburuaga, the Chilean minister to the United States, requested that the U.S. join in the creation of a continental congress designed to formulate a collective action in response to the situation in Mexico.39 In looking to U.S. military and diplomatic power as a counter to Old World colonial adventures, Spanish Americans demonstrated how quickly the revived conception of “continent”—a word that by late 1861 had come to signify the reawakened fraternity between the two Americas—was reshap- ing geopolitical relations in the hemisphere. In a November 1861 note to Seward, Matías Romero asked if Washington would “look with indif- ference upon the storm which is brewing not alone against the Mexican nation, but against republican institutions in America and the autonomy of this continent.”40 Other voices in Spanish America, especially in Mexico, utilized the language of continental solidarity in an attempt to persuade the United States to invoke the Monroe Doctrine. An editorial in El Siglo XIX proclaimed: “The Monroe Doctrine . . . is the independence of a great continent, it is the expression of diverse necessities, of diverse systems, it is the shield that would liberate the new and virgin nations from the frequent complications of old monarchies, it is, in one word, the emancipation of all guardianship and all vassalage.”41 In Washington, the key interlocutor between Spanish America and the Lincoln administration was the indefatigable Mexican ambassador, Matías Romero. In his communications with the secretary of state, Romero con- sistently utilized the language of continental solidarity to remind the secretary of state of the longstanding U.S. policy opposing European colonial schemes in the hemisphere. “I cannot believe, even for a moment,” the envoy wrote, “that the government of the United States can remain . . . an impassible spectator of the contest in which is involved (I say this without fear of being held to exaggerate) the future fortune of the continent.” “It is not possible,” Romero continued, “that the people and government of the United States can forget the principles bequeathed to them by one of the most distinguished of their Presidents, James Monroe?”42 Spanish American hopes that the United States would intervene against the French intervention, however, were soon dashed. Focused on defeating the Confederacy and determined at all costs to avoid a war with Napoleon

232 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 III, Washington declared a policy of nonintervention in the war between France and the government of Benito Juárez. Even worse for Mexico, Seward ordered a strict embargo on the sale of U.S. military supplies to Mexico while the Civil War continued.43 In the face of the increasing pressure from Spanish America for the United States to intervene in Mexico, Seward wrote his crucial March 3, 1862, circular to William L. Dayton and Charles Francis Adams, Washington’s diplomatic envoys in Paris and London, spelling out U.S. policy in the New World. This, Dexter Perkins notes, was the “platform on which Seward took his stand as soon as the issue was definitely presented to him, and upon which he stood from that day forward.”44 Seward expressed the Lincoln administration’s belief that “no monarchical government founded in Mexico, in the presence of foreign navies and armies in the waters and upon the soil of Mexico, would have any prospect of security of permanency.” Discussing the possibility of future European alliances against hemispheric democracies, Seward warned, “It is not to be doubted that the permanent interests and sympathies of this country would be with the other American republics.” In a ringing statement of continental solidarity that, as would the Gettysburg Address the following year, located the origins of New World republicanism during the era of the American Revolution, Seward declared: “It is sufficient to say that in the President’s opinion, the emancipation of this continent from European control has been the principle feature in its history during the last century.” “It is not probable,” he concluded, “that a revolution in a contrary direction would be successful in an immediately succeeding century.”45 Instead of saber rat- tling, Seward’s March 2, 1862, circular warned Europe of the folly of New World interventions, proclaimed the unity of national interests among hemispheric democracies, expressed Washington’s core belief in strength and resilience of the continent’s republican governments and, perhaps most importantly, avoided a armed conflict with France at time the United States had its hands full fighting the Confederacy. For most northerners, the French intervention crystallized into a threat to the national security interests of the United States beginning in 1863. Early that year, the French government published Napoleon III’s instructions to Gen. Élie-Frédéric Forey, his commander in Mexico, and they soon appeared in U.S. newspapers. To the indignant surprise of many in the North, both Republican and Democrat alike, the French leader explained that the French expedition was intended to stop the United States from taking “possession of the whole of the Gulf of Mexico, [governing] the West Indies and South America, thus controlling the entire produce of the New World.”46 In response, the New York Herald angrily concluded, the lost continent of abraham lincoln 233 “Napoleon is engaged in Mexico combatting the spread of our influence and power on this continent.”47 In June 1863 French troops gained a major strategic victory with the capture and occupation of Mexico City. Later that month, worried northerners read an article from the Paris correspondent of the London Post reporting that there was “no doubt about the Emperor having lately received the Southern envoy, Mr. Slidell.”48 In late August, Seward reported to William Dayton, his envoy in Paris, that events in Mexico “were giv- ing rise to much speculation,” including rumors that Slidell had promised to cede Texas to France in exchange for Napoleon III’s recognition of the Confederacy. Assuring Dayton, “Preparations have been made, which, as I trust, will be effectual in establishing the national authority in that State,” Seward ordered the ambassador to formally discuss this matter with the French foreign minister, who vehemently denied that Paris had any interest in annexing Texas.49 In September 1863 a pamphlet, published in Paris and written by Michel Chevalier, one of the emperor’s closest advisors, appeared in U.S. newspapers, predicting that French intervention would be accompanied by recognition of the Confederacy. “There can be little doubt that this pamphlet is one of the Emperor’s feelers,” the Richmond Daily Dispatch noted optimistically. “It certainly indicates an early recognition if we are to judge of people’s intention by what they profess to think right.”50 Napoleon III’s open desire to check U.S. influence in the Western Hemisphere combined with the Confederacy’s opportunistic embrace of the French Emperor’s Grand Design in Mexico intensified Washington’s desire to reestablish Federal control over the borderlands region of South Texas. Just weeks following the twin Union victories at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, Lincoln’s gaze turned to the lower Rio Grande borderlands of South Texas. His administration had long known that tens of thousands of bales of Trans-Mississippi cotton crossed the river from Texas into northeastern Mexico every month in return for military supplies that Confederate armies desperately needed.51 The president, fearing that Napoleon III’s aggression into Mexico might soon result in the presence of a hostile European power along the lower Rio Grande, and perhaps even the creation of a Franco-Confederate alliance, urged his military to reestablish Federal control of the Texas side of the border. On July 29, 1863, Lincoln asked his secretary of war, Edwin M. Stanton, “Can we not renew the effort to organize a force to go to Western Texas?” (Due to the nearly north-south directional flow of the river as it approaches the Gulf of Mexico, the president referred to the lower Rio Grande borderlands as “Western” Texas.) In an indication of how seriously he took the possibility

234 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 of a French presence in the Rio Grande borderlands, Lincoln concluded: “I believe no local object is now more desirable.”52 On August 9, he wrote Gen. Ulysses S. Grant about the deteriorating situation in Mexico. Realizing that this communication would disrupt Grant’s plan to launch an expedition against Mobile, Lincoln explained that “in view of recent events in Mexico” he was “greatly impressed with the importance of re-establishing the national authority in Western Texas as soon as possible.”53 Lincoln’s suggestion that Grant send elements of his army to Texas did not come in the form of an official order, but the politically savvy General took the hint. Bowing to the president’s wishes, Grant wrote, “I see . . . the importance of a movement into Texas just at this time.”54 Delaying his planned movement on Mobile, Grant ordered Gen. Nathaniel P. Banks to deploy elements of the Thirteenth Army Corps from New Orleans to the mouth of the Rio Grande, near Brownsville. Ultimately more than six thousand U.S. troops occupied South Texas, the contact zone with northeastern Mexico that had become a top priority for the Lincoln administration.55 Even as tensions between the United States and France increased, however, Seward continued to stress to Paris through diplomatic channels that “the United States have neither the right nor the disposition to intervene by force on either side in the lamentable war which is going on between France and Mexico.”56 Seward, however, also made it clear that Washington still officially recognized the government of Benito Juárez, even after that government had fled Mexico City, and that the Lincoln administration’s policy of nonintervention did not imply that the U.S. government possessed neutral sentiments about the conflict between France and the Mexican republic. In October 1863, the secretary of state reported to Dayton that the French had informed U.S. officials that Mexico would soon hold an election that would result in the “choice of his Imperial Highness the Prince Maximilian of Austria to be Emperor of Mexico.” Paris, Seward continued, “intimat[ed] that an early acknowledgement of the proposed empire by the United States would be convenient to France, by relieving her, sooner than might be possible under other circumstances, from her troublesome complications in Mexico.” Seward sharply informed Dayton to explain to the French foreign minister, Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, that “the United States continue to regard Mexico as the theater of a war which has not yet ended in the subversion of the government long existing there, with which the United States remain in the relation of peace and sincere friendship.”57 Seward also ordered Dayton “to abstain from all relations” with Maximilian when, as expected, the Austrian prince traveled to Paris to meet with Napoleon III.58 (The Confederate government, however, signaled its the lost continent of abraham lincoln 235 hostility to the Mexican republic by appointing William Preston as its minister plenipotentiary to the government of Maximilian.59) Washington’s refusal to abandon the beleaguered Juárez regime during the era of the U.S. Civil War in the face of pressure from the French government was perhaps its most important contribution to safeguarding the future of republican government not only in Mexico but in the rest of the Spanish America. In addition to affirming the continued U.S. diplomatic recognition of the exiled Juárez regime, the U.S. secretary of state instructed his envoy to explain to Paris that Washington viewed Napoleon III’s attempt to establish a monarchy commanded by a foreign prince to govern the people of Mexico as a geopolitical charade. Two months before the Gettysburg Address, Seward once again deployed a diplomatic discourse articulating Washington’s belief in the ultimate vindication of the continent’s republican institutions in the face of European aggressions. (As with much of his diplomatic correspondence concerning Mexico, Seward’s note to Dayton was soon made public and appeared in U.S. newspapers the following January.) Seward wrote, “This government knows full well that the inher- ent normal opinion of Mexico favors a government there republican in form and domestic in its organization, in preference to any monarchical institutions to be imposed from abroad.” The United States, he continued, had full confidence that any “attempts to control American civilization, must and will fail before the ceaseless and ever-increasing activity of mate- rial, moral, and political forces, which peculiarly belong to the American continent.” In a notable statement expressing Washington’s belief that the success of republican institutions in the New World was vital to U.S. interests, Seward concluded, “Nor do the United States deny that, in their opinion, their own safety and the cheerful destiny to which they aspire are intimately dependent on the continuation of free republican institutions throughout America.” 60 In his diplomacy, then, Seward utilized the language of continental unity as he threaded the needle between the strict U.S. policy of nonintervention in the war raging in Mexico and Washington’s unequivocal sympathy for the struggle of the Juárez regime against the French effort to install a monarch on the ruins of the Mexican republic. The idea of an ideologically united American continent circulated widely throughout the New World after the French intervention, both in Spanish America and the United States. In Peru, Lima’s El Comercio accused Louis Napoleon of seeking the “abolition of republican systems on the new Continent,” and, it continued, “it is evident that all of America is under threat.”61 As the French army advanced toward Mexico City, El Siglo XIX, one of Mexico’s most influential newspapers, explained

236 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 the danger facing the Mexican republic by offering its readers a historical lesson analogous to the one Lincoln would offer at the beginning of his speech at Gettysburg later that year. Reminding its readers that the American Revolution of 1776 had initiated the birth of republican government throughout the New World, this editorial declared, “The cry of freedom that the immortal Washington pronounced in the United States spread throughout the continent of Columbus and in all the populations of the new continent.”62 Later that year, the Mexican Congress issued a manifesto that warned, the “French Emperor brings the war not only to Mexico, but to all the American continent. So it has been understood by Peru and Chili, and so it ought to be, and is, recognized by the United States of the north and by the other republics of the continent. Mexico only serves as the entering wedge; it is the door that, once opened, will give way to the balance of the continent.” This statement concluded: “The cause of Mexico is a continental cause. In defending her liberties, she defends the liberties of the New World.”63 Thanks to Romero’s effort, statements such as these were presented to the U.S. State Department, translated into English, and then published in congressional documents. As the French army gained ground in Mexico, the discourse of continental solidarity moved beyond diplomatic channels and into the North’s public sphere. At the end of 1862 Horace Greeley’s New York Herald argued, “We cannot brook the interference of any European power on this continent, and those who take advantage of our present troubles to intrude will someday reap the whirlwind they are surely sowing.”64 Soon after Juarez was forced to flee Mexico City, this same newspaper wrote that the “sympathies of the American people are wholly with the Mexicans. The interests of this government are tightly bound with the Mexican republic, as it is apparent to all that were France to capture that ill-fated country we should, sooner or later, be forced to drive her from this continent.”65 Early in 1863, as the French began their final advance on Mexico City, Thaddeus Stevens, the powerful Pennsylvania congressman, attacked the French intervention by declaring that “there is nothing” European monarchical governments “so much dread as a prosperous, mighty republic on this continent.”66 In the summer of 1864, Ulysses S. Grant met with Romero at his head- quarters near Petersburg, Virginia. In this conversation, Romero reported, the Union general “expressed to us the greatest sympathy for our cause, even manifesting a desire to directly aid in the glorious enterprise of defending the independence of Mexico and preserving republican institutions on this continent against European aggression.”67 Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s choice for vice president, declared, to great applause, in a June 1864 Nashville campaign speech, “The day of reckoning is approaching. the lost continent of abraham lincoln 237 It will not be long before the Rebellion will be put down, and then we will attend to this Mexican affair, and say to Louis Napoleon, ‘You cannot found a monarchy on this Continent.”68 As Johnson’s speech indicates, during the 1860s the word “continent” was widely understood to signify the renewed sense of inter-American enthusiasm between the United States and Spanish America and had developed into an important component of the geopolitical vernacular of the northern press, political and military leaders, and the Union public at large. Lincoln left the day-to-day operations of U.S. diplomacy in Seward’s hands. Yet in official statements delivered before the Gettysburg Address the U.S. president also adopted a continental language to express the revitalized feeling of inter-American fraternity in the hemisphere. On March 4, 1862, for instance, the day after Seward’s circular to Dayton and Adams articulating U.S. policy in the hemisphere, the Peruvian counsel to New York, Federico Barreda presented his credentials at the White House. In his welcoming remarks, the president noted, “While the United States are thus a friend to all other nations, they do not seek to conceal the fact that they cherish especial sentiments of friendship for, and sympathies with, those who, like themselves, have founded their institutions on the principle of the equal rights of men; and such nations, being more prominently neighbors of the United States, the latter are co-operating with them in establishing civilization and culture on the American continent.”69 Lincoln, then, was fluent in the language of continental solidarity well before he spoke at Gettysburg. The Gettysburg Address occurred within the context of a sequence of events that for many in the North, including the U.S. president, linked the U.S. Civil War and French intervention into Mexico. By the autumn of 1863, a growing wave of public opposition to the French occupation had developed in the United States. The publication of Napoleon III’s letter of instructions to Forey and Chevalier’s provocative pamphlet, combined with the French army’s occupation of Mexico City and the news that Maximilian of Austria had accepted Napoleon III’s offer to become the Emperor of Mexico, alerted many in the North to the danger posed by a French-backed monarchy south of the Rio Grande. Unlike in the Confederacy, where he was widely admired, Napoleon III was detested in the North. In October, Seward asked Dayton to inform French officials that despite its assur- ances “of the just and friendly disposition of the Emperor towards the United States, it is only too manifest that distrust is taking strong hold of the American mind.”70 Antagonism toward the French intervention was extraordinarily widespread throughout the North and included Radical

238 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 Republicans such as Thaddeus Stephens as well as conservatives such as the Blair family. In a unmistakable demonstration of bipartisan opposition to the French attack on the Mexican republic, on April 4, 1864, the U.S. House of Representatives voted unanimously, 109–0, in favor of a resolu- tion opposing the imposition of “any monarchical government in America under the auspices of any European power.”71 By November 1863, top officials in the Lincoln administration, including the president himself, deployed a continental discourse to describe the reawakened inter-American solidarity that developed during the Civil War and the subsequent reentry of Old World monarchies into the Americas. In addition, his administration was aware of a mounting crescendo of concern among northerners about the danger to U.S. national security posed by the possibility of a Franco-Confederate alliance. At the president’s expressed wish, Union troops were deployed to the Texas borderlands just weeks before Lincoln traveled to Pennsylvania. Although we cannot not know with absolute certainly why Lincoln used the word “continent” in his remarks at Gettysburg, the president was not politically tone-deaf. Using this ideologically charged signifier in the opening line of the Gettysburg Address conveyed the idea that the struggle to preserve republican government during the 1860s included both the United States and its neighboring republics in Spanish America. Ultimately, the strategic threat posed by a French-Confederate alliance that so alarmed the Lincoln administration failed to materialize. Due to the tenacious resistance of Juarista forces, the Imperial Army of Maximilian did not occupy the Mexican northeast until the autumn of 1864, just months before the final defeat of the Confederacy. Once the immediate crisis along the Rio Grande borderlands cooled, Lincoln focused his atten- tion elsewhere and left hemispheric diplomacy in Seward’s hands. Even as the threat of a French-Confederate alliance faded, however, criticism of the Lincoln administration’s policy of nonintervention in Mexico increased among many northerners. Infuriated by a U.S. policy that relied on diplomatic discourse instead of military action, Matías Romero played a central role in keeping concerns over the Mexico question alive in the minds of the northern public. A one-man propaganda machine, during the Civil War era he published and distributed thousands of copies of a biography of Benito Juárez and hundreds of pro-Mexican pamphlets and supplied news and information about Mexico to American newspapers he believed were most important in shaping northern public opinion.72 In an attempt to pressure the Lincoln administration during an election year, Romero worked tirelessly

the lost continent of abraham lincoln 239 to galvanize the U.S. public against the threat the French intervention posed to the American continent. In a well-publicized dinner attended by some of New York City’s top intellectual, business, and political elites, such as J. J. Astor, William C. Bryant, George Bancroft, and Hamilton Fish, Romero called for a “common American continental policy which no European nation would dare disregard.”73 By the end of the Civil War, the creation of a number of pro-Mexico societies—“The Defenders of Monroe Doctrine” in New Orleans, New York’s “Monroe Doctrine Committee,” and, in addition, Mexican Aid Societies and Mexican Patriot Clubs in cities from the East Coast to California—demonstrated Romero’s success in shaping American public opinion in favor of the struggle of the Juárez government against the French invaders.74 Seward, however, remained unmoved by the increasing calls for the United States to rethink its policy in Mexico. Instead, he continued to adhere to a program of strict neutrality concerning the Mexican question while ordering his minister in Paris, time and again, to explain the U.S. government’s “friendship towards the republic of Mexico,” as well as Washington’s unbroken faith in the “ultimate success of republican systems throughout this continent.”75 Seward’s adoption of the language of continental solidarity—a political discourse unavailable to the South due to its commitment to slavery and its support for the French intervention— proved notably successful in gaining support for the United States among its neighboring republics and isolating the Confederacy. During the Civil War, no hemispheric republic offered the Richmond government diplomatic recognition or even the lesser diplomatic status of a belligerent power. Given the poisonous states of relations between the two Americas in the decades before the Civil War, Seward’s consistent expressions of faith in the ultimate vindication of the continent’s republican institutions, as self-serving as these statements were to U.S. interests, helped create a brief era of inter-American fraternity during struggle for Union. This was true even in the face of the frustration of hemispheric liberals by Washington’s refusal to intervene in Mexico. Spanish Americans championed the Union cause for a number of reasons. First, Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, brought the United States in line with the abolitionist position of virtually every other hemispheric republic and removed what had proved to be a thorn in the side of hemispheric relations since the 1820s. Next, many Spanish-speaking republicans were convinced that a Union victory offered their nations protection from southern fili- bustering. Liberals in the hemisphere understood that Confederate leaders had been among the strongest proponents of U.S. territorial expansion

240 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 in the decades before the Civil War. “The rebels to the government in Washington,” one newspaper wrote in 1863, “are the same filibusters and pirates who coveted and verbally abused Cuba and Nicaragua.”76 Finally, hemispheric liberals believed that northern victory would prevent further European interference in the New World. Soon after the Triple Alliance entered Mexico, El Ferrocarril, the unofficial voice of Chilean president José Joaquín Pérez, argued that the dissolution of the United States had exposed Spanish America to attacks from European monarchies. “Had the North American nation been at peace,” this newspaper argued, “Santo Domingo would not be today a colony of Spain nor would Mexico see itself menaced by a triple intervention.” The U.S. minister in Peru, Christopher Robinson, reported that the French attempt to subjugate Mexico had solid- ified that country’s support for the Union cause. Peruvians, he noted, were “confident, if the [U.S.] Government could recover its former power, that alone, without a resort to force would interpose an insuperable barrier to the surge of despotism.”77 Far from being duped by Washington’s language of continental solidarity, liberals in Spanish Americans were overwhelm- ingly pro-Union based on their own hard-earned ideological beliefs and clear-eyed conceptions of national self-interest. As the war against the Confederacy continued, the feeling of inter- American enthusiasm in the region south of the Rio Grande intensified. Newspapers in Mexico and South America “eagerly followed the course of the war, celebrating Union victories.”78 Chile’s minister of foreign affairs reported to the Chilean National Congress in the summer of 1863: “The relations which we maintain with the Cabinet in Washington are something more than cordial, they are fraternal.” By the end of the war, nations throughout South America used U.S. national holidays such as July 4 and George Washington’s birthday as opportunities to express support for the Union, via newspaper editorials, street demonstrations, and public cele- brations.79 Spanish American republics were electrified by the Union’s victory over the Confederacy. The Chilean newspaper El Mercurio wrote in May 1865, “We have saluted with enthusiasm the triumph of the Northern States who support liberty over the Southern States who practice slavery, and we now focus on the influence that this grand republic shall exercise, not just over our own fragile nations, but also over the European polity, primarily France and Spain, whose forces now occupy or threaten a great part of the American continent.”80 After the Confederate surrender, Romero predicted to Seward that the United States would be unable to “remain an indifferent spectator of the conquest by a European power of one of the principal regions of this continent in their immediate vicinity.”81 If Romero hoped for a change in U.S. the lost continent of abraham lincoln 241 policy in Mexico, his prediction proved only partially accurate. In the summer of 1865, Washington lifted the arms embargo that had proved so detri- mental to the Juarista army; as a result, tens of thousands of surplus rifles and other military goods poured across the Rio Grande.82 After Lincoln’s assassination, however, Washington continued its strategy of challenging European aggression in the New World by deploying a continental discourse rather than utilizing military force. When Napoleon III tried to persuade Washington to recognize Maximilian in return for a quick with- drawal of French troops from Mexico, Seward flatly refused. After restat- ing the U.S. policy of neutrality in the war between the Mexican republic and France in October 1865, the secretary of state wrote, “Our friendship towards the republic of Mexico, and our sympathies with the republican system on that continent, as well as our faith and confidence in it, has been continually declared.” The “French government,” he continued, “should not . . . fall into a belief that we have entertained any views favorable to it as an invader of Mexico, or that we at all distrust the ultimate success of republican systems throughout this continent.”83 Privately the secretary of state cautioned Romero about the high price of U.S. assistance in the fight against France, arguing that every million dollars in aid would result in the loss of a Mexican state to its northern neighbor, and for every gun an acre of mineral land.84 The period of inter-American solidarity during the U.S. Civil War and French intervention did not survive the defeats of the Confederacy and, two years later, Maximilian’s Mexican Empire. The first cracks in hemispheric fraternity appeared in 1866, when South American republics were disappointed by U.S. government neutrality in the war between Spain and Peru over control of the Chincha Islands.85 During the last decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish Americans watched with growing concern as the United States asserted its military and economic hegemony over the remaining colonial regions of the hemisphere, especially in the Caribbean. The 1898 U.S. intervention into Cuba, the historian James Sanders con- cludes, “definitively killed the ideal of sister republics: the disappointment felt throughout Latin America with the U.S. failure to live up to its own republican heritage was now complete.”86 In neighboring Mexico, however, the story took a somewhat differ- ent and ultimately more tragic turn. Following the defeat of the French intervention, the Juárez government downplayed its wartime anger at Washington’s policy of nonintervention and its refusal to sell arms to Mexico and, hoping to entice U.S. investment capital, expressed its grati- tude for Washington’s unyielding support of the Juárez regime’s legitimacy during its long years of exile from Mexico City. Despite his many wartime

242 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 disagreements with the U.S. secretary of state concerning U.S. policy in Mexico, as Romero returned home in September 1867 he noted with satisfaction his friendly relations with Seward. At Seward’s request, Romero and Margarita Maza de Juárez—the wife of the Mexican president, who lived in New York during the French intervention—returned to Mexico the following month onboard a U.S. Navy ship.87 In 1869, at the invitation of Juárez, Seward traveled to Mexico as a private citizen, where he continued to trumpet the values of continental unity among the hemisphere’s republics. Speaking in Colima, he argued for the adoption of the principle “to secure the success of the republican system throughout the continent: . . . That the several American republics, just as they constitute themselves . . . shall become, more than ever heretofore, political friends through the forces of moral alliance.”88 Mexican liberals’ embrace of the U.S. intervention into the economic life of their nation in the decades after the Civil War would have a deeply complicated historical trajectory of its own and ultimately lead to the convulsions of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.89 In 1867, however, the dominant feeling in the United States was relief at the failure of France to establish a monarchy on the American continent and a general sense of satisfaction with Seward’s diplomacy. Commenting on the U.S. policy soon after the execution of Maximilian, an editorial in Harper’s Weekly noted, “The French and Austrian empire in Mexico has come to the end which was inevitable from the morning at Appomattox Court House. . . . Mr. Seward bowed Louis Napoleon out of Mexico, and his majesty departed with the loftiest phrases upon his tongue and the finest air of condescension. The young Austrian prince who, personally, seems to have been an amiable and mild man, has been put to death . . . and in his grave is buried the last attempt of any European Power to meddle with arms in the politics of this continent.”90 Writing during the period of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy, the historian Nathan L. Ferris reflected on the lost sense inter- American solidarity reflected in this Harper’s Weekly editorial. Ferris concluded that the ideological cohesion of New World republics during the 1860s “was firmly grounded in the common interests and causes of the hemisphere but it was magnified by the hysteria generated by the war and foreign military intervention in the Latin-American countries. It could not last. As soon as the stimuli disappeared, so did the phenomenon. But the elements remained; and it has been for later governments to attempt to establish, with more substantial and lasting incentives, a degree of mutual understanding and friendship somewhere near its equal.”91 Nearly seventy- five years later, that optimistic vision of continental fraternity remains unrealized. the lost continent of abraham lincoln 243 notes 1. See M. M. McAllen, Maximilian and Carlotta, Europe’s Last Empire in Mexico (San Antonio: Trinity University Press, 2014); Alfred Jackson Hanna and Kathryn Abbey Hanna, Napoleon III and Mexico: American Triumph over Monarchy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1971). 2. Richmond Dispatch, July 25, 1863, reprinted in Chicago Tribune, August 1, 1863. 3. “Paris Correspondent of the London Post. ‘Slidell’s Interview with Napoleon,’” reprinted in North American and United States Gazette, July 14, 1863. 4. New York Times, August 1, 1863. See also the Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1863. 5. Stephen A. Townsend, The Yankee Invasion of Texas (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006). 6. Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address (emphasis added), available online at The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale. edu/19th_century/gettyb.asp. 7. Chicago Tribune, August 24, 1863. 8. See Thomas Bender, A Nation among Nations: America’s Place in World History (New York: Hill & Wang, 2006), chap. 3; Don Doyle, The Cause of All Nations: An International History of the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 2015). 9. Gregory P. Downs, “The Mexicanization of American Politics: The United States’ Transnational Path from Civil War to Stabilization,” American Historical Review 117 (April 2012): 408. See also Greg Grandin, “The Liberal Tradition in the Americas: Rights, Sovereignty, and the Origins of Multilateralism,” American Historical Review 117 (February 2012): 68–91. 10. Caitlin A. Fitz, The Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism: The War of 1812, Its Aftermath, and Spanish American Independence. Journal of Ameri- can History 102 (September, 2015): 360. See also See also Caitlin A. Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of Revolutions (New York: Norton, 2016). 11. Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill & Wang, 2012), chaps. 5–6. 12. Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America: The Allure and Power of an Idea (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 6. 13. “Speech of the president of the United Mexican States on the opening of the second term of the sessions of the general congress of the same,” May 15, 1862, quoted in U.S. Congress, House, The Present Condition of Mexico, 37th Cong., 3d Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 54:119. 14. Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862, American Presidency Project, University of California, Santa Barbara, https://www .presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/second-annual-message-9. 15. London Daily News, September 23, 1863, reprinted in New York Times, October 18, 1863. 16. Arthur P. Whitaker, “The Origins of the Western Hemisphere Idea,” Proceedings of the American Philosophy Society 98 (October 15, 1954): 323. 17. Fitz, “Hemispheric Dimensions of Early U.S. Nationalism,” 362.

244 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 18. Jay Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, chaps. 1–2. 19. See Fitz, Our Sister Republics, chap. 6. 20. Sexton, Monroe Doctrine, 80. 21. James E. Sanders, The Vanguard of the Atlantic World: Creating Modernity, Nation, and Democracy in Nineteenth-Century Latin America. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014), 6. 22. Michel Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America: A Transnational History of Anti-Imperialism, Democracy, and Race,” American Historical Review 118 (December 2013): 1345–75. 23. Mexico, Chile, and the Dominican Republic had abolished slavery in the 1820s, while Uruguay did so in 1842. Next were Ecuador (1851), New Granada (1852), Argentina (1853), Peru (1854), and Venezuela (1854). See Gobat, “The Invention of Latin America,” 1356n65. 24. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 172. 25. Karl Jacoby, The Strange Career of William Ellis: The Texas Slave Who Became a Millionaire (New York: Norton, 2016), 17. 26. Estrella de Occidente, December 21, 1860, quoted in the Chicago Tribune, February 19, 1861. 27. Robert Ryal Miller, “Matías Romero: Mexican Minister to the United States during the Juárez-Maximilian Era,” Hispanic American Historical Review 45 (May 1964): 230. 28. Abraham Lincoln to Mr. Matías Romero, January 21, 1861, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Roy P. Basler, 9 vols. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953–55), 4:177–78. 29. Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1861. 30. See Anne Eller, “Dominican Civil War, Slavery, and Spanish Annexation, 1844– 1865,” in American Civil Wars: The United States, Latin America, Europe and the Crisis of the 1860s, ed. Don Doyle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 222–48. 31. El Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), April 24, 1861. 32. New York Times, quoted in Chicago Tribune, April 3, 1861. 33. William H. Seward to Abraham Lincoln, April 1, 1861, in Collected Works, 4:318. 34. Dean P. Mahin, One War at a Time: The International Dimensions of the U.S. Civil War (Washington, D.C.: Brassey’s, 1999). 35. Quoted in James Morton Callahan, Evolution of Seward’s Mexican Policy, West Virginia University Studies in American History ser. 1, Diplomatic History, nos. 4, 5, and 6 (Morgantown, W.Va.: West Virginia University,1909), 20. 36. William H. Seward to Thomas Corwin, April 6, 1861, in U.S. Congress, House, The Present Condition of Mexico, 37th Cong., 2d Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 100:6. 37. See McAllen, Maximilian and Carlotta. 38. Tenorio-Trillo, Latin America, 7. 39. Robert W. Frazier, “Latin-American Projects to Aid Mexico during the French Intervention,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 28 (August 1948): 370–386.

the lost continent of abraham lincoln 245 40. Matías Romero to William H. Seward, November 23, 1861, House Ex. Doc. 100:134. 41. El Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), February 16, 1862. 42. Matías Romero to William H. Seward, June 2, 1862, quoted in U.S. Congress, House, The Present Condition of Mexico, 37th Cong., 3d Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 54:75. 43. See Jasper Ridley, Maximilian and Juarez (London: Constable: 2001), 117–19. 44. Dexter Perkins, The Monroe Doctrine, 1826–1867 (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1965), 430. 45. William H. Seward to Charles Francis Adams and William Dayton, March 3, 1862, quoted in House Ex. Doc. 100:208 (Adams), 217 (Dayton). 46. Percy F. Martin, Maximilian in Mexico: The Story of the French Intervention (1861–1867) (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1914) 107–8. 47. New York Herald, February 3, 1863. 48. “Paris Correspondent of the London Post. ‘Slidell’s Interview with Napoleon,’” reprinted in North American and United States Gazette, July 14, 1863. 49. William H. Seward to William L. Dayton, August 31, 1863, quoted in U.S. Congress, Senate, Message of the President of the United States, 38th Cong., 2d Sess., Senate Ex. Doc. No. 11:462. 50. Richmond Daily Dispatch, September 25, 1863. 51. See James Irby, Backdoor at Bagdad: The Civil War on the Rio Grande (El Paso: Texas Western Press, 1977). 52. Abraham Lincoln to Edwin M. Stanton, July 29, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:354–55. 53. Abraham Lincoln to U. S. Grant, August 9, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:374. 54. U. S. Grant to Abraham Lincoln, August 23, 1863, in Collected Works, 6:374–75. 55. Townsend, Yankee Invasion of Texas. 56. William H. Seward to William L. Dayton, September 26, 1863. Quoted in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Message of the President of the United States, 38th Cong., 1st Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 1, pt. 2:782. 57. William H. Seward to William L. Dayton, October 23, 1863, quoted in House Ex. Doc. No. 1, pt. 2:799. 58. Quoted in Perkins, Monroe Doctrine, 458. 59. On the orders of Napoleon III, however, Maximilian refused to meet with Preston. See Patrick J. Kelly, “The North American Crisis of the 1860s,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (September 2012): 337–68. 60. William H. Seward to William L. Dayton, September 26, 1863, quoted in House Ex. Doc. 1, pt. 2:782–83. Seward’s September 26, 1863 correspondence to Dayton was reprinted in the Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), January 28, 1864. 61. El Comercio (Lima, Peru), September 22, 1864. 62. El Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), April 18, 1863. 63. Manifesto of the General Congress of the United States of Mexico, October 27, 1862, House Ex. Doc. No. 54:394.

246 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2 64. Quoted in David Paul Crook, The North, the South, and the Powers, 1861–1865 (New York: Wiley, 1974), 282. 65. New York Herald, June 14, 1863. 66. Quoted in Thomas Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion: The Triumph of Liberalism in Mexican–United States Relations, 1861–1867 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 118. 67. Matías Romero to Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, October 28, 1864, U.S. Congress, House, The Conditions of Affairs in Mexico, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 73, pt. 1:225. 68. Quoted in Perkins, Monroe Doctrine, 471. 69. Lincoln to Frederico L. Barreda, March 4, 1862, in Lincoln on Democracy: His Own Words with Essays by America’s Foremost Civil War Historians, ed. Mario M. Cuomo and Harold Holzer (New York: Fordham University Press), 243–44. 70. William H. Seward to William Dayton, October 23, 1863, House Ex. Doc. No. 1, pt. 2:799. 71. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, Seward’s ally in the Senate, tabled this resolu- tion on the grounds that diplomacy was the executive’s responsibility. See Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion, 121–25. 72. Miller, “Matías Romero,” 232. 73. Matías Romero, Mexico and the United States, 2 vols.(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 1:385. 74. Miller, “Matías Romero,” 238. 75. William H. Seward to John Bigelow, June 30, 1865, U.S. Congress, House, The Conditions of Affairs in Mexico, 39th Cong., 1st Sess., House Ex. Doc. No. 73, pt. 2:461. 76. El Siglo Diez y Nueve (Mexico City), January 2, 1863. 77. Frazier, “Latin-American Projects to Aid Mexico,” 380–81. 78. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 227. 79. Nathan L. Ferris, “The Relations of the United States with South America during the Civil War,” Hispanic American Historical Review 21 (February 1941): 76. 80. El Mercurio (Santiago, Chile), May 29, 1865. 81. Matías Romero to William H. Seward, January 23, 1863, House Ex. Doc. No. 73, pt. 1:176. 82. Robert Ryal Miller, “Arms across the Border: Unites States Aid to Juarez during the French Intervention into Mexico,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 6 (1973): 1–68. 83. Callahan, Evolution of Seward’s Mexican Policy, 60. 84. Romero Diary, April 6, 1866, quoted in Thomas D. Schoonover, assisted by Ebba Wesener Schoonover, Mexican Lobby, Matías Romero in Washington, 1861–1867 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky: 1986), 123. 85. Robert N. Burr, By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830–1905 (Berkley: University of California Press, 1967). 86. Sanders, Vanguard of the Atlantic World, 45. 87. Schoonover, Dollars over Dominion, 146.

the lost continent of abraham lincoln 247 88. Callahan, Evolution of Seward’s Mexican Policy, 332–33. 89. See John Mason Hart, Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). 90. Harper’s Weekly, July 20, 1867, 451. 91. Ferris, “Relations of the United States,” 78.

248 journal of the civil war era, volume 9, issue 2