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 neigh- boring 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 fol- lowed 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 monar- chical 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, confi- dent 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 pre- dicted 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 con- tinent, 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 impe- rial 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 demo- cratic values, no matter how frayed, of the United States.8 Yet it is impor- tant 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 dur- ing 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. occupa- tion 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 repub- licans 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.