January, 1861.

In the United States, Simon Cameron is cooperating with
President-Elect Abraham Lincoln in the first steps of Lincoln's
program to bring an end to the Panic of 1856. Cameron will return to
Pennsylvania, where Democrat or Republican (he has feet in both camps
now) he will be elected to the Senate no later than 1862, remaining
the principal power-broker in that state's politics. The taint of
corruption which covered Fernando Wood's doomed administration has
slid off him like so many other accusations, and his career survives,
no matter who is in office.

In the Confederacy, Robert Edward Lee has grown frustrated in his
attempts to both govern the loosely-tied states of the South and to
restore the estates left to his wife and sons by his father-in-law,
George Washington Parke Custis. In particular, he finds himself
hitting a legal and financial brick wall where it comes to one
provision of Custis' will- that all his 200+ slaves be emancipated
within five years of his death. There's less than two years to go, and
even with Virginia's mild emancipation laws (compared to the rest of
the Confederacy- indeed, in Mississippi and South Carolina it is no
longer legal to free blacks at ALL!) there is just no way it will be
done in time.

With this frustration close to his heart, Lee has looked to the Texas
Slave Codes enacted during Houston's last administration. This year he
will coax, cozen, and contrive each and every provision of those codes
through the Confederate Congress, expending a lot of political capital
and public goodwill to do it... but it is a thing which, in Lee's
view, needs doing, and he has word from the Confederate Supreme Court
that South Carolina's anti-emancipation law will be overturned as it
restricts the right of property in slaves- to wit, the right to
abandon that property- and is thus against the Confederate
Constitution. 

In Texas, the pro-slavery, pro-expansion, pro-war Whigs hold power in
the Congress and in the Presidency, under Francis Lubbock. This power
is thin and conditional, however, and the Whigs have been fighting
without success to have as much of Houston's political legacy
overturned against united Democrat opposition. Lubbock himself has
nearly tired of the battle over issues such as slavery, Indian
sufferage, Indian land grants, and military appropriations for the
destruction of Indian power in Commancheria and Apacheria, the
protection of settlement in Santa Fe, the Gila Valley, and the newly
named Pico Valley, much less border guard fronting USA, CSA, and
Mexico and its Pacific territories and protectorates. 

Not even the new money coming in from new gold and silver strikes in
the Nevada deserts and the Rocky Mountains could insure steady income.
Like the still-working gold mines in California, both the new strikes
either crossed or came close to international borders with USA or CSA.
In fact, the majority of the easy gold in the Rockies was on CSA soil,
and such gold as was mined in Virginia City or the California Gulch
went across the Arkansas or the Arlington Line as often as it went to
the Texas land assessor's office. 

What Lubbock needed was a cause, something to quiet Democrat
opposition and unite the Texas people. He needed a war, and by the end
of the year he would have that war thanks to the struggles of the
President of Mexico, Benito Juarez, against the empires of Europe...

LONE STAR REPUBLIC
Part 16 - Troubled Southern Waters

Benito Jurarez's government was, put kindly, bankrupt in January 1861.
Only the fanatic loyalty of the new Liberal armies under the young
general Pofirio Diaz had kept them in the field, short on supplies and
months in arrears on pay. Those armies had just broken the last
Conservative army in rebellion against Juarez's offer of amnesty. The
Conservative rival government was defunct, its leaders exiled, its
debts assumed by a nation already foundering in debts and struggling
to rebuild its financial base independent of massive plantations and
usurious church leaders. 

The fiancing of the war, on both sides, came from Europe, who
collectively ought to have known better considering the past track
record of European investments in Latin American governments. Payments
on those debts were wrecking all of Juarez's efforts to restore the
Mexican economy to something approaching stability, and when Juarez
announced an indefinite suspension of payments effective in February,
Europe should have shrugged its shoulders, leaned a bit on Juarez's
unstable government, and taken its money a bit later.

The reason it did not do this, in a nutshell, was the ruling monarch
of France, Emperor Napoleon the Third. Like his grandfather, Napoleon
had a vision of great empires and controls; unlike his grandfather, he
also had a sense of reality as to what risks could be taken,
especially considering how unpopular his regime actually was with the
people. War in the Crimea had earned him nothing more than the emnity
of Russia and the lukewarm support of the Ottomans and Great Britain,
and he dared not meddle militarily in affairs on the European
continent itself. 

Mexico, however... Mexico was quite another matter. Its continual
mismanagement appealed to Napoleon the would-be reformer, its
perpetual weakness- it lost TWICE to Texas, for goodness' sake!-
appealed to Napoleon as an empire-builder. He even had in mind a
puppet ruler for the conquered nation; the younger brother of the Holy
Roman Emperor of Austria-Hungary, Prince Ferdinand Maximilian, who in
turn was related by ties of both blood and matrimony to the ruling
houses of Spain and Belgium. Maximilian himself knew nothing of this;
indeed, he lived in a state of perpetual ignorance about very nearly
everything, a state financed and encouraged by his elder brother
Emperor Franz Joseph.

Many of the leaders of the Conservative movement, having been exiled
by decree or circumstance from Mexico, fled to Europe, where they
already held the ear of the Vatican and, shortly after, held both ears
of Napoleon III. Napoleon heard the Conservative claims that Mexicans
wanted a strong leader, an absolute dictator, and a strong Church
presence, and because he wanted to believe, he did believe. The
announcement that Mexico was withholding its debt payments gave him
the excuse he needed to begin the 'popular uprising against
Liberalism.'

With Spain at his side as a fellow creditor of Mexico, and a secret
supporter of a European conquest of Mexico, Napoleon approached the
Palmerston government in Great Britain proposing that Mexico be shown
her place among nations. That Indian from Oxaca could not be allowed
to slither out of his indebtedness so easily, said Napoleon, and
Palmerston agreed. 

United, the three nations organized a small but formidable
expeditionary force. In August this force siezed Mexico's principal
port, Veracruz, and demanded full resumption of debt payments, with
interest accrued and certain fees for late payment.

Juarez simply did not have the money. He'd made stunning progress in
redistributing the property of Conservatives and the church, but
economic recovery had only begun. He was rapidly discovering, as other
Latin leaders before and since had, that the post-colonial economies
depended heavily on European investment, and as such remained
permanently indebted to European powers. He'd toyed with the idea of
disavowing all debts to Europe, but he was not nearly prepared to take
such a drastic and final step.

As a compromise- a very expensive compromise- he scraped the bottom of
the treasury and came up with an amount much smaller than asked for,
with the promise to resume payments by January 1863, if not before.
With this Great Britain was satisfied; Palmerston saw his nation's
pre-eminence established once more, along with the validity of
Mexico's debts. Spain, likewise, accepted and bowed out, not having
the fiancial or military power to go farther. Still, from Napoleon's
standpoint, both had served their purpose; French troops were in North
America, and would remain there, and Great Britain- the only power
which could stop the enterprise- had recognized the validity of French
claims and could not object to France's actions if not satisfied.

So it was that, as the British and Spanish sailed away in November
with substantial amounts of gold in their ships' hulls, French troops
increased in Veracruz, and French demands and intransigence became
louder. Juarez made one more attempt to appease the French, to no
avail; finally, in February of 1862, Napoleon announced that France
was going to have its payments in full, one way or another... not an
official declaration of war, but as close to one as makes no
difference. In April, 8,000 French troops marched from Veracruz,
attempting to do what only Cortez had done before. 

The Mexican army under Diaz met the French at the village of Puebla
and taught the French just exactly why no European since Cortez had
conquered Mexico, sending the French column running back for Veracruz
as fast as it could go. The Mexican force, less than half the size of
the French force and crippled by the Mexican government's poverty,
could not pursue. France retained Veracruz and, in government-friendly
papers back in France, portrayed the Mexicans as the agressors, the
deadbeat nation which answered they demands for repayment with
gunfire.

Money and arms were raised, ships pulled out of ordinary and remanned,
and 30,000 French soldiers began crossing the Atlantic. These troops
were met with dismay in the United States, amusement in Texas, and a
grim tight-lipped silence in the Confederacy, which still remembered
how important European pressure had been in breaking the Union will to
war in 1855. Abraham Lincoln offered arbitration and threatened naval
blockade of French-held Mexican ports, but he was ignored by the
French (who felt quite capable of keeping those ports open, a belief
Lincoln never challenged).

Despite the massive reinforcement, Napoleon III felt somewhat
apprehensive about his chances. Control of the central Mexican valley
had never proven decisive in any of Mexico's many civil wars, and he
doubted that would change. There were vast regions in the southeast
(where Juarez himself came from) or in the north of the nation where a
rebel army could retreat, reinforce, and return to battle. He wanted a
'sure thing,' as the American slang went, and that meant an ally or
two to assist him in the dismembering of Mexico's elected government.

Spain and Britain were obviously out, having dropped their efforts
already, and no other European nation had sufficient maritime strength
to send and supply sufficient troops so far away from Europe. The
United States was not interested; the Confederate people might be, but
President Lee had no intentions of entering into foreign
entanglements, for either side. 

The only logical choice, the only possible choice, was obvious; to
enlist the aid, by whatever means, of the Republic of Texas...

Next episode: Part 17: Arise Empire, Fall Hubris