Every serious student of the American Civil War knows that its central cause was human chattel slavery. Southern slave economies, deeply destructive to their own natural environments, lusted after new lands for transplanting their “peculiar institution,” especially the vast western territories of the Mexican Cession and the Gadsden Purchase, spoils of war and treaty. When Lincoln’s election on a “Free Soil” platform foreclosed that prospect, the plantation elite led the charge to secession, pledging to establish a “proud slave Republic.” Thus, most histories of the antebellum tensions that would lead to separation begin in the aftermath of the Mexican War (1846-48). But after Fort Sumter, references to Mexico are reduced to occasional footnotes on the periphery of the struggle for Union.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Mexico—which had been stripped of more than fifty percent of its territory by its rapacious northern neighbor—was plunged into economic and political chaos so severe that less than fifteen years after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the war, it fell victim to foreign invaders who would impose the “Second Mexican Empire” upon it. So it was that north of the Rio Grande, as hundreds of thousands garbed in blue or gray lost their lives to muskets or measles, and with Washington far too preoccupied to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, French imperialists sent an Austrian emperor to rule over all of Mexico. How it happened and what was to follow makes for a fascinating story via the talented pen of Raymond Jonas in his brilliant addition to the historiography, Habsburgs on the Rio Grande: The Rise and Fall of the Second Mexican Empire [2024].
In my decades of Civil War studies, only rarely have I paused to consider the conflict’s significance abroad, other than an awareness of the looming threat of European recognition of the Confederacy—Lincoln’s greatest fear. There was, of course, always a certain incongruity to the favor shown by Britain and France—who had each abolished slavery—to the breakaway CSA that championed human bondage. A large part of it was economic, of course, given the hunger for southern cotton. But another was driven by a real anxiety of what a United States that had nearly doubled its size with the spoils of Mexican soil could mean for a future balance of power in the Americas and elsewhere. As such, a house divided reassured them.
The first longer look I took was courtesy of Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton [2014], which demonstrated the global impact of British demand for cotton, endangered overnight by a now tenuous supply chain from the American south, its most important vendor. The result was especially ruinous for India, where colonial exploitation through wide scale cotton cultivation condemned its population to poverty and famine. A decade later, in American Civil Wars [2024], Alan Taylor widened the lens, revealing how growing concerns for an 
It was Taylor’s book that inspired me to read Habsburgs on the Rio Grande, and I was not disappointed. Jonas, professor of history at the University of Washington, starts off by sketching out the pitiful status of the Second Republic following the Texas Revolution, the Mexican Cession, and the Gadsden Purchase. A rump state of sorts, although its remaining territory was still sizeable, the war and its aftermath left deep socio-economic scars that set it politically adrift with an uncertain future further burdened by crippling debt. Mexico was not only maimed; it was deeply disfigured.
Years ago, I recall reading a remark by a supercilious pundit who wondered aloud what the west might look like today absent the forces of manifest destiny. He pointed to the economic and political turmoil that marked contemporary Mexico, and imagined a similar negative outcome for what is now the western United States. Of course—much like passing judgment on twenty-first century sub-Saharan Africa without taking into account the devastating impact of European colonialism—conditions in modern Mexico are in a large part the legacy of American imperialism. Moreover, we can only guess at what the Mexican federation would be like in 2025 if its borders still contained Texas, California, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and those parts of Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Wyoming that had been stripped from it by the war and other means. This point, minimized or even overlooked elsewhere, cannot be stressed too much.
Fallout from the Mexican-American War only exacerbated ongoing political instability. Within a few years, a coup put autocrat Santa Anna back at the helm, but he was then overthrown in Benito Juárez’s liberal revolution that saw widespread reforms to modernize the economy as well as separate church from state, which threatened both the power of large landowners and the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church. This led to a conservative revolt and civil war. Meanwhile, the handful of European powers that held the notes attached to Mexico’s crushing indebtedness—distrustful of one another but yet aligned for mutual benefit—sensed an opening to collect what was due as well as well as set up shop in America’s backyard while Lincoln was too busy eying the movements of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia to do anything about it.
This opportunity was handed to them on a silver platter when conservatives—defeated on the battlefield—reached out to France’s Napoleon III to request a monarch to rule over Mexico. What started out as an alliance of European nations given to intervention quickly fell apart over squabbling and a lack of will, but France stayed in the game. The French Army, at first stymied at the Battle of Puebla—a victory for Mexico still celebrated on “Cinco de Mayo”—later overwhelmed the forces of the Republic, sent Juárez’s government into internal exile, and placed the Austrian Habsburg Archduke Maximilian I on the throne as emperor of the newly established Second Mexican Empire.
This turns out to be an exciting tale Jonas recounts in a well-written narrative matched with an engaging style equally suitable to a popular or scholarly audience that serves as a welcome remedy to the all-too-common plague of book-length history presented as either dull or dumbed down. He’s at his very best with his detailed portrait of the hapless Maximilian: naive, idealistic, uncertain, self-absorbed, vacillating, easily influenced, and politically inept—in short, utterly unqualified to rule anywhere, but especially unsuitable for the chaotic powder keg that was 1860s Mexico. Furthermore, the Maximilian who emerges in these pages does not appear to have had a solid grip on the dangerous realities he was to encounter. Biographers have observed that Thomas Jefferson was capable of holding two opposing ideas in his head at the same time. The same perhaps could have been said of Maximilian, although unlike the shrewd Jefferson, he seemed entirely unaware of the contradictions.
For those intrigued by the intersecting lives of key figures in history, Maximilian’s family tree is worthy of attention. He was the younger brother of Habsburg Emperor Franz Joseph I, ruler of Austro-Hungary until his death during the First World War. And he was married to the beautiful if mentally unstable Carlota, who was sister to none other than Belgium’s King Leopold II, later infamous for the horrific atrocities inflicted upon the inhabitants of the Congo Free State, his own personal fiefdom. Maximilian’s liberal ideals were not welcome at the court of Franz Joseph, but his pedigree— Habsburgs had once ruled the Viceroyalty of New Spain—lent him a legitimacy that suited both Mexican conservatives and European imperialists, each who pressed him to take on the dubious honor of becoming Emperor of Mexico. True to his characteristic indecisiveness, and ever vulnerable to persuasion, he at first declined but later accepted the role.
His reign was doomed from the start, not least because the new emperor never really understood his mission. Despite decades of political unrest and the schemes of conservative monarchists, Mexicans were mostly united in jealously guarding the hard-fought independence won from Spain in 1821. Yet, Maximilian—a foreign ruler imposed by the French—expected nothing less than a joyous welcome as liberator by an adoring population. There was also an immediate conflict with his conservative patrons in Mexico, whose goal was to undue Juárez’s reforms by restoring the church and its large landholdings, and returning power to the wealthy elite. But Maximilian was a liberal who declared himself a champion of the indigenous and sought to further reform—the exact opposite brand of sovereign that reactionary collaborationists had hoped to import to do their will.
Spoiler alert: it did not end well. Maximilian and Carlota flailed about, playing at the frippery of royalty while deceived by their handlers—and their own imaginations—that they enjoyed a popular support conspicuous in its absence. Meanwhile to their north, the Union prevailed and shortly began to offer aid to the exiled Republic. Eventually France cut its losses and withdrew, but Maximilian—in a ludicrous underscore to his penchant for indulging his own illusions—remained behind, still confident that he was a welcome, beloved figure. That fantasy came to a predictable end in front of a firing squad, although it is likely the credulous Maximilian went to his death as dumbfounded as he had lived his life.
There’s far more to report about the events chronicled in this marvelous book, but no review could appropriately do that justice. All that I can add is that if you are interested in significant if relatively unfamiliar episodes of history that seldom receive their due, this volume deserves your attention as well as a permanent home on your bookshelves. You will not regret it.
My Review of: Empire of Cotton: A Global History, by Sven Beckert
My Review of: American Civil Wars: A Continental History, 1850-1873, by Alan Taylor
Great review! Definitely need to add this to my TBR.
Thank you so much! Feedback is always most welcome. And it’s a fine book indeed!