The Saber and Scroll Journal Volume 1, Issue 1, April 2015 | Page 46

with the most disastrous of results.
The response to the French intervention was an important moment in the
foreign policy history of the United States. American government leaders stood
on principle when the nation could hardly afford to do so. It was a bold, decisive,
and ultimately successful act remarkable when compared to the more common
escalation’s resultant bloodshed. Historians should study this incident more often
and in more detail to instruct those today who may find themselves in a similar
situation—having to choose between costly principle and easy expediency. It also
deserves further investigation to understand more deeply how America’s newly-
aggressive posture affected the decisions of other nations, either militarily or
economically.
America might have had only regional intentions when it started its saber
-rattling, but its action against France had global repercussions. There was more
than a military intervention taking place in Mexico at that time, a new wave of
colonists, including Confederate soldiers and political leaders, had been arriving
and settling in Mexico since before the end of the Civil War. As part of his
perceived duties to promote the settlement of lands that earlier strife had
depopulated, “Maximilian had made extensive land grants to German, French,
and Austrian immigrants.” 28 He had to divert imperial troops to protect these
settlers. Those Mexicans not in Maximilian’s camp viewed these settlers the same
as the foreign soldiers that had come to force an unwanted throne upon them.
When Napoleon III bowed to American pressure and started to recall his troops,
these new settlers found it wise to leave the country before they would have to
pay for the land they had been granted with their lives. 29 The native Mexicans
who would take their lands back from these new settlers would not establish
international connections, they only wanted to take back that which had been torn
from them.
The displaced settlers, fresh from Europe and elsewhere, would have
naturally established such connections for economic and other reasons, but this
was not to be. The actions of the United States limited Mexico’s development in
what could have been a more varied global presence as a new round of
immigrants, wealthier than the average pioneer farmer, were driven out of
Mexico. The re-possessors of their land, who by in large were indigenous Indians,
of course had no global contacts. 30 This was an unintended consequence of
enforcing the Monroe Doctrine. There would be no new wave of immigration to
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