"...solemn choice. It is a small wrinkle of history that had the United States held up better on that fateful day of September 9th, Mexico may well have not entered the war, and the Argentine-Brazilian conflict may have been settled otherwise. But the rapid collapse of American defenses in the state of Maryland suggested that the great Yankee hegemon was perhaps rather a paper tiger, and if properly supported with supplies and manpower, the efforts of the Bloc Sud to defang it could bear fruit.
Nonetheless, the legend of the "reluctant Mexican" was born out of the deep divisions in the Mexican government over how, exactly, to respond. The Emperor made plain that he would stand back from the "momentous" decision; he had made a civilian constitution a decade earlier, and he would abide by it. This immediately sidelined possibly the most important voice in the room, particularly for the faction of skeptics who may have carried the day had he spoken up. Unlike the sister republics at war, a declaration of war in Mexico required not a full vote of the Assembly but rather just a vote of the Cabinet, and the Emperor's countersignature. Swaying enough men in the Cabinet, then, became the task of the hawks led by Creel, Molina and, increasingly, Prime Minister Leon de la Barra. The skeptics had no single figure to coalesce around; Lascurain, the ostensibly dovish Foreign Minister, had negotiated the agreement with the Confederacy that the Creel-Molina faction now argued compelled Mexico to act, and he was of course a timid figure in his own right. A war beside the Confederacy was sold as potentially healing the deep rifts in Mexican society exposed by the shocking civil conflicts of the spring; though the militant strike wave had subsided over the course of the summer, there was fear that another autumn of labor militancy might be ahead and that concentrating all that energy northwards could help cool passions in Mexico itself. There was some reason to believe that - one of the few things men like Enrique Creel and Abraham Gonzalez agreed upon was that the United States was the source of much of what ailed Mexico economically, and focusing on that point of agreement was a uniting factor.
The most important voices for the skeptics thus came from outside the government, once again the tandem of Crown Prince Louis Maximilian and General Bernardo Reyes. Margarita herself was firmly opposed to the war, crying long into the night when she heard of the sacking of Washington, but this did not influence her husband; the Crown Prince was not an objector out of compassion but rather out of cold, pragmatic logic. Still, the Emperor instructed members of the royal family not to speak publicly on their thoughts on the war (this of course also muzzled arch-hawks like the Iturbide brothers and Margarita's eldest son, Francisco Jose), and the heir was forced to use Reyes as his mouthpiece as the Cabinet vote on September 13th came closer and closer. The general, having already received orders to mobilize the troops two days earlier out of "caution," came before the Cabinet the morning of their vote and presciently remarked, "In two years time, mark my words, we will be wondering why exactly we followed the Confederacy into the abyss, and we will be negotiating our exit from this senseless war with a decision on whether we buy peace from the yanqui via treasure or land."
Whether Reyes swayed any votes is unclear; the motion to declare war on the United States passed by two votes, one of them Lascurain. At first, the news excited the Mexican street; men who had been striking or rioting were now enlisting to train to fight, and the harshly critical press (soon to be under severe wartime censorship) came to a fairly uniform opinion that the war presented an opportunity for Mexico to drive the United States from its economy forever, using the Confederate war effort as a vehicle. The declaration of war was followed by an even more popular measure - the seizure of American assets, including ranchland such as that belonging to former US President William Hearst, in Mexico and their use to finance the war. Reyes, despite his reluctance, mobilized the standing army and prepared it for a journey north to Los Pasos and Nogales in order to provide cover to the Confederacy on its vast, open Western flank, and prepared to march the 1st Reserve to Centro, from where it would lunge for the real prize and Mexico's other strategic goal in the war - Nicaragua..."
- The Matriarch: Empress Margarita Clementina and the Emergence of a Modern Mexico