TL-191: Filling the Gaps
- Thread starter Craigo
- Start date
Empire of Mexico, 1864-1945
Out of all the land in the divided North American continent, Mexico, until 1914, had seen the most warfare - ironic, as it was generally far from center stage in world affairs.
Yet another civil war concluded in the late 1850s with the ascendancy of the Indian president Benito Juarez. In 1861 Juarez, the Liberal leader, suspended payments to Spain, France, and Britain - he was loth to pay, as the debts had mostly been incurred by his enemies. The three creditors, using the War of Secession to evade the Monroe Doctrine, put together a naval expedition the next year, with the intent to scare money out of the Mexicans. But the French went further, sending an army inland. Napoleon's ambition spooked the British and Spanish into withdrawing, but the French pressed on, weathering a defeat at Puebla before conquering the city in 1863. Juarez fled Mexico City for the North, but had to flee Chihuahua when the Confederate expedition under Earl Van Dorn entered the state at France's behest.
That same year Napoleon III formally invited a Habsburg prince named Maximilian to take the throne of Mexico. Maximilian had rejected a similar proposal from Mexican landowners some years later, but with the promise of French and Confederate support (and a powerless US), he accepted Napoleon's offer, arriving in early 1864.
Maximilian quickly surprised his conservative supports in the landowning elites and in the Church by supporting most of Juarez's liberal policies. Maximilian admired Juarez both personally and politically, and offered him the post of Prime Minister in 1864; Juarez's refusal guaranteed a fresh round of civil strife. The war quickly turned brutal, and the Confederate and French forces supporting the monarchists were often shocked at the execution of prisoners and retaliatory slaughters carried out by both sides. In March 1866 Juarez's main army was pinned down in San Luis Potosi. Juarez again refused Maximilian's offer of a pardon before the battle commenced; his body was discovered the next day, a pistol in his hand and a bullet hole in his chest. Some monarchist soldiers mutilated his corpse - Maximilian later had two of the culprits court-martialed and executed. Juarez had died a day before his 60th birthday.
With Juarez dead and Prussia running wild in Europe, Napoleon III soon lost interest in Mexico, and the bulk of French troops were withdrawn some months later. Ironically, the monarchy that he created in Mexico would far outlive his own throne, as Bismarck would force him to abdicate in 1871.
Maximilian enthusiastically set about uniting and rebuilding his new empire. He was finally coronated in the Metropolitan Cathedral on September 16, 1866, the 55th anniversary of Mexico's independence from Spain. But the very elites who had supported his installation had now grown fractious under his reforms, particularly his support of Juarez's land policies. In order to placate them, Maximilian appointed a conservative general, Leonardo Marquez, as Prime Minister. Marquez promptly attempted to overthrow Maximilian in 1869; the attempt failed when Marquez's young rival Miguel Miramon won over the bulk of the army, and Maximilian's personal guard under Colonel Miguel Lopez kept the emperor from being captured. His fait accompli having slipped through his fingers, Marquez fled to Confederate Cuba, and established a new life as a wealthy sugar planter.
Miramon replaced Marquez as Prime Minister, and Maximilian's position was secure once again. But he had been badly shaken by the failed coup, and agreed to roll back some of the most controversial land reforms, and restored many of the Church's privileges. Reform was dead in Mexico.
But peace did not come easy. With the treasury drained by decades of warfare, and unwilling to raise taxes on the wealthy, Mexico's government was perpetually deep in debt, and often unable to project power beyond Mexico City and a few coastal areas. Maximilian himself contracted malaria on a visit to the Yucatan in 1873 (itself in a state of almost endless rebellion), and though he survived, it was in a weakened condition. His adoptive son Prince Salvador, having spent much of his formative years in Europe, returned to Mexico and assumed much of his father's responsibilities; Maximilian I officially abdicated in favor of Salvador in 1879, who took the throne as Maximilian II.
(Salvador was the grandson of Agustin de Iturbide, Mexico's first emperor. Thus the two royal houses were united. Another adoptive heir, Augustine, had died in a typhus epidemic in 1871.)
Maximilian II was faced with a grim financial outlook for Mexico. He finally agreed to sell the provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua for $3 million to the Confederate States in 1881. His father had repeatedly refused to give up any of his new country's land, but Maximilian II believed he had no other choice. This decision sparked no less than two wars. In the north, the United States of America used the "coerced" purchase as a casus belli for against the Confederate States of America.
In Mexico itself, the loss of yet more Mexican land to the gringos sparked outrage in both the liberals and conservatives. Porfirio Diaz, a general who had fought against the French before siding with Maximilian against Marquez, was in 1882 put forward as a candidate for Prime Minister by a majority of the Mexican legislature. Diaz had been outspoken in his disapproval of the sale, and Maximilian II refused to appoint him, preferring longtime incumbent Miramon. Diaz's supporters attacked Miramon's office, forcing the Prime Minister to flee before burning it to the ground, sparking yet another rebellion.
Diaz failed for the same reason as Marquez: Maximilian II retained control of Mexico City throughout the war, as Miramon’s influence within the army proved superior to that of Diaz, who had a well-deserved reputation as an opportunist. Diaz’s greatest success was the capture of the port of Veracruz in 1883; but when some of his forces began raiding the new Confederate states of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Confederate Navy blockaded Veracruz and immediately extended new loans to the imperial government. The rebellion was slowly ground underfoot; and in 1885, while hiding in his home province of Oaxaca, Diaz was betrayed by a Colonel Huerta on his staff and captured. He was executed by firing squad a week later, and the rebellion collapsed with him.
Ultimately Diaz did more to damage Mexico than any other man in history save Santa Anna. While previously Liberal-Conservative conflicts had been common in Mexico, Diaz had been briefly able to unite rural landowners and aggrieved republicans against the central government, thus poisoning both the left and the right for decades to come. Both wealthy haciendas and bourgeois towns were laid waste as retaliation for supporting Diaz, while in many rebellious provinces such as Morelos, known monarchists were slaughtered. Only Maximilian’s desperate overtures to the Catholic Church prevented the more militant members of that faith from joining Diaz in outright rebellion; thus in 1885 the Church was more firmly in control in Mexico than at any point since the rise of Juarez.
Part II soon, I swear.
Out of all the land in the divided North American continent, Mexico, until 1914, had seen the most warfare - ironic, as it was generally far from center stage in world affairs.
Yet another civil war concluded in the late 1850s with the ascendancy of the Indian president Benito Juarez. In 1861 Juarez, the Liberal leader, suspended payments to Spain, France, and Britain - he was loth to pay, as the debts had mostly been incurred by his enemies. The three creditors, using the War of Secession to evade the Monroe Doctrine, put together a naval expedition the next year, with the intent to scare money out of the Mexicans. But the French went further, sending an army inland. Napoleon's ambition spooked the British and Spanish into withdrawing, but the French pressed on, weathering a defeat at Puebla before conquering the city in 1863. Juarez fled Mexico City for the North, but had to flee Chihuahua when the Confederate expedition under Earl Van Dorn entered the state at France's behest.
That same year Napoleon III formally invited a Habsburg prince named Maximilian to take the throne of Mexico. Maximilian had rejected a similar proposal from Mexican landowners some years later, but with the promise of French and Confederate support (and a powerless US), he accepted Napoleon's offer, arriving in early 1864.
Maximilian quickly surprised his conservative supports in the landowning elites and in the Church by supporting most of Juarez's liberal policies. Maximilian admired Juarez both personally and politically, and offered him the post of Prime Minister in 1864; Juarez's refusal guaranteed a fresh round of civil strife. The war quickly turned brutal, and the Confederate and French forces supporting the monarchists were often shocked at the execution of prisoners and retaliatory slaughters carried out by both sides. In March 1866 Juarez's main army was pinned down in San Luis Potosi. Juarez again refused Maximilian's offer of a pardon before the battle commenced; his body was discovered the next day, a pistol in his hand and a bullet hole in his chest. Some monarchist soldiers mutilated his corpse - Maximilian later had two of the culprits court-martialed and executed. Juarez had died a day before his 60th birthday.
With Juarez dead and Prussia running wild in Europe, Napoleon III soon lost interest in Mexico, and the bulk of French troops were withdrawn some months later. Ironically, the monarchy that he created in Mexico would far outlive his own throne, as Bismarck would force him to abdicate in 1871.
Maximilian enthusiastically set about uniting and rebuilding his new empire. He was finally coronated in the Metropolitan Cathedral on September 16, 1866, the 55th anniversary of Mexico's independence from Spain. But the very elites who had supported his installation had now grown fractious under his reforms, particularly his support of Juarez's land policies. In order to placate them, Maximilian appointed a conservative general, Leonardo Marquez, as Prime Minister. Marquez promptly attempted to overthrow Maximilian in 1869; the attempt failed when Marquez's young rival Miguel Miramon won over the bulk of the army, and Maximilian's personal guard under Colonel Miguel Lopez kept the emperor from being captured. His fait accompli having slipped through his fingers, Marquez fled to Confederate Cuba, and established a new life as a wealthy sugar planter.
Miramon replaced Marquez as Prime Minister, and Maximilian's position was secure once again. But he had been badly shaken by the failed coup, and agreed to roll back some of the most controversial land reforms, and restored many of the Church's privileges. Reform was dead in Mexico.
But peace did not come easy. With the treasury drained by decades of warfare, and unwilling to raise taxes on the wealthy, Mexico's government was perpetually deep in debt, and often unable to project power beyond Mexico City and a few coastal areas. Maximilian himself contracted malaria on a visit to the Yucatan in 1873 (itself in a state of almost endless rebellion), and though he survived, it was in a weakened condition. His adoptive son Prince Salvador, having spent much of his formative years in Europe, returned to Mexico and assumed much of his father's responsibilities; Maximilian I officially abdicated in favor of Salvador in 1879, who took the throne as Maximilian II.
(Salvador was the grandson of Agustin de Iturbide, Mexico's first emperor. Thus the two royal houses were united. Another adoptive heir, Augustine, had died in a typhus epidemic in 1871.)
Maximilian II was faced with a grim financial outlook for Mexico. He finally agreed to sell the provinces of Sonora and Chihuahua for $3 million to the Confederate States in 1881. His father had repeatedly refused to give up any of his new country's land, but Maximilian II believed he had no other choice. This decision sparked no less than two wars. In the north, the United States of America used the "coerced" purchase as a casus belli for against the Confederate States of America.
In Mexico itself, the loss of yet more Mexican land to the gringos sparked outrage in both the liberals and conservatives. Porfirio Diaz, a general who had fought against the French before siding with Maximilian against Marquez, was in 1882 put forward as a candidate for Prime Minister by a majority of the Mexican legislature. Diaz had been outspoken in his disapproval of the sale, and Maximilian II refused to appoint him, preferring longtime incumbent Miramon. Diaz's supporters attacked Miramon's office, forcing the Prime Minister to flee before burning it to the ground, sparking yet another rebellion.
Diaz failed for the same reason as Marquez: Maximilian II retained control of Mexico City throughout the war, as Miramon’s influence within the army proved superior to that of Diaz, who had a well-deserved reputation as an opportunist. Diaz’s greatest success was the capture of the port of Veracruz in 1883; but when some of his forces began raiding the new Confederate states of Sonora and Chihuahua, the Confederate Navy blockaded Veracruz and immediately extended new loans to the imperial government. The rebellion was slowly ground underfoot; and in 1885, while hiding in his home province of Oaxaca, Diaz was betrayed by a Colonel Huerta on his staff and captured. He was executed by firing squad a week later, and the rebellion collapsed with him.
Ultimately Diaz did more to damage Mexico than any other man in history save Santa Anna. While previously Liberal-Conservative conflicts had been common in Mexico, Diaz had been briefly able to unite rural landowners and aggrieved republicans against the central government, thus poisoning both the left and the right for decades to come. Both wealthy haciendas and bourgeois towns were laid waste as retaliation for supporting Diaz, while in many rebellious provinces such as Morelos, known monarchists were slaughtered. Only Maximilian’s desperate overtures to the Catholic Church prevented the more militant members of that faith from joining Diaz in outright rebellion; thus in 1885 the Church was more firmly in control in Mexico than at any point since the rise of Juarez.
Part II soon, I swear.
At what point in the novels is it mentioned that Lincoln lost to Seymour? Seymour is mentioned as winning the 1864 POTUS election in Guns of the South, which while it may be a Turtledove CSA victory book, isn't part of the TL-191 series. All I can recall in TL-191 is Lincoln taking a beating in 1864, but it isn't said what candidate defeated him.
It's not mentioned, which is sort of the point of this thread. We know Lincoln loses, and to a Democrat. McClellan's reputation is destroyed at Camp Hill, so Seymour, the governor of the largest state in the Union and the RL 1868 nominee, is the logical choice. A lot of the stuff in here has less to go on than President Seymour.
welcome back. excellent Mexico update. out of curiosity, are the Mexico names real or fiction?
Every name except for Francisco Jose (I've postulated that he has a male child, instead of his rela life daughter) mentioned so far has been real. Miramon, for example, was executed along with Maximilian in 1867.
) , keep there, the mexican update was excellent and very well make.Actually, I was going off of this:
I'd agree Seymour would be the most logical choice, but that sentence really seems to attribute it directly to Turtledove.
I have a long list:
Poland
Baltics
Scandanavia
Ukraine
Central Powers
Entente
Ottoman Empire
Austria-Hungary
Charles Lindbergh
Three Stooges
Labour Party
Leon Blum
Miklos Horthy
Mannerheim
Attaturk
The Hashemites, Saudis and Rashids
Poland
Baltics
Scandanavia
Ukraine
Central Powers
Entente
Ottoman Empire
Austria-Hungary
Charles Lindbergh
Three Stooges
Labour Party
Leon Blum
Miklos Horthy
Mannerheim
Attaturk
The Hashemites, Saudis and Rashids
Empire of Mexico, 1864-1945, pt II
Though Maximilian II had used the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua to patch the hole in Mexico’s finances, the war against Diaz tore it wide open once again. This time, the Confederate States owned the bulk of the debt, and its government did not shrink from using this to establish itself as the “senior partner” of the Rio Grande relationship. Just as Germany became shackled to Austria-Hungary in the 1880s, the Confederacy had its own Habsburg ally to its south.
Maximilian II passed away in 1895 and left to his son Francisco Jose I a nation burdened with enormous debt, an overbearing ally, a domineering Church, rural fiefdoms, banditry, and a rebellious south. Prime Minister Miramon, incredibly, remained in office well into the 20th century, despite his advanced years, no doubt.
Mexico’s army in 1914 was just big enough to garrison Mexico City, patrol the northern border, and fight the occasionally skirmish in the long war against Emiliano Zapata’s Army of the South. Its machine-guns were few, its artillery nearly ling existent. Its rifles were Tredegars imported from the CSA, as was most of its ammunition. The US’s war plans from the time barely mention Mexico, apart from an attempt to choke off the Confederate Pacific port of Guaymas, which necessitated closing the Gulf of California. This, in turn, required conquering Baja California, and war with Mexico once more. When the fight against the Confederacy did not go as well as planned in 1914-1915, new Chief of Staff Leonard Wood authorized an invasion in May 1915.
It was a fiasco. A single overlarge Sixth Army division, created from new recruits and the remnants of the force that pacified Utah, was tasked to push south from San Diego and capture La Paz, to provide a base for operations against Guaymas. Though the ill-equipped, ill-fed, and ill-led Mexican Army was unable to prevent the US from seizing Tijuana (a Marine division had actually taken that city and Ensenada in the fall of 1914), their delaying tactics in the Baja interior bled the US invaders. Even with US naval support hugging the peninsula, the Mexicans threw up one defensive line after another, mirroring Canadian operations in Ontario. The assault was stopped for good in October 1915, near the Bahia Maximiliano on the Pacific Coast. Repeated attempts by the US Navy to break into the Gulf were thwarted by joint CS-Mexican operations utilizing minefields and submarines.
That single line held till July 1917, when the Empire signed an armistice with the United States. As befitting its role as a minor adversary which was not exactly defeated, no territory was taken from Mexico, and no reparations were demanded.
But as the Great War ended, the greatest war in Mexico's history began. Lasting eight years and taking several thousand lives, the Mexican Civil War (the only one of that country's numerous internecine conflicts to be given that name), like the Spanish Civil War over a decade later, served to bridge the gap between the First and Second Great Wars.
Ever since the defeat of Diaz's rebellion thirty years' before, social unrest had simmered in Mexico, but never come to a boil. Maximilian II remained a hated figure until his death, despised by the left for crushing the rebellion and republicanism, and by the right for selling Mexican soil and attempting to break up the haciendas. His son, Francisco Jose I, was the first monarch of Mexico to be born and raised in a royal family, and thus had far more conservative leanings than his progressive forbears. Through Miramon, he had taken care to placate the Mexican elites, while presenting himself as a man of the people. For a brief time, he managed to repair the damage done to the throne's image.
The Great War wrecked that, as it did so many other things. One would not expect such a minor campaign as the Baja invasion to put much stress on a nation, but for ten years a young mestizo lawyer named Emiliano Zapata had been waging a protracted rebellion in the southern provinces. Though a minor conflict by the standards of Diaz and Juarez, and never a threat to the Empire as a whole, Zapata's rebellion proved a drain on the army and the economy, and kept a number of provinces in constant turmoil. In order to mobilize against the expected US invasion, Mexico had to, for the first time, stringently enforce the conscription law that had been on the books since 1887.
Hundreds of thousands of young Mexican men were swept up into the army - and for many, it was the first time that the imperial government ever toched their lives. It was rarely a pleasant experience - conscripts suffered harsh discipline under aristocratic officers, and their rations, when they had any, were poor. Only weapons and ammunition, supplied by the Confederacy, plentiful. Indians who could not speak Spanish were put in the stockade. They were sent off to the front, which was a Hobbs' choice - fighting their own countrymen in Morelos, Chiapas, and Campeche, or battling the norteamericanos in Baja, where they were either in constant retreat, or huddled in trenches as the US Army's artillery battered them.
While the Empire did not, strictly speaking, win either of those conflicts, the fact that they had successfully defended their own soil against the mighty United States brought forth a brief swell of national pride. Mexican flags flew proudly even in those villages which had previously disdained the government, and toasts were raised to the Emperor. Francisco Jose I could hardly imagine that his downfall was imminent.
Almost as swiftly as the national modd had brightened, it turned sour. Mexican agriculture had expanded in the wake of the destruction elsewhere in North America, and when normal trade resumed in late 1917, Mexican farmers found that they had produced too much. Commodity prices plummeted as the surpluses were burned off, and farm employment reached its highest point in years. The situatin was exacerbated by the government's decision to save money by releasing the vast majority of its soldiers from their terms of service, instead of letting their conscription periods run their course. These men returned home to jobs that did not exist, and with little money in their pockets (due to a combination of inefficiency and corruption among army paymasters).
Just as the situation appeared to be trending upward, the Spanish flu epidemic hit during the winter of 1917. Mexico got off relatively lightly due to a poor system of internal transportation, limiting the spread of the disease. Still, thousands more perished, further straining Mexican society. In such a crisis Francisco Jose could have cemented his reputation by going among the people and sharing their pain. But like his father, the emperor had been raised in rarefied Mexican and European social circles; his French and German were better than his Spanish, which was curiously accented; and he was uncomfortable among commoners.
High unemployment, social strain, a weak central government, an aloof ruler, and a mass of men trained in combat; the situation was explosive. Theodore Roosevelt was only too happy to provide a spark.
Since 1916, the Liberal leader Venustiano Carranza had been in exile in Philadelphia, deported for publicly favoring negotiations with the Army of South. Carranza had been previously critical of Mexico's relationship with the Confederacy, so TR was glad to have him. In October 1917, during his negotiations with the Confederacy at Arlington, Virginia, he granted Carranza a personal audience. The President revealed that he had already arranged with Francisco Jose for Carranza to return to his home country, for which Carranza was grateful. He then told Carranza what he hadn't told the Emperor - Roosevelt wanted him to proclaim Mexico a Republic.
In his first speech in his return to the House of Deputies, he did just that, throwing the legislature into chaos. The American navy blockaded the port of Veracruz, as its Confederate counterpart had once done, cutting Francisco Jose off from foreign succor. The Army of the South seized the city of Pueblo, while spontaenous uprisings broke out in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Rerynosa, and Monterrey. The Mexican Civil War had begun.
The US was soon shipping arms to the Mexican republicans, while Francisco Jose I remained barricaded in Mexico City, which was under virtual siege. By 1919, nearly all of the south and north of Mexico were under rebel control, while the Empire was restricted to a few central provinces. A republican victory seemed certain. How did they fail?
Like the Russian rebels who fought contemporaneously, the Mexican republicans were divided both geographically and politically. Carranza was a liberal while Zapata and his followers were unabashedly socialist. Aside from the seemingly coordinated beginning of the war (in reality, Zapata's assault on Puebla had been planned and launched independently, albeit prematurely), the two sides never cooperated beyond the operational level, and that rarely.
The Mexican Church, as always, did not hesitate in siding with the conservatives, and the Cardinal in Mexico City proclaimed that all good Catholics owed their allegiance to Emperor, whom God had appointed to rule in his stead. Though early 20th century Mexicans, like their Spanish cousins, were less devout than outside observers often assumed, the hierarchy's monolithic opposition to the rebellion persuaded many working and middle class Mexicans to support the Emperor. (Parish priests, especially in the south, tended towards rebellion.)
Carranza had only agreed to proclaim a republic if he had the wholehearted support of the United States - and for over a year, he did. But in the 1918 elections the Socialists gained control of the US House of Representatives, and they slashed the military budget. TR's War Department understandably prioritized their own forces over the Mexican rebels, who saw their aid reduced by a larger percentage than overall US military spending. The blockade of Veracruz was lifted, and friendly nations were able to send their own aid to the Empire. By 1920, TR was distracted over his coming re-election campaign, and US aid slowed to a trickle, evening the odds.
Both historians and the popular imagination choose Confederate aid as the biggest single factor. And though it was negligible early in the war, by 1923 it was undoubtedly the biggest gun the government could bring to bear. Even moreso than Mexico, the postwar Confederacy had suffered economic privation, and its supply of angry veterans was even larger. While the Confederate far-right groups which organized in the late 1910s chose to fight in Richmond and Houston and Atlanta, from nearly the beginning Confederate veterans found their way to Mexico, reasoning that they opposed anything that TR supported. At first, limited by language and logistics difficulties, they did little more than stiffen the backbone of the Mexican Army. But as the Freedom Party and its counterparts grew larger, richer, and more ambitious, they began to make Mexico a primary goal.
The Redemption League, based in Texas, had been among the first to send fighters south, and in 1920 its Sonoran regional commander, Alvaro Obregon, took command of the groups' Mexican volunteers. Obregon established liaisons between the Mexicans and the Confederates to ease communication, and oversaw the illicit supply chain over the Sonoran and Chihuahuan borders. (Officially, the Confederacy was a neutral party.) When the Redemption League merged with the Freedom Party in 1921, Obregon took a similar position in the Party, and the Confederate effort was redoubled. Willy Knight, the Redemption League's former leader, persuaded the Confederate Citrus Company (a government front which operated aeroplanes in violation of the Treaty of Arlington) to lend its support, and the aerial reconnaissance it provided was invaluable.
By 1923, the Confederate volunteers and the Mexican Army had succeeded in producing locally-made barrels, using them to great effect in the rebel stronghold of San Luis Potosi. The rebel cause had been going downhill for several years already, but the introduction of armored warfare proved as devastating in 1923-1915 as it had in 1915-1917. New US President Upton Sinclair openly sympathized with the republicans, but he was more concerned with occupying Canada and holding down the Confederates than in events in far-away Mexico. In any case, Congress was unwilling to appropriate substantial funds, and Assistant (later full) Secretary of War Norman Mattoon Thomas opposed fomenting further conflict.
It is ironic that by the time the war ended in 1925, the four men who had begun it were all dead. Theodore Roosevelt, of course, had been out of office for several years by the time he passed away in 1924. Carranza died of a heart attack in 1922 at his capital in San Luis Potosi, as the war began to go badly for the republicans. His successor in the rebel government, Rodolfo Herrero, was a general of some ability, but he too proved unable to reverse the rebellion's fortunes. He quarreled with the talented Mexican-Confederate general and politician Doroteo Arango, who soon became disgusted with the conduct of the war and returned to Chihuahua before the final surrender. Francisco Jose I didn't live long enough to see any of this - during the desperate street fighting in Mexico City in 1919, the Empire's darkest hour, he was killed by a stray bullet, just a few yards from the armored car that was to be his escape from the Presidential Palace.
His son was a minor at the time, and his younger brother was instead crowned Emperor Maximilian III. Imperial hagiography identifies this point as when the war began to swing in the throne's favor, as Maximilian III flatly rejected any option other than the rebels' surrender - something that even his closest advisers considered wildly optimistic in 1919. But in the wake of his pronouncement the rebels were driven from the capital, never to set foot there in force again.
When San Luis Potosi was captured in 1923, President Herrero shifted the seat of the rebel government to Monterrey. In 1925, with the Mexican Army closing in, Herrero met with General Victoriano Huerta of the monarchists. In return for the rebel army's surrender, Herrero was allowed to emigrate to neutral Spain (where he was, ironically, briefly imprisoned by the government in its own civil war). The number of rebel prisoners who were executed in the next few days remains unknown, but few estimate less than ten thousand.
Zapata outlived all of his rivals, and died of natural causes in 1939 in his capital at Oaxaca, self-proclaimed President of the People's Republic of the South.
Maximilian III was now secure, with the center-right Francisco Madero as his Prime Minister. But he knew that he owed his and his throne's survival to the Freedom Party, and Jake Featherston never let him forget it - especially not after 1933. Confederate advisors remained with the Mexican Army, researching and developing new weapons, such as the Tredegar Automatic Rifle, and modern barrels. When the Confederacy was allowed to re-arm by Herbert Hoover, it had dozens of proven designs ready to go into production. Confederate attaches also assisted with improving government services among the Freedom Party's model, and with public-works projects. Though it could afford few barrels of its own, the Mexican Army was allowed to license the TAR and its cartridge for a very generous price.
Maximilian III died in 1941, just weeks before Wilhelm II passed away in Germany. He attracted far less notice than his fellow emperor, however, whose death prompted the Second Great War. Francisco Jose II dutifully declared war on the United States following Blackbeard, reasoning that he had little to lose and much to gain from placating Jake Featherston. He was, in fact, preparing a new offensive against the RPS in 1942 when Featherston "requested" that he furnish three divisions for a new offensive against the United States. Francisco Jose painfully parted with the Veracruz Division, his army's showpiece, but also cannily supplied Featherston with the Durango and Guerrero Divisions, two of his worst.
The Mexican Expeditionary Force, with relatively little armor or artillery, was limited to screening the Army of Kentucky during the drive to the east and the resulting Battle of Pittsburgh. Some Mexican units are known to have fought effectively in their limited capacity, particularly when it came to guarding against the US garrisons in cities the Confederate advance bypassed.
As the snows began falling on an offensive that was wading knee deep through blood in the streets of Pittsburgh, the Mexican divisions were on the line guarding the Army of Kentucky's flanks. This became de facto occupation duty of much of Western Pennsylvania and the West Virginia panhandle. There, they suffered much the same communication problems that had bedeviled Confederate volunteers in Mexico twenty years earlier. One particular series of misunderstandings in the town of Pennsylvania resulted in a Mexican battalion commander ordering that the coal mines be closed to the locals. As this left them with a shortage of fuel, an uprising began in conjunction with a band of US Army stragglers in the Laurel Highlands. The local commander was caught by surprise, and reinforcements, including some of the Mexicans' precious barrels, were ordered to Connellsville. Unfortunately, the orders came a day before a blinding snowstorm hit the region, delaying the reinforcements and throwing the Mexican order of battle into complete disarray. When the US armored force out of West Virginia hit the Durango Division, few battalions were actually in line and ready to meet them, and it was quickly annihilated.
Featherston was enraged at this development, but the Mexican ambassador argued, quite reasonably, that they were simply not equipped for the mission to which they had been assigned. Featherston came to his point of view, and eventually requisitioned five more divisions - meaning that the bulk of the active Army had been taken from Francisco Jose. These divisions were given a more appropriate role, battling Negro guerrillas in the Deep South. The emperor had good reason to see this as outrageous, as in 1943 the US began a second invasion of Baja, in much greater force than in the last war. There were simply not enough troops to prevent the conquest. Francisco Jose was thus forced to place Confederate interests above Mexico.
In some ways, however, Featherston and the emperor were in complete agreement about sending Mexicans to the Confederacy. As the Destruction gathered speed during the war, it became apparent that there were simply not enough white workers and machines to work the fields and feed the country. The Confederacy began actively importing Mexican laborers to work on its farms; Francisco Jose encouraged this, as he saw the flow of workers as an escape valve that would forestall another rebellion.
When Featherston was killed in 1944, Francisco Jose immediately sued for peace. The US, battered and bloody, happily accepted and allowed Mexican troops in the Confederacy to be repatriated. (Several brief fights soon broke out between Mexican troops trying to get home and Freedom diehards who saw this as betrayal). Despite the probability that Francisco Jose was well aware of the Destruction, and even helped implement it through the loan of Mexican troops, President LaFollette chose to leave him well enough alone, aside from retaining possession of Baja California. When Dewey was inaugurated as LaFollette's successor and continued his policy towards Mexico, Francisco Jose breathed a sigh of relief. In late 1945 he invited the Crown Prince of Austria, a fellow Habsburg, to Mexico on a state visit - no doubt to remind the United States of the connection. His new Ambassador to the United States, Miguel Aleman, is the son of a republican general, and he has appointed a reformer, Lazaro Cardenas, as his Prime Minister. Francisco Jose has aggressively supported Cardenas' program of building more roads, schools, and electrifying the countryside, and he even had Mexico City put forward a bid for the 1948 Olympic Games - though the Alliance-dominated International Olympic Committee quickly rejected the proposal.
Since its height in 1821, the Empire of Mexico has steadily shrank, losing one chunk of territory after anther to the United States. Even now, it does not fully control everything within its borders, as the RPS still survives in the hills and jungles of southern Mexico. Despite his country's long history of enmity with the gringos, Francisco Jose has decided that the survival of his poor, divided empire (not to mention his own) depends on the goodwill of the giant living next door, and there's no reason to expect that he will do anything further to incur its wrath.
Though Maximilian II had used the sale of Sonora and Chihuahua to patch the hole in Mexico’s finances, the war against Diaz tore it wide open once again. This time, the Confederate States owned the bulk of the debt, and its government did not shrink from using this to establish itself as the “senior partner” of the Rio Grande relationship. Just as Germany became shackled to Austria-Hungary in the 1880s, the Confederacy had its own Habsburg ally to its south.
Maximilian II passed away in 1895 and left to his son Francisco Jose I a nation burdened with enormous debt, an overbearing ally, a domineering Church, rural fiefdoms, banditry, and a rebellious south. Prime Minister Miramon, incredibly, remained in office well into the 20th century, despite his advanced years, no doubt.
Mexico’s army in 1914 was just big enough to garrison Mexico City, patrol the northern border, and fight the occasionally skirmish in the long war against Emiliano Zapata’s Army of the South. Its machine-guns were few, its artillery nearly ling existent. Its rifles were Tredegars imported from the CSA, as was most of its ammunition. The US’s war plans from the time barely mention Mexico, apart from an attempt to choke off the Confederate Pacific port of Guaymas, which necessitated closing the Gulf of California. This, in turn, required conquering Baja California, and war with Mexico once more. When the fight against the Confederacy did not go as well as planned in 1914-1915, new Chief of Staff Leonard Wood authorized an invasion in May 1915.
It was a fiasco. A single overlarge Sixth Army division, created from new recruits and the remnants of the force that pacified Utah, was tasked to push south from San Diego and capture La Paz, to provide a base for operations against Guaymas. Though the ill-equipped, ill-fed, and ill-led Mexican Army was unable to prevent the US from seizing Tijuana (a Marine division had actually taken that city and Ensenada in the fall of 1914), their delaying tactics in the Baja interior bled the US invaders. Even with US naval support hugging the peninsula, the Mexicans threw up one defensive line after another, mirroring Canadian operations in Ontario. The assault was stopped for good in October 1915, near the Bahia Maximiliano on the Pacific Coast. Repeated attempts by the US Navy to break into the Gulf were thwarted by joint CS-Mexican operations utilizing minefields and submarines.
That single line held till July 1917, when the Empire signed an armistice with the United States. As befitting its role as a minor adversary which was not exactly defeated, no territory was taken from Mexico, and no reparations were demanded.
But as the Great War ended, the greatest war in Mexico's history began. Lasting eight years and taking several thousand lives, the Mexican Civil War (the only one of that country's numerous internecine conflicts to be given that name), like the Spanish Civil War over a decade later, served to bridge the gap between the First and Second Great Wars.
Ever since the defeat of Diaz's rebellion thirty years' before, social unrest had simmered in Mexico, but never come to a boil. Maximilian II remained a hated figure until his death, despised by the left for crushing the rebellion and republicanism, and by the right for selling Mexican soil and attempting to break up the haciendas. His son, Francisco Jose I, was the first monarch of Mexico to be born and raised in a royal family, and thus had far more conservative leanings than his progressive forbears. Through Miramon, he had taken care to placate the Mexican elites, while presenting himself as a man of the people. For a brief time, he managed to repair the damage done to the throne's image.
The Great War wrecked that, as it did so many other things. One would not expect such a minor campaign as the Baja invasion to put much stress on a nation, but for ten years a young mestizo lawyer named Emiliano Zapata had been waging a protracted rebellion in the southern provinces. Though a minor conflict by the standards of Diaz and Juarez, and never a threat to the Empire as a whole, Zapata's rebellion proved a drain on the army and the economy, and kept a number of provinces in constant turmoil. In order to mobilize against the expected US invasion, Mexico had to, for the first time, stringently enforce the conscription law that had been on the books since 1887.
Hundreds of thousands of young Mexican men were swept up into the army - and for many, it was the first time that the imperial government ever toched their lives. It was rarely a pleasant experience - conscripts suffered harsh discipline under aristocratic officers, and their rations, when they had any, were poor. Only weapons and ammunition, supplied by the Confederacy, plentiful. Indians who could not speak Spanish were put in the stockade. They were sent off to the front, which was a Hobbs' choice - fighting their own countrymen in Morelos, Chiapas, and Campeche, or battling the norteamericanos in Baja, where they were either in constant retreat, or huddled in trenches as the US Army's artillery battered them.
While the Empire did not, strictly speaking, win either of those conflicts, the fact that they had successfully defended their own soil against the mighty United States brought forth a brief swell of national pride. Mexican flags flew proudly even in those villages which had previously disdained the government, and toasts were raised to the Emperor. Francisco Jose I could hardly imagine that his downfall was imminent.
Almost as swiftly as the national modd had brightened, it turned sour. Mexican agriculture had expanded in the wake of the destruction elsewhere in North America, and when normal trade resumed in late 1917, Mexican farmers found that they had produced too much. Commodity prices plummeted as the surpluses were burned off, and farm employment reached its highest point in years. The situatin was exacerbated by the government's decision to save money by releasing the vast majority of its soldiers from their terms of service, instead of letting their conscription periods run their course. These men returned home to jobs that did not exist, and with little money in their pockets (due to a combination of inefficiency and corruption among army paymasters).
Just as the situation appeared to be trending upward, the Spanish flu epidemic hit during the winter of 1917. Mexico got off relatively lightly due to a poor system of internal transportation, limiting the spread of the disease. Still, thousands more perished, further straining Mexican society. In such a crisis Francisco Jose could have cemented his reputation by going among the people and sharing their pain. But like his father, the emperor had been raised in rarefied Mexican and European social circles; his French and German were better than his Spanish, which was curiously accented; and he was uncomfortable among commoners.
High unemployment, social strain, a weak central government, an aloof ruler, and a mass of men trained in combat; the situation was explosive. Theodore Roosevelt was only too happy to provide a spark.
Since 1916, the Liberal leader Venustiano Carranza had been in exile in Philadelphia, deported for publicly favoring negotiations with the Army of South. Carranza had been previously critical of Mexico's relationship with the Confederacy, so TR was glad to have him. In October 1917, during his negotiations with the Confederacy at Arlington, Virginia, he granted Carranza a personal audience. The President revealed that he had already arranged with Francisco Jose for Carranza to return to his home country, for which Carranza was grateful. He then told Carranza what he hadn't told the Emperor - Roosevelt wanted him to proclaim Mexico a Republic.
In his first speech in his return to the House of Deputies, he did just that, throwing the legislature into chaos. The American navy blockaded the port of Veracruz, as its Confederate counterpart had once done, cutting Francisco Jose off from foreign succor. The Army of the South seized the city of Pueblo, while spontaenous uprisings broke out in San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara, Rerynosa, and Monterrey. The Mexican Civil War had begun.
The US was soon shipping arms to the Mexican republicans, while Francisco Jose I remained barricaded in Mexico City, which was under virtual siege. By 1919, nearly all of the south and north of Mexico were under rebel control, while the Empire was restricted to a few central provinces. A republican victory seemed certain. How did they fail?
Like the Russian rebels who fought contemporaneously, the Mexican republicans were divided both geographically and politically. Carranza was a liberal while Zapata and his followers were unabashedly socialist. Aside from the seemingly coordinated beginning of the war (in reality, Zapata's assault on Puebla had been planned and launched independently, albeit prematurely), the two sides never cooperated beyond the operational level, and that rarely.
The Mexican Church, as always, did not hesitate in siding with the conservatives, and the Cardinal in Mexico City proclaimed that all good Catholics owed their allegiance to Emperor, whom God had appointed to rule in his stead. Though early 20th century Mexicans, like their Spanish cousins, were less devout than outside observers often assumed, the hierarchy's monolithic opposition to the rebellion persuaded many working and middle class Mexicans to support the Emperor. (Parish priests, especially in the south, tended towards rebellion.)
Carranza had only agreed to proclaim a republic if he had the wholehearted support of the United States - and for over a year, he did. But in the 1918 elections the Socialists gained control of the US House of Representatives, and they slashed the military budget. TR's War Department understandably prioritized their own forces over the Mexican rebels, who saw their aid reduced by a larger percentage than overall US military spending. The blockade of Veracruz was lifted, and friendly nations were able to send their own aid to the Empire. By 1920, TR was distracted over his coming re-election campaign, and US aid slowed to a trickle, evening the odds.
Both historians and the popular imagination choose Confederate aid as the biggest single factor. And though it was negligible early in the war, by 1923 it was undoubtedly the biggest gun the government could bring to bear. Even moreso than Mexico, the postwar Confederacy had suffered economic privation, and its supply of angry veterans was even larger. While the Confederate far-right groups which organized in the late 1910s chose to fight in Richmond and Houston and Atlanta, from nearly the beginning Confederate veterans found their way to Mexico, reasoning that they opposed anything that TR supported. At first, limited by language and logistics difficulties, they did little more than stiffen the backbone of the Mexican Army. But as the Freedom Party and its counterparts grew larger, richer, and more ambitious, they began to make Mexico a primary goal.
The Redemption League, based in Texas, had been among the first to send fighters south, and in 1920 its Sonoran regional commander, Alvaro Obregon, took command of the groups' Mexican volunteers. Obregon established liaisons between the Mexicans and the Confederates to ease communication, and oversaw the illicit supply chain over the Sonoran and Chihuahuan borders. (Officially, the Confederacy was a neutral party.) When the Redemption League merged with the Freedom Party in 1921, Obregon took a similar position in the Party, and the Confederate effort was redoubled. Willy Knight, the Redemption League's former leader, persuaded the Confederate Citrus Company (a government front which operated aeroplanes in violation of the Treaty of Arlington) to lend its support, and the aerial reconnaissance it provided was invaluable.
By 1923, the Confederate volunteers and the Mexican Army had succeeded in producing locally-made barrels, using them to great effect in the rebel stronghold of San Luis Potosi. The rebel cause had been going downhill for several years already, but the introduction of armored warfare proved as devastating in 1923-1915 as it had in 1915-1917. New US President Upton Sinclair openly sympathized with the republicans, but he was more concerned with occupying Canada and holding down the Confederates than in events in far-away Mexico. In any case, Congress was unwilling to appropriate substantial funds, and Assistant (later full) Secretary of War Norman Mattoon Thomas opposed fomenting further conflict.
It is ironic that by the time the war ended in 1925, the four men who had begun it were all dead. Theodore Roosevelt, of course, had been out of office for several years by the time he passed away in 1924. Carranza died of a heart attack in 1922 at his capital in San Luis Potosi, as the war began to go badly for the republicans. His successor in the rebel government, Rodolfo Herrero, was a general of some ability, but he too proved unable to reverse the rebellion's fortunes. He quarreled with the talented Mexican-Confederate general and politician Doroteo Arango, who soon became disgusted with the conduct of the war and returned to Chihuahua before the final surrender. Francisco Jose I didn't live long enough to see any of this - during the desperate street fighting in Mexico City in 1919, the Empire's darkest hour, he was killed by a stray bullet, just a few yards from the armored car that was to be his escape from the Presidential Palace.
His son was a minor at the time, and his younger brother was instead crowned Emperor Maximilian III. Imperial hagiography identifies this point as when the war began to swing in the throne's favor, as Maximilian III flatly rejected any option other than the rebels' surrender - something that even his closest advisers considered wildly optimistic in 1919. But in the wake of his pronouncement the rebels were driven from the capital, never to set foot there in force again.
When San Luis Potosi was captured in 1923, President Herrero shifted the seat of the rebel government to Monterrey. In 1925, with the Mexican Army closing in, Herrero met with General Victoriano Huerta of the monarchists. In return for the rebel army's surrender, Herrero was allowed to emigrate to neutral Spain (where he was, ironically, briefly imprisoned by the government in its own civil war). The number of rebel prisoners who were executed in the next few days remains unknown, but few estimate less than ten thousand.
Zapata outlived all of his rivals, and died of natural causes in 1939 in his capital at Oaxaca, self-proclaimed President of the People's Republic of the South.
Maximilian III was now secure, with the center-right Francisco Madero as his Prime Minister. But he knew that he owed his and his throne's survival to the Freedom Party, and Jake Featherston never let him forget it - especially not after 1933. Confederate advisors remained with the Mexican Army, researching and developing new weapons, such as the Tredegar Automatic Rifle, and modern barrels. When the Confederacy was allowed to re-arm by Herbert Hoover, it had dozens of proven designs ready to go into production. Confederate attaches also assisted with improving government services among the Freedom Party's model, and with public-works projects. Though it could afford few barrels of its own, the Mexican Army was allowed to license the TAR and its cartridge for a very generous price.
Maximilian III died in 1941, just weeks before Wilhelm II passed away in Germany. He attracted far less notice than his fellow emperor, however, whose death prompted the Second Great War. Francisco Jose II dutifully declared war on the United States following Blackbeard, reasoning that he had little to lose and much to gain from placating Jake Featherston. He was, in fact, preparing a new offensive against the RPS in 1942 when Featherston "requested" that he furnish three divisions for a new offensive against the United States. Francisco Jose painfully parted with the Veracruz Division, his army's showpiece, but also cannily supplied Featherston with the Durango and Guerrero Divisions, two of his worst.
The Mexican Expeditionary Force, with relatively little armor or artillery, was limited to screening the Army of Kentucky during the drive to the east and the resulting Battle of Pittsburgh. Some Mexican units are known to have fought effectively in their limited capacity, particularly when it came to guarding against the US garrisons in cities the Confederate advance bypassed.
As the snows began falling on an offensive that was wading knee deep through blood in the streets of Pittsburgh, the Mexican divisions were on the line guarding the Army of Kentucky's flanks. This became de facto occupation duty of much of Western Pennsylvania and the West Virginia panhandle. There, they suffered much the same communication problems that had bedeviled Confederate volunteers in Mexico twenty years earlier. One particular series of misunderstandings in the town of Pennsylvania resulted in a Mexican battalion commander ordering that the coal mines be closed to the locals. As this left them with a shortage of fuel, an uprising began in conjunction with a band of US Army stragglers in the Laurel Highlands. The local commander was caught by surprise, and reinforcements, including some of the Mexicans' precious barrels, were ordered to Connellsville. Unfortunately, the orders came a day before a blinding snowstorm hit the region, delaying the reinforcements and throwing the Mexican order of battle into complete disarray. When the US armored force out of West Virginia hit the Durango Division, few battalions were actually in line and ready to meet them, and it was quickly annihilated.
Featherston was enraged at this development, but the Mexican ambassador argued, quite reasonably, that they were simply not equipped for the mission to which they had been assigned. Featherston came to his point of view, and eventually requisitioned five more divisions - meaning that the bulk of the active Army had been taken from Francisco Jose. These divisions were given a more appropriate role, battling Negro guerrillas in the Deep South. The emperor had good reason to see this as outrageous, as in 1943 the US began a second invasion of Baja, in much greater force than in the last war. There were simply not enough troops to prevent the conquest. Francisco Jose was thus forced to place Confederate interests above Mexico.
In some ways, however, Featherston and the emperor were in complete agreement about sending Mexicans to the Confederacy. As the Destruction gathered speed during the war, it became apparent that there were simply not enough white workers and machines to work the fields and feed the country. The Confederacy began actively importing Mexican laborers to work on its farms; Francisco Jose encouraged this, as he saw the flow of workers as an escape valve that would forestall another rebellion.
When Featherston was killed in 1944, Francisco Jose immediately sued for peace. The US, battered and bloody, happily accepted and allowed Mexican troops in the Confederacy to be repatriated. (Several brief fights soon broke out between Mexican troops trying to get home and Freedom diehards who saw this as betrayal). Despite the probability that Francisco Jose was well aware of the Destruction, and even helped implement it through the loan of Mexican troops, President LaFollette chose to leave him well enough alone, aside from retaining possession of Baja California. When Dewey was inaugurated as LaFollette's successor and continued his policy towards Mexico, Francisco Jose breathed a sigh of relief. In late 1945 he invited the Crown Prince of Austria, a fellow Habsburg, to Mexico on a state visit - no doubt to remind the United States of the connection. His new Ambassador to the United States, Miguel Aleman, is the son of a republican general, and he has appointed a reformer, Lazaro Cardenas, as his Prime Minister. Francisco Jose has aggressively supported Cardenas' program of building more roads, schools, and electrifying the countryside, and he even had Mexico City put forward a bid for the 1948 Olympic Games - though the Alliance-dominated International Olympic Committee quickly rejected the proposal.
Since its height in 1821, the Empire of Mexico has steadily shrank, losing one chunk of territory after anther to the United States. Even now, it does not fully control everything within its borders, as the RPS still survives in the hills and jungles of southern Mexico. Despite his country's long history of enmity with the gringos, Francisco Jose has decided that the survival of his poor, divided empire (not to mention his own) depends on the goodwill of the giant living next door, and there's no reason to expect that he will do anything further to incur its wrath.
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After further thought, I agree that Ottoman control of the Suez Canal is probably too big a carrot. Turkey would probably receive Cyprus and Britain's Arab protectorates. An independent Egypt would most likely administer the canal, with a friendly khedive instead of the sultan. The British, Ottomans, and Italians are probably jockeying for control of the canal, and with Britain likely out of the game after 1944, Italy and Turkey would likely become the rival powers in the Middle East.
I think people might be thinking of The Guns of the South, in which the Democratic president is specifically mentioned to be Seymour.