Illusions of Empire: The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

By William S. Kiser

Illusions of Empire adopts a multinational view of North American borderlands, examining the ways in which Mexico's North overlapped with the U.S. Southwest in the context of diplomacy, politics, economics, and military operations during the Civil War era.

William S. Kiser examines a fascinating series of events in which a disparate group of historical actors vied for power and control along the U.S.-Mexico border: from Union and Confederate generals and presidents, to Indigenous groups, diplomatic officials, bandits, and revolutionaries, to a Mexican president, a Mexican monarch, and a French king. Their unconventional approaches to foreign relations demonstrate the complex ways that individuals influence the course of global affairs and reveal that borderlands simultaneously enable and stifle the growth of empires.

This is the first study to treat antebellum U.S. foreign policy, Civil War campaigning, the French Intervention in Mexico, Southwestern Indian Wars, South Texas Bandit Wars, and U.S. Reconstruction in a single volume, balancing U.S. and Mexican source materials to tell an important story of borderlands conflict with ramifications that are still felt in the region today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780812298147

Book preview

Illusions of Empire

AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Series editors

Brian DeLay

Steven Hahn

Amy Dru Stanley

America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

Illusions of Empire

The Civil War and Reconstruction in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands

William S. Kiser

Copyright © 2022 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for

purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book

may be reproduced in any form by any means without

written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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A catalogue record for this book is available

from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-0-8122-5351-1

For my daughters, Cassidy and Allyson

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Origins of Irregular Diplomacy in U.S.-Mexico Relations

Chapter 2. The Contest for Chihuahua and Sonora

Chapter 3. Confederate Lifelines in Northeast Mexico

Chapter 4. Chaos and Imperialism in Northwest Mexico

Chapter 5. The Shifting Tides of War and Diplomacy in Northeast Mexico

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Just one week before the Confederate siege on Fort Sumter, President Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward dispatched Thomas Corwin to Mexico City on a diplomatic mission. Lacking reliable information on the state of affairs in Mexico—which was just emerging from its War of the Reform—Lincoln and Seward may have equivocated on some policy details, but they agreed on the overall importance of Corwin’s ambassadorial assignment.¹ Seward knew that the crisis of Southern secession was impeding relations with Mexico, and he predicted that civil commotions in our own country would likely spill across the border. Realizing that Mexico might be drawn into the American conflict—either directly as an allied combatant or indirectly for strategic purposes—the secretary envisioned a disastrous scenario wherein the violent division of the United States would leave Mexico vulnerable to the aggression of European monarchies as well as the Southern Confederacy. With these weighty possibilities in mind, the prophetic Seward and the intuitive Lincoln saw the mission to Mexico as the most interesting and important one within the whole circle of our international relations, and they implored Corwin to be just, liberal, frank, and magnanimous toward Mexico … it can never be an enemy. The abolitionist New York newspaperman Horace Greeley agreed, proclaiming that the mission to Mexico may become the most important of all in our foreign relations.² Corwin spoke almost no Spanish, but he had political influence as a former U.S. congressman and Whig governor of Ohio, and he also commanded respect in Mexico City because of his impassioned speeches in 1847 protesting the Mexican-American War.³

Eight hundred miles away from Lincoln’s White House, in the first Confederate capital of Montgomery, Alabama, Jefferson Davis and Robert Toombs were also contemplating foreign relations.⁴ Secretary of State Toombs believed that Mexico would make a logical ally because the institution of domestic slavery in one country and that of peonage in the other establish between them such a similarity in their system of labor. Rebel leaders met in May 1861 and chose John T. Pickett as a special agent to negotiate a treaty, hoping that he could cultivate the most amicable relations with Mexico.⁵ Pickett previously served as a U.S. consular agent at Vera Cruz and seemed well acquainted with Mexican politics. But he also ridiculed the people of that country for their gross ignorance and superstition, felt that the Confederacy had a preordained right to absorb Mexican land for the expansion of slavery, and thought that Rebel troops ought to overthrow President Benito Juárez and reinstate the conservative faction to governance.⁶ Pickett’s racism, coupled with his prior complicity in filibustering, problematized meetings with Mexican officials from the outset, and the acid-tongued envoy proved to be a poor choice for such a sensitive foreign posting. His abrasive personality finally upended the mission when he beat up a Union sympathizer in a Mexico City bar, tried to elude arrest by claiming diplomatic immunity, then bribed his way out of jail while sneering that he had been compelled to purchase a few hundred dollars’ worth of Mexican justice.⁷ By that time, Pickett had been in Mexico for over four months and still had not heard a word from his Confederate overseers. He feared either that spies were intercepting his weekly reports to Richmond—which he disguised as ordinary looking mercantile letters sent through the British Royal Mail Steam Packet Company in Havana—or that his government had simply abandoned him.⁸ Mexican Secretary of Foreign Affairs Manuel María de Zamacona considered the Rebel diplomat a nuisance, and Pickett’s insistence that the Confederacy desired not one foot of Mexico’s territory sounded especially ludicrous to his foreign hosts in light of antebellum Southern schemes to expand into Latin America.⁹ Indeed, it was Zamacona who ignored Pickett’s pleas for diplomatic immunity, believing that the Southerner made insensible demands on government officials as well as disingenuous claims of benevolence toward Mexico and its people.¹⁰ This country has been the grave of diplomatists, a disillusioned Pickett griped as he finally departed Vera Cruz in February 1862.¹¹

Although their missions were not directly connected, Corwin and Pickett both arrived in Mexico at the dawn of the Civil War, and their activities below the border assumed great significance for the Union and the Confederacy. Aside from the timing and purpose of the trips, one remarkable commonality between Corwin and Pickett was that their respective assignments constituted the most normal diplomatic approaches to Mexico that either side would pursue during the Civil War. Outside of these two men—both of whom traveled in official State Department capacities to meet with Mexican dignitaries in pursuit of formal international arrangements—the methods that Union and Confederate operatives employed when dealing with Mexico perpetuated a kaleidoscopic array of personal scheming that originated in the antebellum decades. Nowhere would the gravity of this convoluted outreach be felt more acutely than in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, where Union agents, Confederate officers, Mexican governors, French imperialists, independent Indians, foreign filibusters, Hispanic and Tejano revolutionaries, and roving bandits competed for power on the extreme peripheries of national control. As they pursued their own ambitions, these groups promulgated some of the most idiosyncratic modes of diplomacy and intrigue that North America had yet seen, and their ability to do so stemmed from two factors: the eruption of major wars in the United States and Mexico, and the longstanding sense of regional autonomy along the border.

Situated within the historiographies of nineteenth-century Mexican politics, American foreign policy, U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the Civil War, Illusions of Empire argues for the centrality of Mexican regionalism in the course of hemispheric empire building, as longstanding divisions between centralists and federalists seeped across the border to influence Union and Confederate strategy in the Civil War as well as Greater Reconstruction initiatives during and after that war. Confederate leaders—Jefferson Davis and his secretaries of state among them—ambitiously imagined a stand-alone nation that included a Pacific coastline and portions of Mexico as slave states, and they believed that the backing of regionalist governors in Sonora, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas could not only drive that expansionist agenda but also facilitate the vital export of Southern cotton to Europe and Asia. United States officials, including Lincoln and Seward, correspondingly feared that Mexican support for the South and foreign routes around the U.S. naval blockade might tip the scales of the war and help secessionists make a reality of an empire they previously could only imagine. Furthermore, Emperor Napoleon III’s so-called Grand Design created the possibility of an alliance between the illegitimate entities of Jefferson Davis and Maximilian I of Mexico that would have expanded the American struggle into a hemispheric conflict. Unionists hoped to prevent French monarchists from creating an empire of their own in Mexico, because they believed that European footholds in the Western Hemisphere posed a direct threat to the security and sovereignty of the United States.

For these reasons, the U.S.-Mexico border became a focus of international strategies in the mid-nineteenth century. To be sure, formal channels of diplomacy were retained through national embassies and local consulates. But this conventional approach usually failed to achieve the desired results—the calamitous Trent Affair of 1861 comes to mind, as does Pickett’s blundering in Mexico City and John Slidell’s abortive efforts in Paris—and national diplomacy often yielded to personal scheming. As Nathan Citino points out, By focusing on official diplomacy, historians of American foreign relations tend to neglect behaviors on the ground and the complexity of inter-group relations carried on beneath the radar of state policy.¹² In this vein, Union and Confederate interactions with northern Mexico reveal that military commanders in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas saw their southerly neighbors as potential allies or enemies in three distinct regional campaigns: the first pertaining to the Civil War, the second relating to the French Intervention, and the third involving conflicts with Indians and outlaws.¹³ With this in mind, Illusions of Empire adopts a multinational view of North American borderlands and border lines, examining the ways in which Mexico’s north overlapped with America’s Southwest in the contexts of diplomacy, politics, economics, and military operations.¹⁴

Beyond these direct historical arguments, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands provide a case study for the overt and covert nature of diplomacy in regions of contested sovereignty. North American history is replete with complicated borderlands diplomacy involving various degrees of coercion and accommodation. A middle ground in which Great Lakes Indians met French colonizers in an environment of shared authority, temporary alliances between hegemonic indigenous confederations and imperialistic Europeans during conflicts like the French and Indian War, and treaties that Comanche leaders negotiated with Spanish officials in Texas and New Mexico during the late 1700s are just three of many examples.¹⁵ But several things made the mid-nineteenth-century U.S.-Mexico borderlands stand out in the longue durée of North American diplomatic history. One was the sheer number of actors involved: no less than two dozen military officers, a dozen Indian tribes or divisions of tribes, a dozen foreign consulate officials, half a dozen bandit groups, half a dozen filibusters, half a dozen revolutionary factions, half a dozen Mexican governors, half a dozen American governors, two U.S. presidents and their cabinets, a Confederate president and his cabinet, a Mexican president and his cabinet, a Mexican monarch and his court, and a French king and his court. Another was the simultaneous occurrence of major wars in the United States and Mexico that distracted each nation’s attention away from affairs on its peripheries, making those borderlands, which stretched more than two thousand miles from east to west, a place where all these actors enjoyed some degree of autonomy. The unconventional approaches to foreign relations along the border line demonstrate the complex ways in which independent local actors can influence the course of global affairs and reveal that borderlands, despite their political porosity, economic messiness, and cultural complexity, can simultaneously enable and stifle imperial growth. This offers a critical new way of thinking about Greater Reconstruction—or the dramatic nineteenth-century expansion of American capitalist empire and assimilation of minority racial groups—because postwar U.S. officials built upon their diplomatic and clandestine achievements in ways that increased federal power in the Southwest and far beyond.

Critical to these arguments is the fact that many Mexicans had their own illusions of empire. Several governors, for instance, shunned their central government and opened illicit diplomatic relations with Union and Confederate agents as a method for achieving political autonomy and economic supremacy. By pursuing personal and local agendas, norteños like Ignacio Pesqueíra (Sonora), Luis Terrazas (Chihuahua), Santiago Vidaurri (Nuevo León), and Albino López (Tamaulipas) perpetuated the trend of liberal regionalism—what Mexicans called sentimiento de la región—that long defined their country’s frontier. All along Mexico’s boundary with the United States during the tumultuous 1860s, pluralities of sovereignty sprouted that encouraged gubernatorial schemes to facilitate commerce, law enforcement, seaport access, and troop movements. The extent and impact of these endeavors differed depending on the region and the individual motivations of the men involved. In Chihuahua, Terrazas sought to sustain wealth and prosperity by making trade arrangements with American agents while retaining his political clout in the state’s legislature, all of which became more complicated when Apache raiding was factored into the equation. In Sonora, Pesqueíra lacked the socioeconomic stature of Terrazas but enjoyed widespread support because he led the opposition to Mexican centralists, American filibusters, and Indian warriors. In northeast Mexico, Vidaurri was a radical separationist who aimed to carry Coahuila and Nuevo León into secession and simultaneously enrich himself by controlling the regional trade networks upon which Texas subsisted during the Civil War, but the incessant depredations of border bandits often upended best-laid plans. His counterpart in Tamaulipas, Albino López, hoped to capitalize on his state’s fortuitous geographic position along the Gulf Coast, from which point Southern cotton departed for Europe, although revolutionary factions repeatedly hampered his ambitions.¹⁶

Independent Native leaders like Mangas Coloradas, Cochise, and Victorio of the Chiricahua Apaches also played important but indirect roles in the formulation of alliances between Americans and Mexicans. Throughout the borderlands, divisions of the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, and Yaqui tribes pursued their own diplomatic, economic, and political objectives as they defended homelands from settler encroachment, ensured access to trade goods and livestock, and took the warpath whenever accommodation with Mexicans and Americans fell short of indigenous protocols. At the same time, opportunistic outlaws like Juan Cortina, Octaviano Zapata, and Henry Skillman commanded ruffian groups that preyed on local communities for economic gain. The havoc that Indian wars and bandit skirmishes wrought across the borderlands created an atmosphere of political uncertainty and influenced the way that Civil War operatives rationalized their positions when speaking to Mexican leaders, providing a compelling pretense for multinational agreements revolving around shared indigenous and criminal enemies. Many of the cooperative pacts between American officers and Mexican governors could not have been reached had it not been for a common interest in quelling borderlands raiding in its many forms.

No other subject in U.S. history has attracted as much scholarly attention as the Civil War. One bibliographer recently estimated that at least sixty thousand books relate to that struggle, of which some fifteen thousand volumes pertain to Abraham Lincoln alone.¹⁷ If a person read one book per day every single day without pause, it would take them 164 years to consume the existing body of literature on the Civil War. But these staggering statistics are misleading, because certain aspects have received less consideration than others. Military campaigns and Indian wars in Arizona and New Mexico have garnered some attention, as borderlands and Western historians convincingly demonstrate the importance of the Far Southwest to the national struggle.¹⁸ Union and Confederate diplomacy, on the other hand, has yielded comparatively few full-length studies, and many people still think first of Europe when considering this topic.¹⁹ Although most scholarship on foreign relations covers the French Intervention and a recent transnational turn in the historiography has begun to assess the Civil War’s impact abroad, the major works in that field largely disregard Union and Confederate efforts to facilitate relations with Mexico’s northern states.²⁰ Along these same lines, the important roles of independent Indians, Mexican revolutionaries, and border bandits receive only cursory treatment in books about Civil War diplomacy and the Far Southwestern theater of military operations.²¹ In short, while the work in these fields has been impressive, scholars still tend to overlook an important element of Civil War strategy that had profound implications for the course of American empire: the interconnectedness of antebellum foreign policy, wartime diplomacy, and postwar Reconstruction across the entire U.S.-Mexico borderlands.

Another critical theme that emerges from illusions of empire in the borderlands involves the pursuit of Greater Reconstruction during the Civil War era. Elliott West originally described this paradigm to connect mid-nineteenth-century histories of the South, the West, and the nation through the common strand of race, writing, The term for this era, Reconstruction, has always thrummed with racial implications, but when broadened to apply seriously from coast-to-coast, the term strengthens and its implications deepen.²² Elaborating on this concept with respect to U.S. wars against Arapahoe, Cheyenne, and Lakota peoples on the Great Plains, Pekka Hämäläinen rightly tells us that the separation of the histories of the Civil War and the American West [is] an artificial divide.²³ But so too is the separation of the histories of the Civil War and the U.S.-Mexico borderlands an artificial divide. Viewing the Civil War not just as a conflict over slavery in the East but also as an imperial exercise in the West and beyond, Illusions of Empire embraces an expansive vision of Greater Reconstruction in alignment with Steven Hahn’s formulation that the issues of empire, slavery, the Pacific, and the struggle for continental and hemispheric dominance … place what we generally call the Civil War and Reconstruction in a rather new and arresting light. Hahn points out that the destruction of the Confederacy, the abolition of slavery, and the expanded authority of the United States government set the country on an imperialist postwar path that went far beyond the assimilation or integration of racial groups residing within national boundaries.²⁴ While the Greater Reconstruction literature continues to enlighten our conceptualization of federal power in the nineteenth century by examining the Civil War’s broader impact upon American Indians and Hispanics in the West as well as Latin populations in the Caribbean and Native inhabitants of Pacific islands, another important but overlooked component of this story involves the foundational role of irregular diplomacy and nation building in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. In the 1860s, Americans helped to oust French monarchists from Mexico and quelled revolutionary activities by saturating the lower Rio Grande Valley with military force, they dramatically undercut Apache power with a similar army buildup and transborder war of attrition in southern New Mexico and Arizona, and they increased their hemispheric economic dominance by sustaining Mexican leaders who were amenable to U.S. interests, thereby contributing to capitalist expansion during the Gilded Age.

Civil War historians might view clandestine diplomatic activities on an international frontier as mundane compared to the gory battlefields of Antietam, Shiloh, or Gettysburg; as tangential to the national project of emancipation; as trivial to the overall result of the war. Scholars of Reconstruction may consider imperial initiatives in the lower Rio Grande Valley and southern New Mexico and Arizona as generally unrelated to the U.S. government’s ambitious plans for Southern reunification and the integration of four million former slaves into American society as freedmen and citizens. But this was not the perspective of those who participated in these events.²⁵ Well before the first major battle of the Civil War was fought in northeastern Virginia, both sides courted Mexican leaders in hopes of building consanguinity, thinking that control of the borderlands could blossom into a decisive advantage in foreign affairs. Illusions of Empire challenges its readers to consider the importance of events that occurred thousands of miles away from the blood-soaked battlefields of Maryland, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania and equally far from the violently racialized atmosphere of a New South undergoing slave emancipation, because some of the principal participants in the Civil War and Reconstruction believed that their causes might live or die on the outcome of transnational operations in the political netherworld that straddled the U.S.-Mexico border.

CHAPTER 1

The Origins of Irregular Diplomacy in U.S.-Mexico Relations

Texas turned out to be a headache for the leaders of independent Mexico. In 1828, the central government selected General Manuel Mier y Terán as a boundary commissioner and sent him to determine the international border between the Mexican northeast and the American Southwest. The Adams-Onís Treaty between the United States and Spain, finalized almost a decade earlier, laid out the basic parameters for the boundary line, but that line had yet to be definitively surveyed. Because Texas posed several urgent challenges to the fledgling Mexican republic—most notably Indian raiding and American colonizing—Mier y Terán also had instructions to observe the influence that foreign empresarios were asserting over the Tejano population. When the general submitted his final report, it must have startled Mexican leaders. His prescient observations suggested that Texas was already slipping from Mexico’s grasp, and he predicted that serious diplomatic and political difficulties lay in the immediate future.¹

Mier y Terán visited dozens of Texas towns and plantations and met with Tejano and Anglo inhabitants, giving him an understanding of rapidly evolving events on Mexico’s northeastern frontier. The department of Texas is contiguous to the most avid nation in the world, he cautioned in reference to the United States. With a hint of trepidation, he pointed out that Americans, in the five decades since their independence, have conquered whatever territory adjoins them and in so doing become masters of extensive colonies which formerly belonged to Spain and France, and of even more spacious territories from which have disappeared the former owners, the Indian tribes. The most extraordinary aspect of American expansion, however, was not the rapidity with which it kept happening. Far more concerning, he believed, were the sneaky methods that migrating Americans and their political leaders used to conquer and absorb new territory. His explanation was both a paean to the determination and efficiency of the foreign interlopers as well as a stark warning to Mexico’s government officials. There is no power like that to the north, which by silent means has made conquests of momentous importance, he warned after viewing the methods at work in Texas. Such dexterity, such constancy in their designs, such uniformity of means of execution which always are completely successful, arouses admiration. Traditionally, expanding empires employed much more overt and violent tactics in their conquests, but the American empresarios that he met in Texas seemed to have perfected a safer and equally effective technique for asserting control over land and people. Instead of armies, battles, or invasions—which make a great noise and for the most part are unsuccessful—these men lay hand on means that, if considered one by one, would be rejected as slow, ineffective, and at times palpably absurd, the officer added.²

Mier y Terán was not the only one sounding alarms about American encroachment. The French botanist Jean Louis Berlandier, who accompanied the 1828 expedition, noted that Anglo Americans seemed to be establishing a monopoly over Texas agriculture, and he came to the conclusion that native Tejanos cannot vie in any respect with those industrious colonists.³ That same year, an artillery lieutenant named José María Sánchez noticed that North Americans have taken possession of almost all of the eastern part of Texas, in most cases without the knowledge of the authorities, since they emigrate incessantly without anyone to hinder them, taking possession of whatever place suits them, without asking. By that time, he claimed, only San Antonio de Béxar and Nacogdoches retained Tejano-majority populations.⁴ In a speech to Mexican legislators two years later, the statesman Lucas Alamán cited these reports when referring to American settlement in Texas as the progress of … evil.⁵ It was apparent to firsthand witnesses that these newcomers had begun circumventing open diplomacy using a process of gradual conquest by settlement, taking advantage of the porous borderlands to expand American empire. All the migrants needed was an excuse for settling on foreign land—however extralegal or fanciful it might be—and once they gained that crucial foothold, the process of Americanization would be set in motion. When the aforementioned officers compiled their reports, empresarios and their colonial followers had been living west of the Sabine River for just five years, but already the U.S. government was working assiduously to purchase Texas and arrange for its annexation as a slaveholding state. The accounts of Mier y Terán, Berlandier, and Sánchez provide glimpses into one of the most well-known causes of diplomatic controversy between the United States and Mexico—the colonization of Texas—but the methods of settlement and political incorporation that the three men described would be repeated again and again over the next four decades. The United States and Mexico developed an increasingly fraught relationship, resulting in unconventional diplomatic techniques that finally reached their apex during the chaotic 1860s.

Mexico gained its independence in 1821, and less than a year later, President James Monroe publicly recommended diplomatic recognition, making the United States one of the first nations to acknowledge Mexican sovereignty.⁶ As a testament to the power and influence of Indians on the country’s northern frontier, the new government also negotiated treaties with Comanches and Lipan Apaches within months of breaking from Spain. No sooner had Mexico become independent than a team of diplomats propositioned chiefs Barbaquista, Pisinampe, and Quenoc for peace. At a camp of five thousand Coman-ches, these tribal leaders convened a council that debated for three days before agreeing to sign a treaty at San Antonio in the summer of 1822. Several months later, another indigenous delegation under Chief Guonique rode to Mexico City, where they finalized a pact in which tribal diplomats acknowledged Mexican sovereignty in exchange for a reciprocal recognition of the Comanche Nation. Mexico also agreed to generous terms for trade, allowed the tribe to keep captives, and assigned a permanent diplomat to serve Comanche interests in much the same way that a minister plenipotentiary would do in a foreign embassy.⁷ That same year, Lipan chiefs Cuelga de Castro, El Cojo, and Poca Ropa also traveled to Mexico City for a peace agreement. They stayed at the capital for several months, lodging in the Colegio Apostólico de San Fernando, and in September finally made their marks upon a treaty that granted land for farming and pasturage, allowed tribe members to claim unbranded livestock, and promised government protection from enemies in exchange for the forgiveness of past wrongs and formal recognition of the Mexican government.⁸

Although Mexico initially came under the rule of Emperor Agustín de Iturbide—the three Lipan Apache chiefs and the Comanche leader Guonique all witnessed his coronation ceremony—the country managed to enact a democratic constitution in 1824 that, among other things, granted territorial status to New Mexico and statehood to the northern provinces of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Chihuahua, Durango, and Occidente (later split into Sinaloa and Sonora).⁹ In 1825, Joel Poinsett was dispatched as the first American minister to serve in Mexico City, and the following year, commerce between the two countries exceeded $10 million in imports and exports.¹⁰ To the casual observer, these auspicious beginnings gave the impression that Mexico was headed for political stability and economic prosperity, but in truth, the country’s relationship with other nations, including independent Indians in Texas and New Mexico, had already begun to deteriorate, as even the most basic diplomatic interchanges tended to elicit stark disparities over foreign policy.

The seeds of discord between Mexico and Europe were sown with remarkable rapidity. Within a decade of achieving nationhood, leaders in Mexico City had already saddled themselves with enormous debts to English and French benefactors.¹¹ In 1824–1825, British companies loaned £6.4 million to Mexico at interest rates ranging from 5 to 6 percent. Beginning in 1826, Mexico added an average of $7.2 million to its national deficit each year, so that by 1844 the treasury found itself nearly $115 million (roughly $6 billion in 2020 dollars) in arrears.¹² During its first three decades of independence, Mexico sustained massive shortfalls because its tax revenues never came close to equaling federal expenditures, even though, according to one eyewitness, the government had undertaken the experiment of how much taxation the people can bear.¹³ Each year, monetary shortages necessitated additional foreign loans to keep the nation afloat. Recalling the riches in silver and gold that Mexico produced during its colonial era, European firms sensed a lucrative investment opportunity and were eager at first to lend money. Acting on hindsight, financiers drastically underestimated Mexico’s fiscal straits and failed to anticipate the country’s inability to repay what it owed.¹⁴ They borrow money, and lavish it as if it formed part of their annual income, Poinsett wrote after his tenure as foreign minister ended. He added, They anticipate their revenue at a ruinous sacrifice, and make no permanent provision for repaying their debt.¹⁵ By 1838, in what came to be known as the Pastry War, France was sending battleships to blockade the Mexican coast at Tampico and Vera Cruz in an attempt to coerce amortization of mounting financial obligations.¹⁶ Economic uncertainty and foreign debts beleaguered Mexico’s early republic and led to the chronic political instability that plagued the country for many years. Nationhood had set off a self-defeating cycle for independent Mexico: inadequate tax revenue necessitated foreign loans, which prompted economic dependency on outside sources, and that in turn fostered political weakness that re-created the need for more loans, leading to diplomatic crises as Europe held Mexico accountable for its debts.¹⁷

While difficulties between Mexico and Europe began in the 1820s, the roots of troubled diplomacy with nomadic Indians on the northern frontier stretched back to the Spanish colonial era, and those conflicts would be exacerbated following independence. Comanches and Lipan Apaches in Texas posed the most serious threat to Mexican interests, although Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches in New Mexico also raided and waged war with devastating effect.¹⁸ Initial tribal recognitions of Mexican sovereignty in 1822 proved unsustainable, largely because the country was unable to fulfill its treaty obligations. Within two years, the governor of Coahuila y Tejas predicted that the peace agreements would fail, as Comanches and Lipans raided frontier settlements with increasing intensity. National and local representatives negotiated new pacts with these powerful indigenous groups, one example being a treaty that the Comanche diplomatist Paruakevitsi approved at San Antonio in 1827. But four years later, when Tejanos commanded by Captain Manuel Lafuente killed Paruakevitsi during a haphazard attack on his camp, relations devolved once more into violence, and the contract became meaningless.¹⁹

Similar episodes of treachery occurred with shocking regularity throughout Mexico’s far north, where diplomatic resolutions proved difficult to attain. Chihuahua and Sonora sustained tentative conditions of peace with some subgroups of Chiricahua and Mescalero Apaches throughout the 1820s, issuing rations and supplies at establecimientos de paz (peace establishments) near towns like Janos and San Elizario. As Mexico’s fiscal straits deepened, funding for these subsistence programs dried up, and a smallpox epidemic compounded the stress. Under the leadership of Chiricahua chief Juan José Compá, some of the last remaining Apaches de paz deserted the establecimientos in the fall of 1831 and took to the warpath. In the first fifteen years of Mexican independence, Indians killed some five thousand fronterizos, and Mexicans reciprocated at every opportunity.²⁰ One of the most renowned Apache diplomats of his time, Compá himself perished in 1837 when Sonora’s first experiment with bounty systems motivated a team of scalp hunters to blast twenty Indians with a hidden cannon during a trade fair. In the 1840s, state governments in Sonora, Chihuahua, and Durango settled on paid scalping and mercenary warfare as their preferred methods for dealing with Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Seris, and Yaquis, the result being a series of genocidal massacres that claimed the lives of hundreds of Indians and saw many more sold into slavery.²¹

When Indians did negotiate treaties, their Mexican counterparts usually acted at the state rather than national level, meaning that at any given time Chihuahua could be at peace with the same Apaches that Sonora was fighting or New Mexico might be in friendship with the same Comanches that Texas waged war upon. State leaders often encouraged different tribes to attack one another, and scalp-hunting gangs included Delaware and Shawnee operatives, further confounding diplomacy and creating a confusing atmosphere of borderlands violence that militated against any long-lasting or all-encompassing peace pacts.²² Donaciano Vigil, a legislator in New Mexico, expressed the frustration that many Hispanos felt over this issue, criticizing the central government for neglecting the safety of its frontier inhabitants. The peculiar location of our country, surrounded on all sides by heathen Indians who harass us most of the time … reduces New Mexico to a state of anxiety and distress, he inveighed, pointing out that no other state or province was so egregiously ignored by the nation’s leaders.²³ These dilemmas arose in part because of the pervasive