Terrible Swift Sword (44 page)

When Sheridan met with Grant in Washington in May, the commanding general had warned him that Seward opposed using troops “in any active way” on the border and counseled Sheridan to “act with great circumspection.” Sheridan took this to mean that Grant was sanctioning him to conduct a “cold war” on the US-Mexican border.

Sheridan moved troops around, gathered intelligence, spread misinformation, and secretly supplied arms to the native Mexican insurgency. He demanded that Maximilian hand over the munitions that the ex-Rebels had given to the Imperialists in exchange for sanctuary. His calculated actions conveyed the impression that he was planning an invasion, which seemed entirely possible to many Mexicans; American troops from the last invasion had left just seventeen years earlier.

To Sheridan's disgust, Seward settled for the return of a few pieces of contraband Confederate artillery and the Imperial government's apologies, and then dropped
the matter. “A golden opportunity was lost,” Sheridan wrote, his frustration leaping off the page, “for we had ample excuse for crossing the boundary.” The US government's passivity freed Maximilian to expand his control over most of Mexico.
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Undeterred, Sheridan launched a fresh “hostile demonstration,” this time on the upper Rio Grande. At San Antonio, he ostentatiously inspected IV Corps and Merritt's cavalry division, as though readying them for a campaign. He then rode with a cavalry regiment to Fort Duncan, the place where he had begun his army career. There, opposite Piedras Negras, Sheridan again inquired about roads and forage. He sent a pontoon train to Brownsville and opened communications with Juarez. Rumors flew of an imminent US invasion of Mexico.

The actions hit their mark. The nervous Imperial government withdrew French troops from Matamoras, and thence from most of northern Mexico, all the way to Monterey. The French ambassador in Washington lodged a formal protest, prompting the skittish State Department to warn Sheridan to preserve strict neutrality on the border.

But Sheridan was already covertly supplying weapons and ammunition to anti-Imperialist insurgents being recruited in the areas that the French had abandoned. The arms, which Sheridan's records showed had been destroyed, were placed “at convenient places on our side of the river to fall into their hands.”

Grant wrote to Sheridan that he was not sure this was legal, while at the same time fuming over the State Department's policy of using American troops as “a police force to protect a neutrality [Maximilian's] to build up a power that has done the United States so much harm and which contemplates so much more.” Grant told Sheridan, “If I had my way I would use the United States forces to give to them [the Mexican republicans] the Rio Grande country as a base to start from.”

The clandestine arms program continued; during the winter of 1865–1866, Sheridan sent Juarez's men 30,000 muskets from the Baton Rouge Arsenal. Still, Sheridan admitted that “it required the patience of Job to abide the slow and poky methods of our State Department,” while at the same time restraining his combat veterans from crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico.
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SOME OF THE NEARLY 5,000 ex-Confederates living in Mexico had begun a colony at Cordoba, in the highlands above Vera Cruz. To attract new supporters to help prop up his sinking regime, Maximilian had promised large land grants to former Rebels and any colonists whom they could lure to Mexico from the South. Promotional material signed by former generals Sterling Price, John Magruder, and Dabney Maury circulated through the South; some states even named commissioners in anticipation of a surge of emigration to Mexico.

When the State Department did nothing about it, Sheridan, with Grant's authorization, published an order in April 1866 stating that anyone sailing to Mexico from Texas or Louisiana must first obtain a permit from his headquarters. The requirement doomed the colonization scheme.
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As the tide began to go out on Maximilian, a number of former Mexican republic generals began vying to succeed Juarez, whose presidential term had officially expired in December 1865. The contenders included the three C's: Juan Cortinas, Servando Canales, and Jose Maria Carbajal. Sheridan wanted a “uniter,” and in his view, Cortinas and Canales were “freebooters” and unsuitable. Grant liked Carbajal, who had recently visited Washington to seek aid for the republicans. “Give him the benefit of advice and all the information you have,” Grant told Sheridan. “I regret that we cannot give him direct aid.”

But after interviewing Carbajal in New Orleans, Sheridan bluntly wrote, “He did not impress me very favorably. He was old and cranky, yet, as he seemed anxious to do his best, I sent him over to Brownsville.” Carbajal didn't last; Canales deposed him in Matamoras. And so Sheridan decided to stick with Juarez and his general, Mariano Escobedo.
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Major Henry Young, Sheridan's former chief of scouts, had organized a bodyguard for Carbajal with Sheridan's reluctant consent and financial backing. But by the time Young reached the border with fifty men, Canales had already ousted Carbajal. And so, with Sheridan's blessing, Young decided to make contact with General Escobedo.

As Young and his men crossed the Rio Grande to meet Escobedo, a band of ex-Confederates and Mexican rancheros lying in ambush opened fire. Young and twenty-five of his men were either killed or drowned in the river. “I have never ceased to regret my consent,” Sheridan confessed in his
Personal Memoirs
.
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Under Mexico's constitution, General Jesus Gonzales Ortega, who was president of the Mexican Supreme Court when Maximilian seized control of the country, was next in line to become president after Juarez. Living in exile in the United States, Ortega now attempted to claim the office. Sheridan irritably judged him to be “ridiculously late” and feared he might spoil the republican insurgency that was now gathering momentum under Juarez and Escobedo. After Ortega left New Orleans for the Rio Grande, Sheridan ordered Colonel John Sedgwick to arrest him when his ship docked. Sedgwick quietly took Ortega into custody at Brazos Santiago, ending his “further machinations,” wrote Sheridan.
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By mid-summer 1866, Juarez's men, armed mainly with weapons Sheridan had secretly given them, controlled the territory along the Rio Grande and nearly all of northern Mexico down to San Luis Potosi. With each passing week, Maximilian's
situation worsened. Sheridan's spies reported that the French were fortifying Vera Cruz and that the Empress Carlotta had sailed to France to beg Napoleon III for more aid.

But Napoleon wanted to cut his losses in Mexico and bring his army home to France. He would need every soldier soon. Prussia, having easily defeated Austria, was busily sweeping Germany's other states into its orbit, and Napoleon's regime was teetering. War with Prussia would curb its growing power and increase his, Napoleon believed.

In December, Sheridan learned that French soldiers were boarding ships at Vera Cruz. Confirmation came in early January 1867, in the form of an intercepted telegram addressed to French general Henri Pierre Castelnau in Mexico City. “Do not delay the departure of the troops; bring back all who will not remain there. Most of the fleet has left.—Napoleon.”

With the French troops gone, in May 1867, Juarez's forces captured Mexico City and arrested Maximilian. On June 19, Maximilian was executed by a firing squad despite Secretary of State Seward's appeal for mercy.

Sheridan's “cold war” against Maximilian had succeeded brilliantly; it was no less than a tour de force in geopolitics—by a fighting general with no experience in international affairs. Sheridan's seat-of-the-pants brinkmanship on the border and his secret arms shipments to Juarez's insurgents had so destabilized Maximilian's regime that when Napoleon withdrew France's support, Maximilian could not survive.

Faith in Sheridan's ability to improvise had persuaded Grant to select him, over all his generals, for just this mission. And once more, Sheridan had proven to be Grant's most dependable troubleshooter, improbably ousting the French without using any force. “I doubt very much whether such results could have been achieved without the presence of an American army on the Rio Grande,” Sheridan modestly wrote years later.
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SHERIDAN'S TRAINING AND EXPERIENCE had not prepared him for the complex problems and superheated political partisanship that he faced in Louisiana and Texas. A cold war strategy had worked in Mexico, but in the Southwest, diplomacy and a deft human touch were needed. Sheridan possessed neither.

In 1864, Louisiana Unionists wrote a new state constitution abolishing slavery and established a provisional government. But up-country Louisianans in the north and west remained loyal to the Confederacy, even after the war. Sheridan described them in a letter to President Andrew Johnson as “malcontents,” adding that “this bitterness is all that is left. . . . . There is no power of resistance left.”
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Johnson implemented Lincoln's lenient Reconstruction plan in the hope of rapidly restoring the South to its place in the Union. He extended amnesty to former Rebels who took a loyalty oath and liberally granted pardons to those whose former high standing in the Confederacy made them ineligible for amnesty. By the end of 1865, every state except Texas had begun adopting a new state constitution and establishing a provisional government.

In the blink of the eye, former Rebels took control of state governments across the South. After the fall 1865 Louisiana state elections, ex-Rebels replaced nearly every Unionist elected official.

In his first State of the Union message in December 1865, Johnson pronounced the Union restored and declared his readiness to admit Southern senators and representatives to Congress. A staunch believer in states' rights and no friend of the black man, Johnson turned a blind eye when the reconstituted Southern states began enacting the so-called Black Codes, whose centerpieces were antivagrancy and labor-contract laws written to keep the new freedmen out of the cities, under the control of the whites, and working in the fields. The codes transformed the new freedmen into de facto slaves.

Sheridan wrote that the president's failure to demand civil rights for the new freedmen left the blacks “at the mercy of a people who, recently their masters, now seemed to look upon them as the authors of all the misfortunes that had come upon the land.” Cruel Southern whites made the blacks at times wish they could repent their freedom. A Freedmen's Bureau official wrote that in Texas, blacks “are frequently beaten unmercifully, and shot down like wild beasts, without any provocation.”
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The Black Codes and the former Confederates' swift return to power evoked cries in the North for harsher treatment of the South. In December 1865, congressional Republicans created a joint House-Senate Committee of 15 to reexamine the issues of Southern representation in Congress and black suffrage. The committee repudiated the provisional state governments approved by Johnson, asserting that only Congress could approve them.

 

AND SO BEGAN A titanic power struggle between Johnson and Congress over which branch of government would oversee postwar Reconstruction. Congress passed a bill giving the Freedmen's Bureau—hated bitterly in the South—new authority to protect former slaves and to try in military courts those who violated the rights of blacks. Johnson vetoed the bill, as well as the Civil Rights Act, which granted blacks the same rights as whites. The bills trampled on the states' prerogatives, the president declared.

Congress overrode both vetoes. It went on to approve and send to the states for ratification a proposed Fourteenth Amendment that extended citizenship rights to
blacks, protected those rights against hostile state laws, and eliminated the old “three-fifths” clause from the Constitution. The latter provision had permitted the slave states to count, during every ten-year census, each slave as three-fifths of a white man to increase their representation in Congress. The clause's elimination, coupled with blacks' new citizenship rights, had the collateral effect of increasing the South's representation in Congress by twelve members.

The former Confederate states were required to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment before being fully restored to the Union with congressional representation. Tennessee, governed by Radical Republicans, ratified it, but the other ten states rejected it—Louisiana's legislature by a unanimous vote. Johnson tacitly supported the South's defiance and acted as if his vetoes had been upheld.
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Caught in the middle of the all-out war between the president and Congress were Sheridan and the other army commanders in the South who were responsible for implementing Washington's conflicting policies.