Texas, Mobile, and Wilson’s Raid

Abstract

Civil wars in both the United States and Mexico during the 1850s–1860s fostered the most serious challenge to the Monroe Doctrine in American history. Taking advantage of Mexico’s internal troubles, Emperor Napoleon III of France installed a Hapsburg prince as the new emperor of Mexico. Although invited to intervene by Mexican conservatives, no one liked the prince who remained on the throne only at the point of thirty thousand French Army bayonets. The U.S. government tried to intimidate Napoleon to withdraw his troops by placing a small force in the lower Rio Grande Valley, but it failed to have an effect. Two campaigns closed the war in the West by capturing Mobile, Alabama, and destroying Confederate war industries in Alabama and Georgia before the Federals could shift large numbers of troops to Texas and finally bring an end to the French intervention in Mexico.