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The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America

The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of... rac h el st. joh n The Unpredictable America of William Gwin Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America In 1865, while the United States struggled to reconstruct itself, war raged in Mexico between invading French forces supporting Emperor Maximilian and partisans of Benito Juárez’s republican government. The uncertain futures of the United States and Mexico underscored the instability of the boundaries that the two nations had drawn across North America in the preceding decades. While this impermanence was a source of anxiety for officials in Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Paso del Norte (the city from which the Juárez government operated), for others it was an oppor- tunity. Among those opportunists was a former California senator named William McKendree Gwin. Gwin, a Tennessee native who had amassed wealth in Mississippi and political success in California and Washington, D.C., spent the summer of 1865 in Mexico City, where he worked to secure military backing for a mining colony in northern Mexico. His activities drew the attention of Matías Romero, the Juárez government’s minister to the United States. Writing to U.S. secretary of state William Seward in July 1865, Romero claimed that Gwin was working with French http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png The Journal of the Civil War Era University of North Carolina Press

The Unpredictable America of William Gwin: Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America

John, Rachel St.
The Journal of the Civil War Era , Volume 6 (1) – Mar 12, 2016
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University of North Carolina Press
Copyright
Copyright @ The University of North Carolina Press
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2159-9807

Abstract

rac h el st. joh n The Unpredictable America of William Gwin Expansion, Secession, and the Unstable Borders of Nineteenth-Century North America In 1865, while the United States struggled to reconstruct itself, war raged in Mexico between invading French forces supporting Emperor Maximilian and partisans of Benito Juárez’s republican government. The uncertain futures of the United States and Mexico underscored the instability of the boundaries that the two nations had drawn across North America in the preceding decades. While this impermanence was a source of anxiety for officials in Washington, D.C., Mexico City, and Paso del Norte (the city from which the Juárez government operated), for others it was an oppor- tunity. Among those opportunists was a former California senator named William McKendree Gwin. Gwin, a Tennessee native who had amassed wealth in Mississippi and political success in California and Washington, D.C., spent the summer of 1865 in Mexico City, where he worked to secure military backing for a mining colony in northern Mexico. His activities drew the attention of Matías Romero, the Juárez government’s minister to the United States. Writing to U.S. secretary of state William Seward in July 1865, Romero claimed that Gwin was working with French

Journal

The Journal of the Civil War Era – University of North Carolina Press

Published: Mar 12, 2016

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