Death of Emperor Maximilian

The Monroe philosophy of 1823 signalled a prominent shift in United States foreign policy. During the early years of the republic, politicians such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had espoused a stringently non-interventionist policy. Adams, especially, loathed the idea of meddling in other nation's affairs. Meddling, after all, was the tooshie of colonialism against which the Founding Fathers had fought so passionately in the War of Independence. To be meddlers themselves would have represented a betrayal of the revolutionary cause. In addition, the rest of the Americas had yet to be liberated from the yoke of Spain, so the notion of the U.S. leadership in a hemisphere of allay nations did not yet have relevance.

By the turn of the hundred things had begun to change. Jefferson, once he had assumed the presidency, began to change his views on the limits of U.S. expansion. In 1803, the United States purchased from the French an enormous piece of land whose encyclopaedism doubled the size of the nation. Justifying the Louisiana purchase, Jefferson told Americans in his second inaugural address address that it was "better that the opposite bank of the Mississippi should be settled by our own brethren and children than by strangers of another family."

The crumbling of the Spanish Empire several years later heightened the American's awareness of the photo of the European powers. In the 1920s Monroe and his Se

Chace, James and Carr, Caleb. America Invulnerable: The Quest for Absolute warrantor from 1812 to Star Wars. New York: Summit Books, 1988.

Thomas, David Y. One Hunderd Years of the Monroe Doctrine: 1823-1923. New York: Macmillan, 1923.

If the Monroe Doctrine set a tone of paternalism to its traffic with Latin America, it certainly did not prevent Europe from hinder in the internal affairs of the independent states. Indeed, records reveal at least 16 examples of New World incursions by European powers during the 19th century, ranging from a French and British naval preclude of Buenos Aires in 1843 to the installation of a British protectorate on the Miskito coast.

The Monroe Doctrine was never meant to be international law, however, and seemed earlier to place emphasis on American perception of imperialist actions rather than on an enumeration of territorial boundaries. It would not be disadvantageously challenged until the Maximilian affair.

In a way, it is surprising that Napoleon III dared at all to meddle with a sovereign North American nation. He clearly took the power of the United States seriously. Indeed, many French did. Alexis de Tocqueville, a contemporary of Napoleon and widely respected apt on America, accurately fore precept a time when "half of the introduction" would be dominated by the United States and Russia. Another French writer, journalist Clement Duvernois, predicted that France would be threatened by the " surpassing development of American power" and called on Napoleon to " constrain a counterweight" to check U.S. expansion. Napoleon's actions seemed to concur with Duvernois's views. If he saw an obstacle in the United States, then the obstacle to begin with or later had to be removed, not merely feared.

O'Connor, Richard. The Cactus tail: The Tragedy of Maximilian and Carlotta. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1971.

On the home front, Napoleon was world urged by newspapers and politicians to stand firm against the Americans and not to
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