Look, as Taylor points us, to Mexico. That country’s fractious politics, laced for decades with rotating strongmen and beleaguered liberals, finally collapsed by mid-century into outright civil war, with ousted figures like Benito Juárez escaping a claque of competing generals, all while trying to triangulate around local caudillos who just want to keep their revenue spigots open. Into the breach stepped a European empire, looking to reclaim its own piece of North America. While the United States was mired in its own civil war, Napoleon III launched an invasion of Mexico, appointing the waifish, waffling Maximilian I as the new head of his Mexican satrapy. While these French-backed forces never controlled much beyond the corridor between Veracruz and Mexico City—and while few Mexicans ever recognized the legitimacy of this French colonization effort—Maximilian’s reign only worsened Mexico’s bloodletting.
Eventually, however, realizing that his Mexican misadventures cost him much more than he’d ever gain, Napoleon III cut Maximilian loose. Suddenly facing pushback from both liberals and locals, Maximilian’s remaining support quickly melted away. (It didn’t help that Maximilian, as Taylor points out, “neglected his . . . duties to travel the countryside, collecting birds, butterflies, flowers, and antiquities.”) Juárez soon returned to power, and Mexican republicanism, just like American republicanism, was restored—even as, in the distance, a Mexican general named Porfirio Díaz started to recognize his own opportunity in the instability.
Taylor looks to the north as well. While British Canada never suffered anything like the slaughter of places like Puebla or Antietam, it still saw the kinds of sociopolitical cleavages like those of the United States and Mexico. For years, British Canada had enjoyed equal parity, in terms of both power and population, among Francophone Catholics in Quebec and Anglophone Protestants elsewhere. But an immigration upsurge in the mid-nineteenth century tilted things firmly in favor of English speakers. Similar to the Confederates watching their own demographics swamped by other, non-slave American states, Quebecers suddenly realized their own political futures were slipping from their control—and that, in another parallel to the Confederates, it was time to reformulate the entire Canadian arrangement, or potentially even detonate Canada wholesale.