Though President Wilson brought back from Paris a treaty of alliance between the United States, England and France, which he asked the Senate, on July 29, 1919, to ratify, and declared that “we are bound to France by ties of friendship which we have always regarded and shall always regard as peculiarly sacred,” he stated in a much earlier work, “The State,” that though the Congress at Philadelphia had explicitly commanded Franklin, Adams and Jay, the American commissioners, to be guided by the wishes of the French court in the peace negotiations, “it proved impracticable, nevertheless, to act with France; for she conducted herself, not as the ingenuous friend of the United States, but only as the enemy of England, and, as firstand always, a subtle strategist for her own interests and advantage. The American commissioners were not tricked, and came to terms separately with the English.”
Having accomplished the object of giving aid in humbling England through the loss of her colonies, the French, far from remaining our friends, became our enemies, and from 1797 to 1835 we find the messages of the Presidents abounding in complaints of the treatment France was according our young merchant marine on the high seas. In 1798 we found ourselves in a state of war with France. “Such an outburst had not been known,” says the historian, Elson, “since the Battle of Lexington.” Patriotic songs were written, and one of these, “Hail, Columbia,” still lives in our literature. Washington was again called to the command of the American army, but beyond some engagements at sea, no blows were actually struck.
But ere long France was again at her old tricks. In 1851 we were on the eve of war over the Hawaiian Islands, which France had seized, though knowing that she could never hold them save as the result of a successful war. On June 18, 1851, Secretary of State Webster instructed the American minister in Paris to say that the further enforcement of the French demands against Hawaii “would tend seriously to disturb our friendly relations with the French government.”
The third conspicuous instance of France’s persistent enmity to us was at a time when President Lincoln was harrassed by the distressing events of the most critical hours of the rebellion and the possibility of England and France together undertaking the cause of the Confederacy. England had been approached by the Emperor, Napoleon III, with a proposal for an alliance, and in both countries the Union cause was at its lowest ebb.
Justin McCarthy in his “History of Our Own Times” (II, p. 231) says: “The Southern scheme found support only in England and in France. In all other European countries the sympathy of the people and government alike went with the North.... Assurances of friendship came from all civilized countries to the Northern States except from England and France alone.”
While the Northern and Southern States were engaged in a death grapple, Napoleon III was defying the Monroe Doctrine by invading Mexico, and in 1862 was sending instructions to the French general, Forey, as follows:
People will ask you why we sacrifice men and money to establish a government in Mexico. In the present state of civilization the development of America can no longer be a matter of indifference to Europe.... It is not at all to our interest that they should come in possession of the entire Gulf of Mexico, to rule from there the destinies of the Antilles and South America, and control the products of the New World.
After Lee’s surrender General Slaughter of the Confederate army opened negotiations with the French Marshal Bazaine for the transferof 25,000 Confederate soldiers to Mexico, and many distinguished Confederate officers cast their lot with the French to establish Maximilian on the throne. General Price was commissioned to recruit an imperial army in the Confederate States. Governor Harris of Tennessee and other Americans naturalized as Mexicans and now took the lead in a colonization scheme of vast proportions. The North became thoroughly alarmed. A French army co-operating with Confederate expatriates could not be tolerated on the Mexican border.
The government at Washington lodged an emphatic protest with the French government, and an army of observation of 50,000 men under General Sheridan was dispatched to the Rio Grande, ready to cross into Mexico and attack Bazaine at a moment’s notice. The American minister in Paris was instructed by Seward to insist on a withdrawal of the French forces from Mexico, and as the French government was in no position to engage in a war in a distant country against a veteran army of a million men it was forced to yield.
“The Emperor of the French,” writes McCarthy (p. 231), “fully believed that the Southern cause was sure to triumph, and that the Union would be broken up; he was even willing to hasten what he assumed to be the unavoidable end. He was anxious that England should join with him in some measures to facilitate the success of the South by recognizing the Government of the Southern Confederation. He got up the Mexican intervention, which assuredly he would never have attempted if he had not been persuaded that the Union was on the eve of disruption.”