The American Legion of Honor in Mexico

Abstract

THE BLOODY FRATRICIDAL war of monarchists and republicans in Mexico, better remembered as the struggle between Emperor Maximilian and President Juarez, was related in many ways to the concurrent American Civil War. One interrelationship was the considerable number of men who soldiered in both military theaters. In addition to European knights-errant like Prince Felix Salm-Salm of Prussia, who served in the Union army before fighting in Mexico,' thousands of American war veterans crossed the Rio Grande to join the opposing armies of Maximilian and Juirez. For the most part the ex-Confederates gravitated to the imperial forces, while northern veterans supported the defenders of the republic of Mexico. Two contemporary estimates by responsible and informed officials indicate the strength of the American auxiliary troops. General Philip Sheridan of the United States Army concluded that two thousand Confederate soldiers joined the Mexican Imperialists, and Matias Romero, the Mexican minister to the United States, reported that there were some three thousand American war veterans in the army of the Mexican Republic.2 One group of former United States soldiers was organized as an elite company, its officers commissioned by the President of Mexico, and designated the American Legion of Honor. This corps fought in several of the battles that preceded the downfall of the Mexican Empire, and legion officers were present at the surrender and execution of Maximilian as well as the triumphal entry of Juirez into Mexico City in the summer of 1867. Although there were more than one hundred officers in the American Legion of Honor, its existence has been generally ignored by Mexican and American writers. Indeed, with one exception there is no published work in Spanish or English evaluating the role of the legion or tracing its curious history. The sole account is a highly