A Cinco de Mayo story you probably didn’t know

By Victor Landa, NewsTaco (4 minute read)

On May 5th, 1862, a contingent of soldiers on the American continent encountered their enemy along a road that led to the enemy fort. The contingent attacked but was repulsed.  The enemy counterattacked and closed in on the contingent’s flank, when reinforcements came from a supporting brigade. Together the contingent and the supporting brigade countered on the enemy’s left flank and sent them running into the night.

The battle happened in Williamsburg, Virginia. It was the first pitched battle of what’s known as the Peninsula campaign of the U.S. Civil War.

[pullquote] . . . the battle of Puebla is little more than a footnote, hardly celebrated, in Mexico.[/pullquote]

On that same day, 2,300 miles south . . . 

. . .  in Puebla, Mexico, another battle raged that would have a greater effect on the outcome of the Civil War than the battle of Williamsburg.

The battle of Puebla had nothing to do with the hostilities between the Union Federals and the Confederate Rebels of the Civil War. The fighting in Puebla was between the elite French forces of Napoleon III and the Mexican troops that defended the town that lay on the road to Mexico City, the jewel that Napoleon wanted as payment for a debt past-due.

But the French monarch had a grander design in mind.

The U.S. Civil War had triggered a cotton famine across Europe. An article in Napoelon.com tells us that “The north of France, Alsace, and Normandy bore the brunt of this shortage, which threatened to decimate the French textile industry: in 1862 alone, the price of cotton in France doubled.” Napoleon was working to forge an alliance with Britain to recognize the Confederacy as an independent nation with the hope of helping to end the U.S. conflict and restore the cotton industry.

The first order of business, though, was collecting the debt from Mexico.

batalla_de_puebla

[pullquote]The Mexicanos in California “were able to link the struggle of Mexico to the struggle of the Civil War, so there were simultaneous fights for democracy.’”[/pullquote]

Then the Battle of Puebla happened.

The French suffered a great loss and the news of the humiliation of the mighty French forces spread to all corners of U.S.

TIME magazine’s Ashley Ross picks-up the story:

“It wasn’t until May 27 that the news of the Battle of Puebla finally reached California-based Latinos, who had been feeling disheartened as Union forces were falling, quite disastrously so, to Robert E. Lee’s Confederate troops. The news from Mexico was doubly good for that population: not only was Mexico victorious, but California—as a free state—was also glad for the failure of the French plan to help the Confederacy. This was particularly true for residents of Hispanic origin, who had particular reason to oppose the South’s system of white supremacy.”

The Mexicanos in California began to raise money for the Mexican army because they saw a shared outcome.

Again TIME:

“Jose Alamillo, a professor of Chicano studies at California State University Channel Islands [said] ‘They had to kind of make the case for fighting for freedom and democracy and they were able to link the struggle of Mexico to the struggle of the Civil War, so there were simultaneous fights for democracy.’”

[pullquote][tweet_dis]The battle of Puebla is ensconced in the Mexican-American consciousness going back to three weeks after the fighting happened.[/tweet_dis][/pullquote]

The help never came

Partly because of the defeat at Puebla the French never formed their alliance with Britain, so there was never a recognition of a Confederate state and the aid that the South needed to fight the Union North never came.

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The funny thing is that the battle of Puebla is little more than a footnote, hardly celebrated, in Mexico. But it’s been ensconced in the Mexican-American consciousness going back to three weeks after the fighting happened. Maybe that’s why it’s a big deal here in the U.S. Maybe that’s why Mexican-American’s are so annoyed at the commercialization of the day – the whole cinco-de-drinko thing.

What if?

I wonder what would happen if we commemorated the Battle of Williamsburg by popping open a fifth of Jack Daniels, putting on a Union Army cap and whooping it up as we sang Dixie?



[Photos courtesy of Civil War Daily Gazette, Wikimedia]

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