Lincoln ordered conscription, though the first drafts led to riots in Manhattan. Civil wars divide families, and the Roosevelts were typical: the ageing millionaire CVS Roosevelt and his son Theodore were passionately abolitionist and Yankee, but the latter’s wife, Mittie, was an equally passionate Confederate. In 1860, Mittie gave birth to Theodore junior, Teddy, by which time America was in crisis. Mittie secretly sewed clothes for Confederate troops, and her brothers were Confederate agents plotting to assassinate Lincoln and buying new battleships in Britain. Her husband Theodore refused to fight her family, instead, like many of his class, paying a surrogate to fight in his place. Little Teddy admired his mother, yet he worshipped Lincoln and dreamed of fighting for the Union.
The self-destruction of the USA was an opportunity for its rivals. Out in the west, the native peoples started to raid again. Comanche bands attacked Texas; in September 1860, Governor Houston dispatched a unit of Rangers and their Tonkawa auxiliaries to hunt the Comanche raiders, ambushing Peta Nocona’s village and massacring men, women and children. Peta Nocona and his son Quanah were away, but the Rangers captured a fair-haired, blue-eyed woman and her baby daughter.
CYNTHIA PARKER AND PETA NOCONA; FRANZ JOSEF AND SISI
When she was questioned, the blonde woman said, ‘Me Cynthia,’ at which one of the Rangers exclaimed, ‘Why, Tom, this is a white woman, Indians don’t have blue eyes.’ She was taken back to Fort Belknap, where her surviving brother Isaac Parker could not identify his long-lost sister – who could barely remember any English. But finally the Parkers adopted her. Yet Cynthia grieved for Peta and her sons, whom she believed were dead. When her daughter died of influenza, she tried to kill herself, cutting her breasts, and finally starved herself to death.
Out on the prairie, her husband Peta Nocona mourned her too, dying of wounds soon afterwards. Their son Quanah, now fifteen, learned for the first time that his mother was American. Determined to fight for his people, he joined another war band and planned revenge.
Napoleon and Palmerston also saw opportunities. Ironically the first Old World potentate to back Lincoln was Alexander II. The virtuous backwoods lawyer and the concupiscent Romanov emperor had something in common: in February 1861 Alexander had liberated Russian serfs, two years before Lincoln’s emancipation. In both cases, the measure raised radical expectations that proved disappointing – and both would pay with their lives.
Surprisingly, Britain and France leaned towards the Confederacy. Palmerston had been re-elected in 1859 at the age of seventy-four, his vigour confirmed by rumours of illegitimate children and his citation in a divorce case, which only added to his roguish popularity. Pam was exasperated by his chancellor, the melodramatic, wild-eyed, self-righteous Gladstone, who stalked the streets of London seeking prostitutes to redeem: this involved long, titillating conversations about Christ with ladies of the night after which Gladstone tried not to masturbate. ‘Whenever he gets my place,’ said Palmerston, ‘we’ll have strange doings.’ Palmerston had orchestrated the navy’s anti-slavery campaigns, yet the British and French textile industries were dependent on southern cotton. Gladstone proposed an armed intervention,* and Palmerston came close to recognizing the Confederacy – as did their ally Napoleon, who was restrained in part by his American dentist, Thomas Evans, certainly the most powerful dentist in history.* But Napoleon, in the midst of expanding in Asia and Africa, saw the chance to found an American empire – in Mexico.
Halved in size by American gains, and hobbled by misrule and racial and economic inequality, the republic was struggling, but its president Benito Juárez, a lawyer risen from the humblest Zapotec origins, had restored order after Santa Anna but suspended payments on its European debts. Encouraged by Morny, who held Mexican bonds, Napoleon assembled an Anglo-French coalition to exploit American chaos. Although Palmerston backed French intervention, he limited his involvement. In December 1861, Napoleon’s troops, conveyed in steamships, landed in Mexico, expelled Juárez and in June 1863 took the capital. Eugénie introduced her husband to Mexican grandees, who proposed a European monarchy. In July, Napoleon sought an emperor for Mexico and found him among the Habsburgs: Maximilian, the brother of Franz Josef.
