http://www.cjonline.com/stories/050597/cincodemayo.html
From the page: “If outnumbered, outgunned Mexican troops hadn’t defeated professional French invaders 135 years ago today, we might all be whistling “Dixie.”
After five years of civil war, Mexico was bankrupt in 1861. The beleaguered government of President Benito Juarez owed staggering sums to France, Great Britain and Spain.
In 1823, President James Monroe had put Mexico and the rest of the Western Hemisphere off limits to European intervention.
However, the United States was unable to enforce the Monroe Doctrine after the Civil War erupted. French, British and Spanish forces landed in Mexico to make certain Mexico paid its debts.
The British and Spaniards soon withdrew after seeing the French emperor, Napoleon III, had more on his mind than money.
Napoleon landed an invasion force intent on marching north from the port of Veracruz, taking Mexico City and continuing into Texas to support Confederate troops in the American South.
France then could easily have convinced England to break the Union’s blockade of Southern ports, freeing shipping lanes for supplies.
The outcome of the Civil War could have turned had not the crack French troops, many of them veterans of the Crimean War, not had to first capture the city of Puebla.
The French thought Puebla would be a cakewalk, that the city’s power elite would welcome them with magnolia blossoms.
However, what the French found was a ragtag, ill-equipped but valiant army commanded by Gen. Ignacio Zaragoza de Seguin, who, ironically, was born in what today is Goliad, Texas, when the region was part of Mexico.
On May 5, 1862, the French attacked recklessly. Within two hours, the French troops had expended half of their ammunition.
The decisive maneuver of the day was led by future Mexican dictator but then a young Brig. Gen. Porfirio Diaz. The commander of the Second Brigade led a late afternoon counterattack that repelled a determined French assault on Zaragoza’s right flank.
The dejected French soldiers retreated to await reinforcements…………………………….
Mexican writer Justo Sierra in “The Political Revolution of the Mexican People” wrote that the Cinco de Mayo victory gave the United States “an involuntary service … of inestimable value.”
The pressure the United States put on the French to withdraw inadvertently repaid Mexico for preventing a Franco-Confederacy alliance that could have altered the history of the entire hemisphere.”
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