Race and Revolution: The Confederacy, Mexico, and the Problem of Southern Nationalism

Abstract

In July 1859, Henry Watkins Allen, a prominent sugar planter from Louisiana, boarded a steamer in New York bound for Liverpool, England. He found himself in the company of several notable traveling companions, including future Confederate Secretary of State Judah P. Benjamin and the Irish nationalist Richard O’Gorman. For Allen, though, the most interesting personage aboard was the recently ousted president of Mexico, Ignacio Comonfort. After Allen made Comonfort’s acquaintance, the two talked about the future of the Mexican nation. Allen found his new friend “down upon his native country,” convinced that the USA would “be doing God’s service to go at once and take possession of the whole.” Allen enthusiastically agreed. “Unless something is done, and that quickly,” he exclaimed, the Mexican people, “like the Kilkenny cats,” will “eat up one another, and leave the Anglo-Saxon land-robber nothing but the tail end of a once beautiful and rich country.”¹