s would have done more than a dozen Acts of Congress or
Amendments to the Constitution. There were many to whom this had always
appeared the most hopeful remedy for the sectionable trouble. Among them
was Seward, who, having been Lincoln's Secretary of State, now held the
same post under Johnson. While secession was still little more than a
threat he had proposed to Lincoln the deliberate fomentation of a
dispute with some foreign power--he did not appear to mind which. It is
thought by some that, after the war, he took up and pressed the
_Alabama_ claims with the same notion. That quarrel, however, would
hardly have met the case. The ex-Confederates could not be expected to
throw themselves with enthusiasm into a war with England to punish her
for providing them with a navy. It was otherwise with the trouble which
had been brewing in Mexico.

Napoleon III. had taken advantage of the Civil War to violate in a very
specific fashion the essential principle of the Monroe Doctrine. He had
interfered in one of the innumerable Mexican revolutions and taken
advantage of it to place on the throne an emperor of his own choice,
Maximilian, a cadet of the Hapsburg family, and to support his nominee
by French bayonets. Here was a challenge which the South was even more
interested in taking up than the North, and, if it had been persisted
in, it is quite thinkable that an army under the joint leadership of
Grant and Lee and made up of those who had learnt to respect each other
on a hundred fields from Bull Run to Spottsylvania might have erased all
bitter memories by a common campaign on behalf of the liberties of the
continent. But Louis Napoleon was no fool; and in this matter he acted
perhaps with more regard to prudence than to honour. He withdrew the
French troops, leaving Maximilian to his fate, which he promptly met at
the hands of his own subjects.

The sectional quarrel remained unappeased, and the quarrel between the
President and Congress began. Congress was not yet Radical, but it was
already decidedly, though still respectfully, opposed to Johnson's
policy. While only a few of its members had yet made up their minds as
to what ought to be done about Reconstruction, the great majority had a
strong professional bias which made them feel that the doing or not
doing of it should be in their hands and not in those of the Executive.
It was by taking advantage of this prevailing sentiment that the
Radicals, though still a min