neutrality, and the other leading papers reiterated the familiar objections against playing the British game; and hence, while it appeared reasonable to expect that Guizot would aid England more or less in a diplomatic way to limit the extension of our boundaries, no other sort of French intervention seemed at all probable.[1]
The success of our armies clinched the argument. From the first, McLane urged that a vigorous campaign should be waged. That, he said, would be the best way to prevent interference, and he predicted that victories would overcome sympathy with Mexico. Had Taylor been defeated on the Rio Grande, as Londoners expected, those ill-disposed toward us in Europe, wrote our minister at Paris, "might have been emboldened to unfriendly or offensive demonstrations"; but as it was, reported McLane, the conduct of the American army and the magnanimity of the American general served to "inspire a respect for our country and our cause which was not felt before, and which nothing less could have produced." The failure of Ulúa to detain Scott until the yellow fever should force him to decamp had no slight effect; and the victories at Vera Cruz and Cerro Gordo, reported Bancroft, who succeeded McLane at the court of St. James, totally changed the complexion of sentiment in Europe regarding the United States. After the battles of Contreras and Churubusco the same minister said to a friend, "You should foe here to see how our successes have opened the eyes of the Old World to our great destinies." In England racial sympathy, too, could not wholly be suppressed. Scott received very handsome compliments from the commander of the British fleet at Vera Cruz and from a son of Sir Robert Peel, who was aboard one of the vessels; and Robert Anderson remarked in his diary: When our arms do something glorious, "jealousy, for the moment, is conquered by pride." Indeed Lord Palmerston himself spoke most warmly to Bancroft of our victories as illustrating the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon.[2]
King believed they "secured a perhaps doubtful neutrality." "Let Mexico show the determination and the power to resist," remarked Le Journal des Débats significantly, and a way to aid her will doubtless be found, but "Europe cannot intervene effectively in behalf of a people who throw themselves away."
