French Government Buys Egyptian Negroes and Sends Them to Fight in the French-Mexican War 1863

Lincoln, Abraham

[SLAVERY IN MEXICO 1863]. Message of the President of the United States, Communicating, In Answer to a Resolution of the Senate of the 12th Instant, Correspondence Relative to the Use of Negroes by the French Army in Mexico. 37th Congress, 3rd Session, Senate, Ex. Doc. No. 40

Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1863. First Edition. [3] pp. (final page blank). Extracted from a larger volume (the two leaves are separating). Good. Item #3481

Little-known report to Congress, referencing the estimated 450 Negro Egyptians who were rounded up off the streets, beaten, and forced onto a French ship bound for Mexico, without their knowing why or where they were going. The issuance of this report is the only "action" taken by the United States government.

In 1863, as the Confederate South in America was fighting a bitter war with the Union North over the question of slavery, another war was raging along the U.S. border.

The Second French Intervention in Mexico had been launched in late 1861, the consequence of President Benito Juarez’s two-year moratorium of loan-interest payments to French, British and Spanish creditors.

In 1863, Britain reported in its House of Commons that France had been continuing the slave trade by buying unsuspecting negro soldiers from the Pasha of Egypt. The present document conveys these reports to the U.S. Congress.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that southern slaveowners had forcibly conscripted their slaves, to fight in a war to keep themselves enslaved, or to die where they stood by their master’s hand, that gave Napoleon III the idea to obtain his own negroes to fight his war as well. Of the ca. 450 seized Egyptian negroes, it is believed that 126 died in battle. It is not known if any of the survivors were ever repatriated.

See the long discussion of the little-known outrages by the French and the Egyptian Pasha in the online "Bahamianology."

Price: $200.00