1866 – Sheet music expressing American outrage that France had attempted to install a puppet dictator in Mexico while the U.S. was preoccupied with its Civil War

Chicago: Lyon & Healy, 1866. Disbound. Very good. Get Out Of Mexico. Words by E. B. Dewing. Music by J. P. Webster. Chicago: Lyon & Healy. Complete with six pages including the cover. Light marginal toning. Once bound in a private volume so the left edge is a little rough. In nice shape.

The front cover shows a stern Uncle Sam using his right hand to pulling a diminutive Emperor Maximillan from a palace by the his ear while gesturing with a cheroot in his left to a presumed door.

The rear cover contains a full-page advertisement of Lyon & Healy who sold musical accessories, instruments, and furniture as well as sheet (truncated) music; it features an illustration of their massive store in Chicago.

This sheet music’s four verses describe the French incursion and its repetitive shouting chorus echoes the national sentiment of the time.

“Oh, poor Max., there’s no use in talking – So pack up your kit and go. For the Universal Nation says, ‘Get out of Mexico! Get out of Mexico!”

As U. S. aid to the Mexican liberals began to flow, the French withdrew its army, and Maxmillian was executed by the new liberal Republican government. . Between 1857 and 1860, Mexico was engulfed in a complex civil war between supporters of a conservative or liberal interpretation of a new constitution. After a liberal president cancelled all foreign debts, conservative leaders seized upon the action and invited France to intervene on their behalf with the promise that his action would be overturned. France quickly accepted and installed an ally, the Archduke of Austria Ferdinand Maximilian Josef Maria von Habsburg-Lothringen, as Maxmillian I, the Emperor of Mexico, and dispatched French military units to keep him in control At the time, the United States was too embroiled in the regional turmoil that would soon burst into a Civil War of its own, to contest this action that ran counter to its long-established Monroe Doctrine, and turned Mexico into a vassal French state. However, with the end of the Civil War, the U. S. began to actively work to expel the French presence from the continent. . (Inventory #: 010434)