Early in 1863 there appeared in the cozy circle of Confederate agents and sympathizers in Paris a southern gentleman whose looks were fully as distinguished as his reputation. Erect and tall—he stood six feet two—with a massive head crowned by a backswept plume of iron-gray hair, he had aquiline features, a penetrating glance, and a hard, resolute mouth. He carried himself with an air of authority; though he was the son of a Tennessee frontier preacher, he had the bearing and manners of a born aristocrat.

This arrival from the seceded states was William McKendree Gwin, a man who had been in his remarkable and wide-ranging lifetime a lawyer, a doctor, a land speculator, a wealthy cotton planter, a congressman from Mississippi, a founder of the state of California, and one of its first two senators. Now he was about to embark on an enterprise more grandiose than any so far—lor Gwin would not only grasp at a dukedom in Maximilian’s Mexico and a fortune beyond reckoning, bul he would attempt to provide a faltering Confederacy with a sanctuary in a new country.

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