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Agnes Joy zu Salm-Salm was born in Vermont (something she tried to forget.) She would not have chosen the New England Block to recall the glamorous tale of the Princess Salm-Salm.
The Prince & Princess Salm-Salm (1844-1912)
A joint portrait doesn’t seem to exist but the couple is joined here with a little digital alteration.
Union expatriates Agnes and husband differed from the typical refugees discussed this year in Confederados. Agnes’s early career is rather mysterious. Was she a circus performer, a "Cuban" dancer? Her own biographical accounts begin in wartime Washington where she met German Prince Felix Salm-Salm escaping his European debts in the Union Army. Agnes in her 20s was pretty, flirtatious and ambitious.
After they married in 1862 her job became ensuring her husband’s shaky success as an American officer. Fellow officer Frederick Otto von Fritsch understood her well:
“A very shrewd woman whose motto was the same as that of the Jesuits: ‘The end justifies the means.’...she made use of her charms, and bestowed her favors on those who could promote her husband’s interests. Proud and politely cold with ordinary men, she was seductive only with influential people….”
After 1865’s Union victory Felix was a soldier looking for a war. Agnes turned her ambitions towards Mexico in political turmoil due to Napoleon III’s interference in Benito Juárez’s revolution. Taking advantage of the U.S. wartime distraction the French Emperor first sent 30,000 French troops in 1862 and then Maximilian to rule the country. Maximilian and Carlota arrived in the summer of 1863 hoping for support from the Confederacy, never understanding the hopelessness of their ambitions in a country that wanted nothing to do with European monarchs who did not speak Spanish.
Once the Civil War was over the U.S. backed Juárez’s revolutionary forces with arms. Carlota sailed to Europe to gather support from the Hapsburgs and fellow monarchs to no avail. She completely broke down. Seeking help in vain from the Pope she refused to leave the Vatican, was confined thereafter and considered seriously insane for the rest of her life.
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1873 painting by Manuel Ocaranza:
Agnes imploring Juárez to free Maximilian.
Felix himself was imprisoned and sentenced to execution but Agnes successfully negotiated for her husband's freedom. After his release they went on to their next war where he fought as a German in the Franco-Prussian War and was killed in battle in 1870. Agnes lived the rest of her life in Europe. Her second marriage to British diplomat Charles Heneage did not last long. She died in her late 60s in Germany in 1912.
One has a hard time exaggerating Agnes’s sense of publicity. Here she and Jimmy are pictured riding an American train in the cowcatcher.
The Block
David Coffey, Soldier Princess: The Life and Legend of Agnes Salm-Salm in North America, 1861–1867. (2002) Texas A&M University Press. ISBN 978-1-58544-168-6
Mary-Luise Frings, "Salm-Salm, Agnes Elisabeth Winona Leclercq Joy (1844-1912), princess, adventurer, and wartime humanitarian." American National Biography. Oxford University Press, (2000).
Agnes Elizabeth W. Salm-Salm, Ten Years of My Life, Google Books. London: Richard Bentley & Sons. (1876).
