Although people often believe that the surrender of armies means the end of violence, this was not always the case in the Americas. Violence often did not end with the surrender of the enemy forces. In the US, for example, after the surrender of rebel armies led by Robert E Lee, Joseph E Johnston and Stand Watie, former rebels returned home, but they did not suddenly embrace peace. Instead, many of them quickly adopted violence as a strategy to win the peace following the war they lost. This violence took various forms. It ranged from individual attacks against African Americans and their white Republican allies to larger-scale violent episodes by paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan. Furthermore, especially as Reconstruction continued in the US, the vanquished and their allies launched more and more audacious assaults against local and state governments and officials, which eventually resulted in the overthrow of duly-elected governments in the southern states. This wave of violence has led recent scholars to contend that there was a war against Reconstruction, a continuation of the US Civil War by somewhat different means.
In Mexico, the War of the Reform (1857-61) resulted in the triumph of the liberal government under Juárez, but this vicious civil war did not end with the liberal victory. Juárez suspended debt payments; the UK, Spain and France intervened in Mexico; and France, determined to recreate the New World empire it had lost several generations before, committed military force to overthrow Juárez’s government (at this point, the UK and Spain, who just wanted to get paid, withdrew).
Mexican conservatives, who had fought the liberals for years, allied with the French. They played a critical role in helping the French take control of Mexico and in persuading the Austrian archduke Ferdinand Maximilian to take the throne of a new Mexican empire. Although it seemed for a moment like civil war had ended in 1861, in reality, it had entered a new phase that did not end until the defeat of Maximilian and his conservative collaborators in 1867. Even after the war ended, violence continued in Mexico, although, unlike the US, this violence often took place between groups of victorious liberals.