New Mexico Territory during the Civil War: Wallen and Evans Inspection Reports, 1862-1863 (review)

2009 ◽  
Vol 113 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-126
Author(s):  
Bradley R. Clampitt
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Civil War ◽  
New Mexico Territory

New Mexico and the Central Great Plains in the Civil War

2021 ◽  
pp. 168-186
Author(s):  
Stacey L. Smith
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Military Force ◽  
White Americans ◽  
American Empire ◽  
American States ◽  
Political Clout ◽  
New Mexico Territory

This chapter investigates campaigns of the American Civil War in New Mexico Territory and the Great Plains. It contends that the U.S. federal government fought a multifront war during the 1860s that spanned the Confederate South and the American states and territories of the Far West. The war in the Far West aimed to establish U.S. territorial sovereignty and political authority over the nation’s vast North American empire. Across the 1860s, federal officials sought to defend the West against Confederate invaders, compel Native Americans to submit to U.S. rule, force Spanish Mexican citizens to give up systems of Indian slavery and peonage, and rein in rogue White Americans living in federal territories. Federal officials, however, often lacked the political clout or military force to achieve these goals. The Civil War in the Far West reveals the unevenness and weakness of the American state in the mid-nineteenth century.

The Limits of Manifest Destiny

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Frymer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Latin America ◽  
New Mexico ◽  
Central Government ◽  
Manifest Destiny ◽  
The United States ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Settlement Policies ◽  
New Mexico Territory ◽  
Land Policies

This chapter examines the politics of American expansion into the Southwest, focusing on how some racist politicians promoted manifest destiny while others opposed expansion. The chapter first takes a look at Mexico's land policy and its attempt to design its settlement policies in a way that copied the United States. It shows how Mexico struggled to assert national authority over its states and territories, promoting a federated structure that empowered the states to control their own land policies. Many of those territories, in turn, committed themselves to land policies that were at odds with those of the central government. The chapter proceeds by discussing U.S. efforts to acquire territory from Latin America, including Cuba and the Dominican Republic, before concluding with an analysis of the politics of the battle to incorporate New Mexico Territory as a state.

Theater of a Separate War

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Cutrer
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Mississippi River ◽  
Military History ◽  
Indian Territory ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
History Of ◽  
High Desert ◽  
North And South

Though its most famous battles were waged in the East at Antietam, Gettysburg, and throughout Virginia, the Civil War was clearly a conflict that raged across a continent. From cotton-rich Texas and the fields of Kansas through Indian Territory and into the high desert of New Mexico, the trans-Mississippi theater was site of major clashes from the war’s earliest days through the surrenders of Confederate generals Edmund Kirby Smith and Stand Waite in June 1865. In this comprehensive military history of the war west of the Mississippi River, Thomas W. Cutrer shows that the theater’s distance from events in the East does not diminish its importance to the unfolding of the larger struggle. Theater of a Separate War details the battles between North and South in these far-flung regions, assessing the complex political and military strategies on both sides. While providing the definitive history of the rise and fall of the South’s armies in the far West, Cutrer shows, even if the region’s influence on the Confederacy’s cause waned, its role persisted well beyond the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to Grant. In this masterful study, Cutrer offers a fresh perspective on an often overlooked aspect of Civil War history.

The Civil War in the Western Territories: Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah

1960 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 630
Author(s):  
Robert G. Athearn ◽  
Ray C. Colton
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Civil War

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas W. Cutrer
Keyword(s):  
New Mexico ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black People ◽  
Union Army ◽  
Indian Territory ◽  
White Population ◽  
Potential Significance ◽  
Black Populations ◽  
New Mexico Territory ◽  
Slave Population

The Confederate states of Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri, the parishes of Louisiana west of the Mississippi, the Indian Territory, and the New Mexico Territory constituted what Richmond editor Edward Alfred Pollard called “the distant and obscure theatre of the Trans-Mississippi.” But “distant and obscure” as it might have seemed to a citizen of Richmond in 1862, the trans-Mississippi was an area of tremendous potential significance. For one thing, at 600,000 square miles, the trans-Mississippi Confederacy comprised more than one-half of the entire Confederate landmass, and the area was as variable as it was vast. In addition, manpower reserves were substantial. In 1860, Arkansas had a white population of more than 324,000; Louisiana, 375,000; Texas, 420,000; and Missouri, in excess of 1,000,000. The black populations of these states were also significant, with Louisiana’s slave population nearly equaling that of its free citizens. Texas had a slave population of more than 180,000, and Arkansas and Missouri each had more than 100,000 enslaved black people. With the coming of emancipation and the enlistment of former slaves into the Union army, many of these men flocked to the colors and played significant roles in the campaigns of 1863 and 1864. Of Louisiana’s black men of military age, 24,052, or 31 percent, joined the army, and in Arkansas, that number was 5,526, or 24 percent. From Texas, however, a state that largely avoided Federal invasion and occupation and therefore held its slaves until the war was ended, only 47 black men enlisted, a mere .001 percent of its prewar slave population....

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