The Civil War In New Mexico

Although the New Mexico Territory was far distant from the main theaters of war, it was engulfed in the same violence and bloodshed as the rest of the nation. The Civil War in New Mexico was fought in the deserts and mountains of the huge territory, which was mostly wilderness, amid the continuing ancient wars against the wild Indian tribes waged by both sides. The armies were small, but the stakes were high: control of the Southwest. Retired lieutenant colonel and Civil War historian Dr. Walter Earl Pittman presents this concise history of New Mexico during the Civil War years from the Confederate invasion of 1861 to the Battles of Valverde and Glorieta to the end of the war.

With limited money or free time, Father Stanley Francis Louis Crocchiola wrote and published 177 books and booklets pertaining to the southwest. He published this work after 19 years of researching the Civil War as the Volunteers of New Mexico lived and fought it.

The Civil War in New Mexico began in 1861 with the Confederate invasion and occupation of the Mesilla Valley. At the same time, small villages and towns in New Mexico Territory faced raids from Navajos and Apaches. In response the commander of the Department of New Mexico Colonel Edward Canby and Governor Henry Connelly recruited what became the First and Second New Mexico Volunteer Infantry. In this book leading Civil War historian Jerry Thompson tells their story for the first time, along with the history of a third regiment of Mounted Infantry and several companies in a fourth regiment. Thompson’s focus is on the Confederate invasion of 1861–1862 and its effects, especially the bloody Battle of Valverde. The emphasis is on how the volunteer companies were raised; who led them; how they were organized, armed, and equipped; what they endured off the battlefield; how they adapted to military life; and their interactions with New Mexico citizens and various hostile Indian groups, including raiding by deserters and outlaws. Thompson draws on service records and numerous other archival sources that few earlier scholars have seen. His thorough accounting will be a gold mine for historians and genealogists, especially the appendix, which lists the names of all volunteers and militia men.

The Civil War in the Indian Territory proved to be a test of valor and endurance for both sides. Author Steve Cottrell outlines the events that led up to the involvement of this region in the war, the role of the Native Americans who took part in the war, and the effect their participation had on the war's outcome, particularly in this region. For Indians, as in the rest of the country, neighbor was pitted against neighbor, with members of the same tribe often fighting against each other. Cottrell describes in vivid detail the guerilla warfare, surprise attacks, and all-out battles that stained the grassy plains of Oklahoma with blood. In addition, he introduces the reader to the interesting and often colorful leaders of the military-North and South-including the only Indian to attain the rank of general in the war, Confederate general Stand Watie. With outstanding illustrations by Andy Thomas, this story is a tribute to and a revealing portrait of those who fought and the important role they played in this era of our country's history.

John Potts Slough, the Union commander at the Battle of Glorieta Pass, lived a life of relentless pursuit for success that entangled him in the turbulent events of mid-nineteenth-century America. As a politician, Slough fought abolitionists in the Ohio legislature and during Kansas Territory's fourth and final constitutional convention. He organized the 1st Colorado Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War broke out, eventually leading his men against Confederate forces at the pivotal engagement at Glorieta Pass. After the war, as chief justice of the New Mexico Territorial Supreme Court, he struggled to reform corrupt courts amid the territory's corrosive Reconstruction politics. Slough was known to possess a volcanic temper and an easily wounded pride. These traits not only undermined a promising career but ultimately led to his death at the hands of an aggrieved political enemy who gunned him down in a Santa Fe saloon. Recounting Slough's timeless story of rise and fall during America's most tumultuous decades, historian Richard L. Miller brings to life this extraordinary figure.

A full, detailed, and accurate history of the struggle in the Glorieta valley. Includes organization, pproach to the battle, military units organized and where, all known participants' accounts.

"This volume unifies the concerns of Civil War and western history, revealing how Confederate secession created new and shifting borderlands. In the West, both Civil War battlefields and Civil War politics engaged a wider range of ethnic and racial distinctions, raising questions that would arise only later in places farther east. Likewise, the histories of occupation, reincorporation, and expanded citizenship during Reconstruction in the South have ignored the connections to previous as well as subsequent efforts in the West. The stories contained in this volume complicate our understanding of the paths from slavery to freedom for white as well as non-white Americans. By placing the histories of the American West and the Civil War and Reconstruction into one sustained conversation, this volume expands the limits of both by emphasizing how struggles over land, labor, sovereignty, and citizenship shaped the U.S. nation-state in this tumultuous era. This volume highlights significant moments and common concerns of this continuous conflict, as it stretched across the continent and throughout the nineteenth century"--Provided by publisher.

Following Zebulon Pike’s expeditions in the early nineteenth century, U.S. expansionists focused their gaze on the Southwest. Explorers, traders, settlers, boundary adjudicators, railway surveyors, and the U.S. Army crossed into and through New Mexico, transforming it into a battleground for competing influences determined to control the region. Previous histories have treated the Santa Fe trade, the American occupation under Colonel Stephen W. Kearny, the antebellum Indian Wars, debates over slavery, the Pacific Railway, and the Confederate invasion during the Civil War as separate events in New Mexico. In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser demonstrates instead that these developments were interconnected parts of a process by which the United States effected the political, economic, and ideological transformation of the region. New Mexico was an early proving ground for Manifest Destiny, the belief that U.S. possession of the entire North American continent was inevitable. Kiser shows that the federal government’s military commitment to the territory stemmed from its importance to U.S. expansion. Americans wanted California, but in order to retain possession of it and realize its full economic and geopolitical potential, they needed New Mexico as a connecting thoroughfare in their nation-building project. The use of armed force to realize this claim fundamentally altered New Mexico and the Southwest. Soldiers marched into the territory at the onset of the Mexican-American War and occupied it continuously through the 1890s, leaving an indelible imprint on the region’s social, cultural, political, judicial, and economic systems. By focusing on the activities of a standing army in a civilian setting, Kiser reshapes the history of the Southwest, underlining the role of the military not just in obtaining territory but in retaining it.