Transcript New Mexico’s Bumpy Road to Statehood

New Mexico’s Bumpy
Road to Statehood
The Long and Winding Road!
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Road to Statehood
• The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo would end
the Mexican War and, with it, the United
States achieved one of its principal objectives:
the acquisition of New Mexico and California
and recognition of the Rio Grande as Texas’
Western boundary.
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Road to Statehood
• Along with the new territory, the nation also
acquired an alien population and a boatload
of problems!
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Road to Statehood
• Indeed, there were blunt spokesmen who
went so far as to suggest that the United
States had made a bad bargain in annexing
New Mexico.
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Road to Statehood
• Some years after the Civil War, General
William T. Sherman, who heartily disliked the
arid country and the people of the Southwest,
was quoted as saying that “the United
States ought to declare war on Mexico
and make it take back New Mexico.”
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• One result of such hostility was that New
Mexicans for more than sixty years were
repeatedly checkmated in their efforts to
achieve statehood. This resulted in their land
remaining a US territory until 1912, with
officials appointed from Washington. Upon
that vexation were piled others – problems
with hostile Indians and outlaws, problems of
education and economics, difficulties involving
land and water rights and territorial
boundaries.
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• A central issue was the uphill job of adapting
to a new pace and pattern of life, one ruled by
a different philosophy. A country and
people so unlike the rest of the United
States seemed to have a poor chance of
adjusting to the militant demands of
American patriotism and economic
nationalism.
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• So, one argument against the people of New
Mexico and against the possibility of
statehood for the region was CULTURAL!
Basically, the rest of the nation was being
PREJUDICED!!!
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• Yet things were not as black as they appeared.
The New Mexicans, like most pioneers, were
accustomed to living by luck and hope, and
they possessed some firm traits of character,
often overlooked by American newcomers,
that promised to see them through the hard
times of their territorial days.
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Road to Statehood
• What do we mean when we say,
“Territorial Days”?
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• The Anglo-Americans entering New Mexico in
the late 1840s and 1850s were small in
numbers but large in influence. New
merchants came, as establishment of regular
stagecoach and freight service with the East
stimulated business.
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Road to Statehood
• The ranks of the military swelled with the
construction of Fort Union (1851) and Fort
Stanton (1855) on the Indian frontier.
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• Besides the merchants and soldiers, there
were the lawyers in frock coats and bat-wing
collars. They descended in swarms, after the
conquest, eager for political power and a slice
of New Mexico’s vast real estate, which
represented the country’s most visible wealth.
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• The state of New Mexican politics in the
period following the Mexican War was readymade for lawyers and opportunists of all sorts
to jockey for advantage. The assassination of
Governor Charles Bent and the collapse in
1847 of the civil government created by
Kearny left the area under virtual military
rule.
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• That situation continued over the next several
years, while Congress debated New Mexico’s
future political status.
• In the meanwhile, persons on the Rio Grande
broke into two opposing camps: the
supporters of a territorial form of
government, and the advocates of
immediate statehood.
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• Basically, Anglo-Americans, being in the
minority, favored the territorial system. If New
Mexico stayed a territory, its principal officials
would be appointed in Washington. For that
reason, the Hispanic majority tended to lean
toward statehood; with the right to elect their
own officials, they could easily put native New
Mexicans into the highest offices.
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• Establishing Borders
• The Compromise of 1850, among other
things provided for the organization of
New Mexico as a territory. The
Compromise also resolved another
complicated matter – an old Texas claim
to that portion of New Mexico lying east
of the Rio Grande.
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• For ten million dollars’ compensation
provided by the United States government,
Texas relinquished her claim, thus paving the
way for establishment of a permanent
boundary with New Mexico.
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• The Territory, as organized in 1850, included
the New Mexico and Arizona of later years,
and a part of southern Colorado.
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• New Mexico’s southern border with Mexico
was less easily settled. In accordance with the
Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, a joint
boundary commission was organized and
began (in July 1849) the task of surveying a
dividing line between the two nations.
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• The US surveyors working with the
commission also had instructions to look for a
practical railroad route to the Pacific,
close to the boundary, and to ascertain the
agricultural possibilities of the new country.
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Road to Statehood
• In the course of the boundary work, it was
discovered that the map used to establish the
original treaty line had been inaccurate and
that the border would in fact have to be
placed thirty miles farther north.
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• That slip meant withdrawing five or six
thousand square miles from the United
States and losing a potentially rich farming
district in the Mesilla valley!!!
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• Before a serious dispute could develop, the
American minister to Mexico, James
Gadsden, negotiated in 1853 the treaty that
bears his name, providing for the purchase of
a large tract of desert land in southern New
Mexico.
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• The area offered an advantageous route for a
transcontinental railway entirely on
American soil, and its acquisition concluded
the final adjustment of our border with
Mexico.
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• The gold rush to the Rockies and the ensuing
boom in population led to the formation of
the Colorado Territory in 1861. As a result,
New Mexico lost ground, for its northern
boundary was pulled back to the parallel of 37
degrees.
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• The reduction meant the territory was
deprived of a valuable coal-mining area
around Trinidad and of jurisdiction over those
outermost settlements in the upper San Luis
valley created by New Mexicans in the
previous decade.
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• In these early years of adjusting to its new
place in the Union, New Mexico absorbed a
respectable quota of adventurers,
gamblers, speculators, and renegade
whiskey-peddlers from the eastern states –
but it also got a share of those solid upright,
intelligent citizens representing the glue
that held a democratic society together and
gave it its strength.
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• Before education or the natural process of
assimilation could make much headway,
however, the people of the Southwest found
themselves caught up in the momentous and
ugly Civil War. It was an issue in which
the New Mexicans felt only a small stake.
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• The question of the expansion of slavery to
the western territories, especially the New
Mexico territory, dominated the debate in
Congress during the 1850s.
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• When the storm broke, splitting the country in half,
New Mexico unexpectedly found herself part of the
theater of conflict.
• From the outset, the newly formed Confederacy cast
covetous eyes westward, where it dreamed of
creating an empire that would reach the
Pacific. Winning the West became a crucial aspect
of winning the war for the Confederacy.
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• The grand strategy developed by Southern
leaders showed plainly that as a first step
toward westward expansion, New Mexico
must be brought into the Confederacy.
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• The Rio Grande, for centuries the scene of
fierce struggles between the Spanish and
Native Americans now experienced the
violence between Northerners and
Southerners. Brigadier General Henry H.
Sibley of the Confederate army and Colonel
Edward R.S. Canby, commander of Federal
forces in New Mexico first clashed at the
Battle of Valverde.
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Edward R.S. Canby: Union
Kit Carson saw action at Valverde!
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• The Civil War in the Southwest was indeed
moving toward a climax. On March 27 and 28,
1862, regular troops from Fort Union,
supported by the Colorado Volunteers, met
the Rebels at Glorieta, in what would
become known as the “Gettysburg of the
West”.
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• Victory would be snatched from the Rebels’’
hands when Major John M. Chivington of
the volunteers delivered a wholly unexpected
thunderbolt. He and his men would burn the
Confederate wagons and bayonet nearly 500
horses and oxen.
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• The disaster at Glorieta and the retreat of
the Confederate Army to Texas scuttled for all
time Confederate hopes for an empire in
western America.
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• One consequence of the Civil War in the
Southwest was that the U.S. Congress
finally turned its attention to the
creating of another territory.
• Arizona would be literally carved from the
western half of New Mexico in 1863.
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• Another outcome was that it left the frontier
open to attack by hostile Indians. It was not
lost on the tribes seeking plunder or bearing
old grudges that the white men were fighting
among themselves, abandoning forts, and
withdrawing troops for duty in the East. The
ensuing bloodshed brought nightmarish days
to New Mexico.
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Road to Statehood
• So, what were TWO OUTCOMES of the War in
the Southwest?
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• Brigadier General James Carleton, a
Californian, assumed command of the Military
Department of New Mexico. His troops were
ready for acting and he had fixed notions
about how to deal with hostile tribes:
– “Wage merciless war against all hostile tribes, force them
to their knees, and then confine them to reservations
where they could be Christianized and instructed in
agriculture.”
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• The Mescalero Apaches of southern New
Mexico were first to feel the effect of Carlton’s
strategy. Placing Militia Colonel Kit Carson in
charge of troops in the field, the general sent
his men to harry the tribe into submission.
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• By March 1863, Carson brought four hundred
warriors with their families to the new Bosque
Redondo Reservation on the Pecos River in
southeastern New Mexico. Here Fort Sumner,
constructed by Carleton, stood guard.
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• The “Long Walk”:
• Next it was the turn of the Navajo, a people
numbering at that time some ten thousand
and inhabiting the crumpled and rock-strewn
lands of western New Mexico. For years,
Spanish and Mexican expeditions had tried to
bring them to bay, but the Navajo proved too
nimble, fading into the remote canyon lands
whenever their enemies gave chase.
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The Long Walk of the Navajos
Ernest L. Blumenschein
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• During the last half of 1863, government
troops marched and countermarched through
Navajo land, destroying crops and orchards
and capturing livestock. They fought no major
battles, but their campaigning left the Navajo
economy in ruins. In January of 1864, Kit
Carson led his men into the depths of Canyon
de Chelly, where, for the first time, he
encountered a large body of Navajo.
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• They were exhausted and starving, and at that
point disposed to listen to a man who was
known to be trustworthy. The tribe would
have to emigrate to a government reservation
at Bosque Redondo, Carson told them, but
that was preferable to annihilation. Under the
circumstances, the majority of the Navajo
agreed, and they surrendered.
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