An illustration by Ian Bristow in Where Duty Calls. New Mexico is a dry and harsh land. We do not have the soil or the water to support plantations. Yet, in 1861 a Confederate force entered the state. Why would they bother? The answer lies with one man, who convinced the South that there were two good reasons for the Confederacy to want this territory.
The U.S. Army prior to the Civil War was rather small. Its ten infantry regiments, four artillery regiments, three mounted infantry regiments, and two regiments each of cavalry and dragoons were scattered across the continent, with only 18 of the 197 companies garrisoned east of the Mississippi River. Of the 16,367 men in the Army, 1,108 were commissioned officers. When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, about 20% of these officers resigned. Most of these men were Southerners by birth and chose to join the Confederate Army.
One of the men who resigned was Henry H. Sibley, a native of Louisiana who was serving New Mexico Territory with the 2nd U.S. Dragoons. Sibley resigned his commission on May 13, 1861, the day he was supposed to be promoted to Major. He accepted an appointment to colonel in the Confederate army three days later. A month after that, he became a Brigadier General, in command of a West Texas brigade of volunteer cavalry. He recruited and gathered his force in San Antonio and named it the Army of New Mexico.
Taking New Mexico was only the first step in Sibley’s bold plan to capture the west for the Confederacy. And the New Mexico Campaign would cost the South almost nothing. Sibley assured Confederate President Jefferson Davis that his troops would be able to live off the land, resupplying themselves with Union stores as they captured first Fort Craig and then Fort Union. But even at no cost, why would the South want New Mexico? There were two reasons: access and idealism.
Gold prospectors in the Rocky Mountains of western Kansas Territory, near Pike's Peak in what would become Colorado New Mexico provided access to more desirable lands. One of those lands was Colorado, New Mexico’s neighbor to the north. If Sibley could wrest the Union Army from New Mexico, he could take control of Fort Union. In addition to having the greatest stockpile of supplies in the west, the fort could become a forward base of supply from which to continue north. Gold had been discovered in Colorado in 1858. Sibley argued that capturing a territory filled with gold and silver mines would help replenish the badly depleted Confederate treasury. The Rio Grande was a natural conduit to Colorado, guaranteeing water to the troops and their mounts as they traveled north.
John Baylor, governor of Confederate Arizona. Once Sibley had captured the goldfields of Colorado, he planned to turn west and take the second on his list of desirable lands, California. By July of 1861, the Union Navy had established a blockade of all the major southern ports from Virginia to Texas. The Confederacy desperately needed to establish a new supply line to the South. Sibley argued that this could be done through the warm-water ports of California. The southern part of the territory, including the land acquired by the United State in the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, had already been secured for the Confederacy by Lieutenant John R. Baylor, who had ridden in and taken control in July, 1861. This land was the most promising for building a transcontinental railroad, which would then link the California ports to Southern cities.
The deep water port of Los Angeles
But acquiring Colorado and California for the South was not reason enough for Sibley to invade New Mexico. Tied into the need for a southern port and a railroad was the ideal of Manifest Destiny. In 1845, editor John Louis O'Sullivan had coined “Manifest Destiny” to promote the annexation of Texas and the acquisition of the Oregon territory. Americans began believing in a country that stretched from sea to shinning sea, from the Atlantic seaboard to the shores of the Pacific. When the country divided during the War, this dream was taken up by both the North and the South. New Mexico Territory would be part of the wide swath of land the Confederacy needed to prove their own destiny, both to themselves and to the other nations of the world.
Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way (mural study, U.S. Capitol), 1861
In the end, Sibley's dreams and the dreams of the Confederacy could not overcome reality. The Army of New Mexico could not live off the land. They had far too much hoofstock for the amount of fodder available in the dry desert. The local population, which lived just above subsistence level in even the best of times, could not support the troops. After the war, in a letter to John McRae, father of the South Carolina-born Union Captain Alexander McRae, who fought bravely and was killed at the Battle of Valverde, General Sibley wrote “You will naturally speculate upon the causes of my precipitate evacuation of the Territory of New Mexico after it had been virtually conquered. My dear Sir, we beat the enemy whenever we encountered him. The famished country beat us.”
Retired history teacher Jennifer Bohnhoff has written a middle grade novel about the Confederate invasion of New Mexico during the Civil War. Where Duty Calls, available from Kinkajou Press, a division of Artemesia Publishing, is the first in a trilogy of novels entitled Rebels Along the Rio Grande.
