Talk:New Mexico Territory in the American Civil War

message: So what about Arizona Territory after 1863 when it became a Union territory, seperate from New Mexico. The Arizona in the American Civil War article should never have been merged here.--$1LENCE D00600D (talk) 01:30, 18 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Arizona Territory in the American Civil War

message: I noticed that the Politcs subsection seemed to have a lot of information on the Confederate Arizona Territory but almost nothing on the New Mexico Territory politics during the ACW. Should the Arizona info in this section be condensed to a minimum? Wild Wolf (talk) 00:27, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: The was some question about the merger about a year ago, but it never got settled; I'm of the opinion that the Arizona material is perhaps over-emphasized, but at the very least we greatly need to expand the New Mexico material in the same section, even if we leave the Arizona material intact.IcarusPhoenix (talk) 05:50, 30 September 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Too much info on Arizona? 

message: Just came across this particular wording, "At the outbreak of the Civil War, sentiment in the territory was in favor of the Confederacy."  This wording has been in the article since Aug. 2008 but was not sourced until much later. As a paragraph it lists the Arizona SCV site as a source as well as Frazier (p.34), but it is not clear that either of these refer to the assertion made in the opening sentence.  I don't have Frazier so I can't check the latter.  
Other sources I do have indicate the opposite to be the case.  Yes, there was a secession convention in the far southern portion of the territory and repeated in Tucson, and the majority of the U.S. officers stationed in the territory would join the CSA, but neither the majority of the populace nor the regular soldiers favored secession.  As Don Alberts states on p. 5 of The Battle of Glorietta: Union Victory in the West:  "The bulk of the native Hispanic population lived in the northern half of New Mexico, which was tied closely to the Union by trade with the northern states through Missouri.  A sprinkling of Anglo merchants and government officials also lived in the area, many having married into Hispanic families over the course two decades."  Later he states that "however, while there was no overriding issue uniting them behind the Union effort, they were in agreement on one particular feeling the resulted from prior experiences of invasion and racial insults--they detested Texans." 
Ray Colton in The Civil War in the Western Territories describes the sentiment in New Mexico:  "Since New Mexico had been recently annexed to the United States by conquest, it may have been assumed that the Spanish-American people would favor the Secession movement.  When the test came however, the majority of the citizens, even at the height of the Confederate victories, especially in the northern part of the Territory, were loyal to the Federal Government."  In speaking of the Mesilla and Tucson conventions he uses Twitchell's New Mexican History and states "that the masses of the in the territory were loyal to the Union."  Searching Twitchell's Vol. II of The Leading Facts of New Mexican History confirms this characterization and Twitchell' supplies quotes from Bancroft to support the view. Red Harvest (talk) 11:27, 16 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Thanks for fixing that; I've wanted to do a massive rework of this article for years, but have never gotten around to it.  In the case of that particular line, it appears whoever wrote it made the exact same error certain Confederate officers made at the same time: They mistook apathy for antipathy. --IcarusPhoenix--The Labyrinth 01:04, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: I had the same impression.  A quote from decades before when Texans were raiding was attributed to Manuel Armijo, "Poor New Mexico! So far from heaven, so close to Texas."  Those early events and resultant animosity should probably form part of this article, but I'm not well versed in them at present.  The other factor presently absent in this article is that a major reason for the creation of a Southern Arizona territory was the pre-war effort of slave states to run a trans-continental railway through it, or so I've read.  Western expansion was somewhat corked until the Deep South seceded. Red Harvest (talk) 05:11, 21 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Highly dubious: "sentiment in the territory was in favor of the Confederacy."