Talk:New Mexico Territory in the American Civil War

Requested move

Per manual of style guides on using contemporary names, I'm requesting a wholesale move of all territories created during or before the ACW to page space titled correctly for the era. BusterD (talk) 20:40, 15 August 2008 (UTC)

Unnecessary. New Mexico was called New Mexico in 1861; that it was not a state should be made clear in the intro. Style guidelines do not determine article names; our naming conventions do not require us to have long official names instead of the ones that are or were in common use. See WP:COMMONNAME. Septentrionalis PMAnderson 19:40, 16 August 2008 (UTC)

As another user has correctly identified, Arizona was also known as New Mexico in 1861. Prior this datestamp, that user retitled this page as a territory and merged the AZ page. Fortunately, naming conventions, themselves styleguides, are arbitrated by consensus. I endorse Bill's boldness in the move and merge. BusterD (talk) 11:13, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Agree with BusterD. Scott Mingus (talk) 14:28, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Disagree. Most have no idea if an area was a state or territory during the time. For simplicity and elegance it is best to treat each area as a state. BTW, the CSA saw Arizona as it's territory, so it should remain a separate article.--King Bedford I ^{Seek his grace} 04:58, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Actually, Arizona and New Mexico were not necessarily considered the same place in 1861. Arizona was first used to describe the area of New Mexico territory south of the gila and west of the Rio Grande. See Traditional Arizona.

Arizona Territory in the American Civil War

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)

Too much info on Arizona?

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)

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)

Highly dubious: "sentiment in the territory was in favor of the Confederacy."

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)

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)

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)