How the American Civil War Nearly Started in Santa Fe
When Texas came surprisingly close to igniting the Civil War ten years before Lincoln
In August of 1850 acting United States Secretary of War Gen. Winfield Scott sent an unusual dispatch 1,800 miles west to the dusty territorial capital of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It read, in part:
“You are hereby instructed, in the case of any military invasion of New Mexico from Texas, or by armed men from any other State or states for the purpose of overturning the order of civil government that may exist in New Mexico at the time, or of subjugating New Mexico to Texas, to interpose, as far practicable, the troops under your command against any such act of violence.”
This order involved no idle threat. Colonial John Munroe, acting military governor New Mexico, had just run an especially aggressive attache of Texans out of the territory earlier that spring. In Austin, Fire-Eaters and Southern nationalists were in the midst of ratcheting up pressure on the Texan government to return en masse and take New Mexico by force if necessary.
Over late 1849 and 1850 one of the most ambitious bills in U.S. history navigated the thorny question of how to organize the newly acquired expanse of land gained from Mexico at the end of the Mexican-American War. Now known as the Compromise of 1850, it attempted to resolve the critical question of whether any new states or territories carved from these war spoils would enter the Union as free or slaveholding.
At the time of Gen. Scott’s dispatch the infamous Compromise was nearing approval by both houses of the U.S. Congress and would soon be signed into law by President Millard Fillmore. One final piece needed to be certified by the state legislature of Texas however or the entire effort was at risk of collapse — formal approval to drop their territorial claims over half of New Mexico in exchange for a $10 million bailout of state debt by the federal government.
1850 was not the first time that Texas had attempted to invade New Mexico, nor would it be the last.
The Texan claims over all of New Mexico east of the Rio Grande, including the cities of Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Taos, traced back to the birth of the Republic of Texas in 1836 when the victorious Texan army compelled the defeated and captured Gen. Santa Anna of Mexico the Treaty of Velasco after the Battle of San Jacinto.
Neither public or public version of the Treaty was ever ratified by the Mexican government. Santa Anna, considered an absentee president for years, was swiftly nullified as President and his successor claimed the terms of the Treaty had been signed under duress by a man with no legal authority to bind the nation. Mexico further refused to recognize the Republic of Texas as a sovereign nation, nor did it recognize any of the Texan claims within the Treaty over the province of Nuevo México.
The Texan claims over New Mexico were fantastical from the start.
Nuevo México had been a kingdom of the Spanish Empire since the Don Juan de Oñate Expedition of 1598. It was reorganized as a province following Mexican independence from Spain in 1821 and had its own Mexican governor seated in its historic capital of Santa Fe, six hundred miles northwest from the province of Coahuila y Tejas and the administrative center of Béxar.
As such Nuevo México and Tejas operated as independent governments for centuries, being separated by four hundred unforgiving miles of water less terrain and rovering bands of Comanche raiders and other tribes. While the Republic of Texas had gained actual control over Coahuila y Tejas north of the Rio Nueces after the Battle of San Jacinto they had no military or civil presence in Nuevo México whatsoever. Thus their claim was entirely based on the terms of the non-ratified Treaty of Velasco.
One other critical note is the racial makeup of the two provinces was quite different by 1836. Anglo-American settlers had been allowed to immigrate into nearby Coahuila y Tejas since 1830, which resulted in an influx from nearby U.S. southern slave states that quickly outpaced the native Mexican populace. Hosting a newly arrived majority population with little loyalty to the distant Mexican government was one reason they were able to organize a sustained revolt after the repeal of the Constitution of 1824 for the more authoritative Las Siete Leyes in 1835.
In contrast, Mexico maintained restrictions on foreigners in Nuevo México that had been in place since original Spanish rule. This allowed the more isolated Nuevo México to keep a strong Mexican and Spanish majority identify, with only a small English speaking Anglo-American presence that primarily consisted of traders from Missouri moving along the Santa Fe Trail.
The hard truth was that the Republic of Texas had no historic or real world basis for their claim over half of Nuevo México when they drew up the terms to the Treaty of Velasco 1836. Nor did they have any practical means to secure the territory after Mexico refused to ratify the Treaty.
To address the situation of claiming a distant province for which they had no legitimacy or presence, Texas Governor Mirabeau B. Lamar organized the infamous Texan-Santa Fe Expedition of 1841 under the guise of a trading expedition to tap into the lucrative trade market flowing out of the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri north of Texas. The ulterior purpose of the expedition was to persuade Nuevo México to join the fledgling Republic via the armed military attache sent alongside the commercial traders.
The Expedition ended up being an mitigated disaster. Many deserted or lost their lives due to poor logistical planning, and the sitting Mexican governor of Nuevo México quickly rounded up the ragtag group of survivors who managed to cross the Llano Estacado once they reached the nearby hills of Santa Fe. The Texans were marched in chains 2,000 miles down to Mexico City before eventually being released after the U.S. government intervened on their behalf.
Texas took the embarrassment in characteristic stride, maintaining the fullest extent of their recently debunked claims over Nuevo México when they applied for annexation to join the United States in 1845 as the 28th state. Many politicians in Washington, including Presidents Tyler and Polk, were happy to accept the full claims, leading to a historical series of misleading maps that lasted for generations.
The reason why so many maintained the obvious fiction was simple. A sizable portion of the American political class had a vested interest in assuring that the United States reached the full extent of its Manifest Destiny. They were itching for a full on war with Mexico as a pretext to lay claim over California and everything between. Enforcing the exaggerated Texan claims helped allow this war to become a reality.
The Mexican-American War itself was mostly anticlimactic. Mexico was trounced across multiple theaters by the American forces, including the full occupation of Nuevo México led by Brigadier General Stephen Kearny in 1847. His battalion moved in from the historic route out of Missouri, not Texas, before continuing on to take northern California as well.
With the newly christened New Mexico Territory now under actual U.S. federal control the question on its official boundaries grew more complex. While incorporating the claimed territory east of the Rio Grande into the already enlarged state of Texas seemed outlandish to most, a vocal minority of politicians across the U.S. South began to publicly support the position. The reason for the partisan shift was surprisingly explicit —
Texas had entered the Union as a slave state, and slavery supporting Southern representatives were about to do everything in their power to stretch the legal boundaries of slavery extend as far west as possible.
By 1849 the question of slavery had become one of political math. Early Southern representatives had won a major concession by embedding slavery directly into the U.S. Constitution in 1787. The three-fifths clause allowed slave owners to count 3/5ths of their slaves toward state census numbers for the purpose of determining congressional representation.
This allowed slave supporting representatives from the South to dominate the U.S. Congress for the next sixty years despite carrying a smaller population of free citizens than the North. Presidential elections also tilted toward slave owning candidates due to inflated electoral college votes. Ten of the first twelve presidents owned slaves, and slave owners were heavily over represented in every aspect of the federal government through the 1840’s.
Southerners wielded this advantage as a voting bloc to keep their advantage growing strong. For sixty years they insured that slave states and free states loosely entered the Union in pairs — Vermont and Kentucky (1791/92), Mississippi and Indiana (1816/17), Illinois and Alabama (1818/19), Missouri and Maine (1820/21), Arkansas and Michigan (1836/37), and Texas and Iowa (1845/46). The goal was to never let the balance tip in the favor of free states, for that is when they feared the federal government would clamp down and attempt to subvert slavery within their state borders.
“The day that the balance between the two sections of the country — the slaveholding States and the non-slaveholding States — is destroyed, is a day that will not be far removed from political revolution, anarchy, civil war, and widespread disaster.” — John C. Calhoun, Senator from South Carolina
Tensions had already been on the rise throughout the 1830’s and 40's as a wave of immigrants from Europe flooded into major Northern seaboard ports like Boston and New York. This population surge threatened to shift the political balance out of Southern hands, which satisfied Northern and Southern moderates who did not favor expanding slavery but were happy to see it contained within the states where it was then permitted.
Southerners could see the same demographic time bomb however. The explosion of territory gained from Mexico by the end of 1847 would determine the future of slavery and of the delicate balance of free and slave states that had lasted for six decades. This seemed to be the turning point their forefathers warned of, when they would have to chose between protecting the right of ownership over human chattel slavery against their oaths to the greater republic.
After the 1848 elections the Democrat party found themselves with a narrow majority in the U.S. Senate and plurality advantage in the U.S. House. To add to the confusion there was a mix of pro- and anti-slavery views among both Democrats and their chief rivals the Whig party which made political calculations difficult to any degree of certainty.
The Whigs, primarily made of northern representatives with lukewarm anti-slavery views, were in control the presidency thanks to the unlikely nomination and win of war hero Zachery Taylor. The most influential member of Whigs was U.S. Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky, a fervent Unionist who wanted to percent Southern secession at all costs. It was Clay who pushed for a grand Compromise to defuse the rising tensions across the Capitol over how to divvy up the newly acquired Mexican territory in a way that would somehow satisfy both slavery and anti-slavery forces.
It was a tall task. Ardent Abolitionists in both chambers sensed the opportunity to deal slavery a mortal blow, and refused to support any compromise with the favored moderate position that would allow the new territories to vote on the issue of slavery expansion within their borders at a later date, known as Popular Sovereignty. Conversely, Southern Fire Eaters blasted any attempts to prohibit slavery within the territories as a direct act of aggression against the South and the unity of the nation as a whole.
Out west things moved more quickly. California was experiencing one of the great population booms in American history due to the ongoing Gold Rush of 1849. Local organizers worked to pull together a state constitution and elect delegates for a statehood convention to fast track Congressional approval. Despite local lobbying efforts it was not likely to enter as a slave state, which made the situation in New Mexico even more critical.
In Santa Fe numerous groups of southerners were lobbying newly arrived northern Anglos and native Nuevo Mexicanos to formally acquiesce to the Texan claim. Both groups pushed back on these attempts, and the federal military government left in charge of the region generally ignored their antics while awaiting instructions from Washington. The peacetime army holding the territory was spread thinner than they had hoped for, and there were real concerns if they could hold the territory of Texas got more aggressive in asserting their position.
Back in Washington momentum stagnated on a compromise. President Taylor, despite being a slave holder himself, refused to support the Texan claims, considering everything acquired from Mexico to be federal land. Texan newspapers began drumming up more aggressive language on the issue, with the influential Texas State Gazette in Austin opining that “Rather than surrender to the usurpation of the General Government one inch of our blood-won territory, let every human habitation in Santa Fe be leveled to the earth, and we, the necessity of the case requires it, buried beneath the ruins.”
Clay considered New Mexico to be the “crisis of crisis” that could splinter the nation into full blown civil war. Over the winter of 1849 and into 1850 numerous proposals went round and round over the future of New Mexico but the ideological divisions were too deep. Calhoun penned several fiery calls to action if their rights to slavery continued to be assailed, notably the Southern Address that was so subversively secessionist several Southerners refused to sign on to it, including Senators Sam Houston and Tom Rusk of Texas.
The discussions grew more divisive. Abolitionists pushed to eliminate slavery in the Distinct of Columbia, while Senator Andrew Butler of South Carolina introduced a bill strength enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, a direct attack on the Underground Railroad and current laws in free soil states that made it near impossible for Southerners to recoup slaves smuggled slaves out of the south.
Tensions flared in both houses of Congress, including a riotous exchange when William Duer, an antislavery Whig, was nearly attacked on the House floor by Richard Meade of Virginia after calling him out as a “disunionist” over his fiery speech threatening secession over the dispute. That only led to more and more assertive threats over secession from Southern representatives as the debate continued.
“I do not hesitate to avow before this House and the country, and in the presence of the living God, that if by your legislation you seek to drive us from the territories of California and New Mexico, purchased by the common blood and treasure of the whole people, and abolish slavery in this District, thereby attempting to fix a national degradation upon half of the States of this Confederacy, I am for disunion.” —Robert Toombs, U.S. Representative from Georgia.
Clay continued to fight for a compromise, using all of his accumulated experience and political skill to propose a united bill that seemed to please no one. He proposed pushing back the Texan borders several hundred miles east of the Rio Grande, leaving the spine of New Mexico settlement intact while still granting Texas an enormous berth of territory. He also proposed entering California as a state and allowing them to vote on slavery under Popular Sovereignty while granting territorial status without slavery to the rest of the west, all boons to the North. Finally he pushed the passage of the updated Fugitive Slave Act and to maintain slavery in Washington DC to appease the South.
Fredrick Douglas and other Abolitionists painted Clay as a “moral monster” for his willingness to support a new Fugitive Slave Act, while the South was sent into full fury at the attempted compromise that essentially doomed the expansion of slavery west of shrunken Texas border.
Jefferson Davis, a Mexican-American War hero and Senator from Mississippi, positioned himself as the leading voice of the pro-slavery forces from his Senate speeches vehemently supporting the Texan claims into New Mexico. He was the heir apparent to the ailing and soon to be dead Calhoun, but unlike his mentor he was far more direct in his threats of secession if the North continued to aggravate their southern neighbors over the issue of slavery.
A large part of the non-slaveholding States have declared war against the institution of slavery... Now, sir, can anyone believe, dues any one hope, that the southern States in this Confederacy will continue, as in times gone by, to support the Union, to bear its burdens, in peace and in war, in a degree disproportioned to their numbers, if that very Government is to be arrayed in hostility against an institution so interwoven with its interests, its domestic peace, and all its social relations, that it cannot be disturbed without causing their overthrow?— Jefferson Davis, Senator from Mississippi
Clay’s omnibus bill was eventually cut to pieces in parliamentary voting in July of 1850, ultimately alienating both Abolitionist and pro-slavery forces. President Taylor had also died suddenly of a stomach ailment earlier that summer, leaving his Vice President Millard Fillmore to wade through the critical proceedings.
The mood in Washington was of paralysis. Momentum across the federal government was shifting toward the emboldened southern nationalists calling for secession, and with the failure of a legendary figure like Clay to unite Congress the risk of an actual splintering between North and South states appeared more plausible than it ever had before in the history of the nation.
At this critical juncture Representative Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois pulled off an improbable political feat. A moderate like Clay who supported Popular Sovereignty, (a position that Abraham Lincoln would skewer him over in their infamous debates a few years later) Douglas had little emotional stake in the proceedings outside a strong desire to broker some sort of compromise. He divided Clay’s original bill into smaller pieces and started calculating cold, hard votes. Douglas realized that each individual article of the bill had enough votes to pass both houses of Congress individually by mix and matching the complex web of voters across the North and South, Democrats and Whigs, and antislavery and pro-slavery forces.
Through this juggling act he managed to get near the entirety of the original bill approved by the U.S. House and Senate despite fierce opposition to each limited article. The most tense section passed was, of course, over the much disputed New Mexico-Texas border.
Back in New Mexico an unwelcome guest had spent the spring stirring up a hornet’s nest of trouble.
Robert S. Neighbors had been dispatched to New Mexico by Texas Governor Peter H. Bell. The Governor, a former Texas Ranger, was out of patience with the federal government in Santa Fe. He sent Neighbors with copies of the Texas constitution, an array of legal documents, and several Texas Rangers to persuade the locals to join Texas peacefully.
Neighbors party survived a brutal winter trek through the deserts of modern west Texas before arriving in El Paso north of the Rio Grande. El Paso had historically been part of Nuevo Mexico as a critical stop on the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro between Mexico City and Santa Fe. The Mexico border region was near lawless after the destruction of the Northern Army of Mexican during the Battle of Chihuahua City three years earlier and Neighbors received a friendly welcome from a population boom of recent Anglo arrivals from east Texas.
After dispatching his orders, drawing up county lines, and making several local appointments he continued north up the Rio Grande to Santa Fe where he received a far chillier reception. Officials had already received word of his usurpation in El Paso and New Mexico Chief Justice Joab Houghton, a native of New York, threatened to jail anyone attempting to expand Texas jurisdiction in Santa Fe.
Even under such threats Neighbors had been emboldened by his success in El Paso. Upon his arrival in April he bee-lined directly to Colonel Munroe, the current military governor of New Mexico. He demanded Munroe acknowledge the jurisdictional claims of Texas over the region and remove all current federal officials to be replaced by his own appointees.
Munroe did not budge. He refused to recognize the Texans claims and stated he had no right to remove other officials in New Mexico. He was operating under clear orders sent from President Taylor sent that March to protect the wishes of New Mexico to assert their own statehood and protect the residents against the claims of the Texans. This was a bold move since all parties knew the federal troops in the region were spread thin and had little hope of holding much of anything outside of Santa Fe.
The overconfident Neighbors was flummoxed. He reiterated threats to take the state by force if necessary, and then went on a recruitment tour to sway some friendly Southerners in the region to his cause over the next month. The effort was unsuccessful in building a local movement toward Texas however. Nuevo Mexicans feared that Texan occupation would bring in more Anglos and introduce black slavery which would compete with their own labor. Pueblo Indians showed little interest in yet another distant would-be conqueror, and the local Anglo population from northern states such as Munroe and Houghton held critical positions of power.
By May 1850 Neighbors had fled back to Austin. At the same time New Mexico held a statehood convention that outright rejected the Texas border claims. Neighbors had already predicted such an outcome and dispatched notice to Governor Bell that urged him to send a regiment of Texas Rangers and enforce Texan law in the state “which can only be done by military force.”
This lingering tension was felt far to the east in Washington. Senator Henry Foote of Mississippi had taken the hell brazer mantle role on New Mexico after Neighbor’s failed attempt to take the region by diplomatic force.
“We are about to be plunged into all the horrors of civil war, unless Congress shall interfere, in season, and arrest the fatal course of events. If a single drop of Texan blood shall be shed upon her own sacred soil, it will be the duty of every southern man, able to bear arms, to rush to the scene of the strife, in order to put down usurpation and to maintain the cause of justice and of right.” — Henry Foote, Senator from Mississippi
He was backed by the most nationalist elements of the Southern delegation.
“You may consider the ‘gallant state of Texas’ too weak for a contest with the army of the United States. But you should recollect that the cause of Texas, in such a conflict, will be the cause of the entire South. And whether you consider Santa Fe in danger or not, you may yet live to see that the fifteen states in this Union, with seven million people, ‘who, knowing their rights, dare maintain them,’ cannot easily be conquered!” — Alexander Stephens, Representative of Georgia
The message was clear — if the federal government chose to mess with the Texan claims over New Mexico they were at risk of aggravating the entire slave holding South.
Emboldened by the national support, Governor Bell made a formal call for armed volunteers to march to Santa Fe that summer, and stated that Texas recognized no federal authority in New Mexico. It was amidst this turmoil that Clay’s bill was defeated, with national momentum on the issue shifting toward appeasing the fervent Texan position.
In many ways Douglas attempt to revive the bill caught many off guard. Clay had been one of the most formative political figures of the early nineteenth century, and his failure seemed to take all the wind out of a grand compromise. At the same time nearly everyone was exhausted over arguing about New Mexico. Some solution was needed, the question was if the southern position had simply worn down their opponents.
The most surprising help came from new U.S. President, Millard Fillmore. Fillmore, a Whig of little renown that many considered pliable to aggressive tactics, threw a surprising amount of strength into maintaining Taylor’s position that New Mexico was unequivocally federal territory and directly warned that any Texans marching into the territory would be “trespassers” and no longer “under the protection of any lawful authority.” In essence he was calling out a year’s worth of Southern bluffing by asserting the federal government would defend New Mexico by going to war.
The Southern representatives in the U.S. Congress found themselves in an awkward position. While the entire affair had fully vested a belief in secession as the future of the South (one that would be manifest ten years later in 1860) very few were actually willing to go to war over the issue now that the gauntlet had been laid out so forcefully by Fillmore. Douglas piecemeal Compromise bill allowed them to salvage some elements of their position (including the nefarious Fugitive Slave Act updates and maintaining slavery in the District of Columbia) while Texas had to sacrifice it’s 14 year old claims to New Mexico.
Even with the exhaustion and added incentive to make a compromise the final tallies did not come easily. The federal government promised to wipe out 10 million dollars in debt the state of Texas still carried from it’s brief stint as a Republic (worth roughly $339,716,883 today). In addition, a new border was drawn up that stretched the farthest Texan line out west to El Paso, snatching away the historic Nuevo Mexícan city, before pulling back east to the 31° 20'N coordinate. This sweetened the deal as it granted the Texans thousands of acres of the original Nuevo Mexíco province and bore some fruit from Neighbors expedition that spring. This also resulted in the oddly distinctive shape Texas still enjoys to this day.
As the bill was debated through the U.S. Congress Governor Bell of Texas showed no signs on backing down him his call for war from Austin. On August 13, 1850 he requested authorization from the state legislature to dispatch a military force to Santa Fe, specifying a call for 1,600 men to defeat federal forces in the state and another 1,300 to suppress any dissent among the local population. He already had Texan Ranger companies standing by, ready to march on September 1 if needed. He received calls of support from across the south, including Samuel Colt, founder of Colt Firearms, who offered to ship a thousand new pistols on short notice for the invasion. It was during this tense period that Sec. of War Winfield sent his dispatch to Col. Munroe in Santa Fe to prepare to defend the territory by force if necessary.
Everything now hinged on Douglas bill. In some ways the risk of igniting a war helped the effort. Douglas managed to cobble together a unlikely group of allies on each bill to navigate each bill through parliamentary debate and votes that September. California statehood (without slavery) passed both houses, then Utah territorial organization, then finally the New Mexico territory bill with the new boundaries. Along with the carve outs for the South with the new Fugitive Slave Act, which required the federal government to support slave holders in tracking run away slaves in free soil states, the Compromise of 1850 looked complete with Fillmore’s signature.
Except it wasn’t. The New Mexico bill carried a provision requiring the state legislature of Texas to certify the new border and drop their standing claims. While most of Washington celebrated, the federal government nervously waited for word from Austin where rumors of 3,000 men ready to march to Santa Fe still floated across daily discussions.
In Texas the war fervor that had overwhelmed the summer seemed to simmer away. Many expected to take New Mexico without an actual fight. Texan leaders were surprised by the resolve of both President Taylor and Fillmore to defend the federal claims to New Mexico. Others frowned at the costs of such an expedition, noting the state was still deeply in debt and a federal bailout of that might be more fruitful for their future than warring over hundreds of miles of mostly desolate land.
While a vocal minority within the state and across the South still pushed for a full military invasion the mood of the Texan public grew tempered on the issue. They too had grown tired about arguing over New Mexico. That November Governor Bell finally had the standing Texan Rangers regiments set down their arms, and the Texan legislature approved the $10 million dollar bailout and newly drawn New Mexico border.
Texas would finally attempt one final invasion of New Mexico twelve years later in 1862, under the flag of the Confederate army and in the midst of the bloodiest months of American Civil War.
While the Compromise of 1850 starved off Southern secession for ten years it emboldened a generation of southern thinkers to seriously consider a separation with the United States. The Fugitive Slave Act also turned many northern moderates into activist opponents of slavery when they witnessed the cruel and horrific capture of freed slaves in their own cities. New Mexico Territory ultimately rejected legalized slavery within it’s borders, leaving El Paso as the farthest west slave city in America and marking an end to the long held free state/slave state balance.
The Confederates were never quite able to let go of their dreams of westward slavery expansion however. After winning over regions of the new Arizona Territory, General Henry Hopkins Sibley lead a brigade out of West Texas into southern New Mexico, taking the southern town of Mesilla before marching up the Rio Grande and occupying Albuquerque and Santa Fe in quick succession. His Confederate force, primarily made of volunteer Texan cavalry, shifted to cut off Fort Union in northern New Mexico to take full possession of the territory.
Roughly fifty miles east of Santa Fe, just outside the ruins of Pecos Pueblo, Sibley’s force was engaged by a collected force of New Mexico and Colorado volunteer infantry and Union cavalry regiments.
The infamous Battle of Glorieta Pass, romanticized as the “Gettysberg of the West”, ended in a decisive win for the Union when they broke the supply line for the Confederates after two days of skirmishes. Sibley’s men were sent fleeing back to Texas with their dreams of building a Pacific slave holding empire finally closed for good.
The battle was the western most engagement in the American Civil War, and would serve as a bookend to the turmoil of 1850, when the war itself nearly started with the threat of a Texan attack on Santa Fe for control over the federal territory of New Mexico.
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For a more detailed look at the Compromise of 1850 I recommend “America’s Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union” by Fergus M. Bordewich
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