Go West, Young Historian

Speaker 1:
Major funding for Backstory is provided by an anonymous donor, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Joseph and Robert Cornell Memorial Foundation.

Joanne Freeman:
From Virginia Humanities, this is Backstory.

Joanne Freeman:
Welcome to Backstory, the show that explains the history behind today’s headlines. I’m Joanne Freeman. If you’re new to the podcast, hello. Each week, along with my colleagues, Nathan Connelly, Brian Balogh and Ed Ayers, we explore a different part of American history.

Joanne Freeman:
Now, over the years, tens of thousands of books have been published about the Civil War. America’s most divisive conflict might be, it’s most written about. No other moment in American history has captured public and scholarly attention quite like the battles that raged throughout the United States from 1861 to 1865. With stacks and stacks and stacks of books about the Civil War, it can seem hard to know what else there is to say, but historians are coming up with new ways to look at that historic conflict all the time. So on this episode of Backstory, we wanted to feature two conversations with scholars offering new takes on how to understand the Civil War.

Joanne Freeman:
You’ll hear my conversation with writer and historian Megan Kate Nelson about how the war changes if you look beyond the North/South binary, and you’ll hear Ed’s conversation with Joan Cashin, the author of several books on the Civil War era. In her newest book, Professor Cashin shifts her attention from the people of the Civil War to the goods that kept it going.

Joanne Freeman:
The American West, it’s a region that loons large in the national imagination, but when it comes to the Civil War, the places that dominate the headlines couldn’t be further away from the West. After all wasn’t all of the action of the Civil War in places like Gettysburg and Manassas, Shiloh and Vicksburg? Maybe so, but Megan Kate Nelson wants you to think again. Nelson is an author and historian. Her latest book is, The Three Cornered War, the Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. In it, Nelson tells the tale of the Civil War in New Mexico and she does it by weaving together the stories of a diverse cast of characters. To name just a few, there’s John R. Baylor, a Texan who establishes the Confederate territory of Arizona, James Carlton, a union soldier who fought campaigns against Navajo and Apache peoples and Juanita, a Navajo woman who fights union efforts against her people.

Joanne Freeman:
I spoke recently with Nelson about her book and how these unique stories set in a unique backdrop change our very framework for the Civil War.

Joanne Freeman:
Hi Megan, welcome to Backstory and thank you so much for being here.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Well, thank you so much for having me. It’s really exciting.

Joanne Freeman:
Megan, you call the Civil War in the West, the three cornered war. So tell us a little bit about what you mean by that.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Sure. So there are really three meanings for the three cornered war. The first is that, the book contends that the war took place in the North, the South and the West between the union, the Confederacy, and native peoples, and that those fights involved Anglo, Hispano and native soldiers. So in all of those three ways, I’m really thinking of the war more expansively as a conflict that involved more than the usual players, more than the people we think about usually when we think about Civil War history and in more and diverse places.

Joanne Freeman:
I’m curious as to how you came to this viewpoint and to this topic, and I know you grew up in Colorado, so is it partly your western viewpoint that led you in this direction with this?

Megan Kate Nelson:
Well, partly yes. I think when I was writing my previous book, Ruined Nation, and kind of thinking about it and researching it and teaching Civil War history, I was doing, as we all do, a lot of background research and I discovered that there were these battles in New Mexico and I had never heard of them growing up in Colorado. We had had history about pioneers and we had talked about Indian Wars, but they tended to be later, kind of in the 1880s and nineties and we talked about silver mining, but we never talked about the gold rush at 1859, 58, 59. And I was really shocked actually, it was one of those moments where I thought, how is it possible though that I grew up not knowing about the conflict in this region and not knowing that Colorado soldiers took part in this war and that they had actually turned the tide. They were really responsible for pushing the Confederates back in the first phase of the war.

Joanne Freeman:
Now we’re talking about the West, you’re talking about Colorado, but actually the book focuses on New Mexico, and before the Civil War broke out, the territory was pretty much brought into the union as a place where residents could decide whether it was going to be a free state or a slave state, and they chose for it to be a slave state. So give us a sense of what slavery would have looked like in the region at that time.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Yeah, so the system of enslavement evolved in the Southwest in a really interesting way. For hundreds of years since first contact, since Europeans had come into the kind of northern reaches of Mexico, which aren’t, is now kind of New Mexico, and in this moment was New Mexico territory. There evolved to kind of really intricate system, an economic system mostly, of raiding warfare, where Hispanos either Spanish-Mexican or Hispano-New Mexicans would raid Comanche and Apache and Navajo camps and towns. And they would take their women and children, mostly, captive. And then those indigenous communities would raid in retaliation and take Hispano captives as and use them as unfree laborers. It’s not the same kind of system of enslavement that we see in the southeast, but it was regional and it was the economic basis of the regional trade.

Megan Kate Nelson:
So it’s important to realize that all of the communities in this region did, in fact, engage in this practice. And this was one of the reasons actually that Confederates thought they had a pretty good chance of taking the southwest. They thought that because wealthier Hispanos enslaved native peoples and because native peoples had this system of enslavement as well, and that both of those groups were not particularly fans of the federal government in the 1850s, that perhaps they could persuade them to join the Confederate cause.

Joanne Freeman:
You can really see, even just in our conversation here, how taking this western vantage point introduces all kinds of contingency that people don’t tend to plug into this conflict.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Exactly. There are all sorts of moments where things kind of turn where, if things had only been different, if the Confederate army that had invaded New Mexico in the summer of 1861, if it had not been entirely Texan, then they may have had a better case to make with Hispano-New Mexicans who did not have any charitable feelings towards Texans, because Texans had invaded New Mexico before. If there is anyone that Hispano-New Mexicans felt less disposed to life then the federal government, it was Texans and so there were sort of these moments in these calculations, where Henry Hopkins Sibley, who was really leading this invasion of the territory, he really miscalculated.

Joanne Freeman:
Contingency and action is what that is. I was like, Oh, serious miscalculation.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Yes, exactly.

Joanne Freeman:
Now along these lines, your book tells this story that you’re telling by looking at nine different people. And we’re talking Union people, Confederate people, Apache, Navajo, men, women, and one those people is John Baylor, who is a Confederate and I understand he compromises Confederate President Jefferson Davis’ plans to form an allegiance with indigenous peoples in the region. He penned some kind of an extermination order. So can you explain what that’s about? What does that extermination order and what was Baylor doing?

Megan Kate Nelson:
Sure, yeah. I’ll give you a little background on Baylor first. He was originally from Kentucky, but he came to Texas in the early 1840s. He owned slaves. He also was a lawyer. He won election to the state legislature. And so he was one of these like men on the make, right? He, in this period, he had a lot of ambition. By the time the Civil War broke out, he was really primed to join the Confederate army. And so he led the kind of first group of soldiers, the Second Texas Mounted Rifles into New Mexico territory in the summer of 1861 and he successfully occupied the town of Mysia, which is in southern New Mexico, and forced the surrender of a union fort nearby, Fort Fillmore. And then he sat down on August 1st, 1861 and created the Confederate territory of Arizona. It was basically the southern half of New Mexico territory.

Megan Kate Nelson:
So he kind of created this thoroughfare for the Confederacy from Texas to California, which is, of course, California was really the goal. But all along that pathway was a mail route that had been built on top of an Apache trail. So in order to get from Texas to California, the Confederate army was going to have to go through Apacheria, which is a massive territory occupied mostly in this part by Chiricahua Apaches. When the war began, and even a little bit before the Chiricahua Apaches had been kind of taking advantage of all of this war mobilization. There were a lot of people on the roads, there were a lot of animals and wagon trains on the roads and they raided them. And John Baylor knew that in order for the Confederacy to really launch their campaign for California, they were going to have to meet the Apaches in battle and subdue them.

Megan Kate Nelson:
And so as all of this other war action with the union was going on, and this is why it really is a three cornered war, Baylor pivots and looks to the west and to Apaches and he sends contingents of soldiers kind of out toward Tucson and he himself leads a raid against Apaches into Mexico, which almost causes an international incident. And then one of his final acts in March of 1862, before he leaves New Mexico, is to instruct one of his militia company commanders to try to lure Chiricahua Apaches into a parlay and then to kill all the men and enslave all the women and children. And this became known as Baylor’s Apache extermination order. And he kind of left it. Well, he sent it to the militia captain and then he left a copy for Henry Sibley, who was commanding this much larger Texas army trying to defeat the Union along the Rio Grande. And when Henry Sibley saw that order, he was outraged and he sent it along to Jefferson Davis in Richmond.

Megan Kate Nelson:
The Confederacy was really trying to have a softer touch. They really wanted their soldiers to sign treaties of allegiance with native peoples. Baylor actually ended up being forced to leave the Confederate army for a time because of this extermination order that he had issued because it was a great kind of embarrassment to the politicians in Richmond.

Joanne Freeman:
Another character in your book is Juanita. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about her and why her story is important to your book.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Sure. Yes. So Juanita was a Navajo woman and she was just a teenager when she married Manuelito, who was a powerful Navajo headman and pretty soon after their wedding, the Civil War began.

Megan Kate Nelson:
So readers of The Three Cornered War kind of follow her as she and Manuelito and their band of Navajos kind of engage with and invade and manipulate Union forces who are in their homeland beginning in the kind of summer and fall of 1861 and 62. And then they’re kind of forced, by 1866, by impending starvation to surrender to the US Army. That came about because once the union forces had forced the Confederates back to Texas, there were thousands of soldiers in New Mexico with two years left in their enlistment in the Union army. And so the new commander in charge there, James Carlton, turned them toward fights with Chiricahua Apaches, Mescalero Apaches and Navajo.

Megan Kate Nelson:
So readers will sort of learn about all of those actions through her eyes and her experiences as, not only a woman, a woman and a civilian. She and Manuelito are constantly moving, constantly evading union forces until they’re forced to surrender and then they are forced on the long walk from their homeland to a reservation called Bosque Redondo, which is in the middle of New Mexico and it’s about a 400 mile march that they do mostly on foot and then once they get to Bosque Redondo, they’re there for about two years and this reservation was just a disaster.

Megan Kate Nelson:
And the story of Juanita’s long walk and her experience at Bosque Redondo really dominates the last part of the book. I really think that Juanita, her story is one of suffering, but it’s also one of persistence and survival, and of all of the protagonists, I really think that Juanita is the heart of the book.

Joanne Freeman:
Now we, for logical reasons, I’ve been focusing on the west, but now I want to shift the focus for just a second. Certainly the book is absolutely persuasive in talking about how important the west is to understanding the Civil War, but how much of the story that we’ve been talking about here made its way back east. So how, how much of this percolated and had an impact on people on the east coast?

Megan Kate Nelson:
Well, there definitely were reports and stories of, particularly the larger battles. The Indian campaigns were less reported, but they were very much reported across the west in all of the big newspapers. You know, the Confederacy wanted the west for its gold and its specific ports. And they really saw it as a central feature of their expanding empire of slavery. And so even though they may not have been kind of talking about the war in the west, they were feeling the impact of it. In the north, one of the interesting things that happened is that once the Confederacy was kind of pushed back, and once the Union, once the commander in Santa Fe, sent word that they were gone and that he had secured the west and that they would continue to monitor everything, but he was fairly certain that they wouldn’t be coming back. Then Congress passed a series of acts.

Megan Kate Nelson:
So in the spring and summer of 1862, in the wake of the Union kind of victory over the Confederacy in the far west, they passed the Homestead Act, the Pacific Railway Act, which created the infrastructure to build the Transcontinental Railroad, the Moral Land Grant Act, which sold public lands to support colleges and universities that had agricultural and mechanical programs. And they created a Department of Agriculture. And all of those pieces of legislation were part of the Union’s vision for the west. It was going to be this empire of free labor. And that labor was going to be white labor. And increasingly they thought also perhaps black labor, all free. But that vision necessitated the removal of native peoples, so it necessitated conquest.

Joanne Freeman:
This is an amazing story and I don’t think anyone listening is going to need persuasion that you need to include the west into your understanding of the Civil War. But I want to ask you a historian-ish question. And that is, why do you think it has taken historians so long to weave this story into their understanding of the Civil War?

Megan Kate Nelson:
I think for a couple of reasons. I mean, one, I think, Civil War historians have been, the field until about kind of 20 or 30 years ago, It was pretty dominated by military historians. When you focus on the battlefield, of course you’re going to focus on the east, because that’s where all the major battlefields are and you’re going to focus maybe a little bit on the trans Mississippi West, but you’re not going to focus on the far west at all because you don’t perceive those battles to actually be battles because they were fought with so few soldiers. And I think also, when we think about kind of what we grow up seeing and learning and sort of the impact of public history on our lives, if you go to the west, there are so many Civil War sites that are still there.

Megan Kate Nelson:
You know, none of them really have been paved over as parking lots or strip malls. Many of them have been successfully preserved, are being run by either the National Park Service or state kind of Bureau of Land Management folks or state parks, but they’re really poorly signed. Apache Pass, which is the site of a very important battle between the Chiricahua Apaches and Union troops coming from California. It’s still there. You can even see the ruts from the original wagon road are still there. In order to get to it, you either have to drive on an eight mile dirt path that goes through in an arroyo or you have to take this other road from Bowie, Arizona where they warn you on the national park service site that the last 400 meters of the road is just rocks.

Joanne Freeman:
Now it sounds like you took that trip. Is that the case?

Megan Kate Nelson:
I did and I chose, I was driving in a sedan. I was there in kind of several weeks after the monsoon season, but I had been warned that if there were wet patches, I was likely going to get stuck. The cell service is pretty bad. I called my husband before I left the highway and I said, if I don’t call you in three hours, call the Fort Bowie people and ask if they’ve seen me because things could be kind of dire. It turned out to be fine. The dirt road was actually fine, but in order to get to the site from there, you then have to park your car and then hike for a mile and a half. You know, it was a beautiful place to be. I was completely alone when I was there in many of these places. And then some of these places are actually kind of hidden in plain sight.

Megan Kate Nelson:
And Santa Fe Plaza is a very good example of that. Like if you go to Santa Fe Plaza, you’re probably there for the kind of New Mexican, green chili, Navajo history experience and you get a lot of that. The Palace of the Governors is still there, one of the oldest buildings in North America. And you’ll kind of walk around the Plaza and you probably won’t notice that there’s an obelisk sitting in the middle of the Plaza, much less read what’s on it. And what it is, is a monument to Civil War soldiers. So there’s a way in which we think about history because sort of in place and if we don’t see it then we don’t think there was history there.

Joanne Freeman:
Right. In many ways what you’re saying is that the Civil War lives visibly in some ways in the west, but that many of us haven’t noticed it yet.

Megan Kate Nelson:
Exactly. Exactly.

Joanne Freeman:
Megan Kate Nelson is the author of several books. Her latest is the Three Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West.