The American Civil War was fought in New Mexico. It was, really, though most histories make no mention of the Confederate invasion in 1862 and its two significant battles. It was a bizarre little sideshow.
I’ve been a Civil War buff for years but was unaware of the New Mexico campaign until I moved here and attended a re-enactment of a battle I’d never heard of. I began reading up on the campaign and was intrigued by what I found.
General Sibley’s big idea
The invasion was the brainchild of Henry Hopkins Sibley, a Mexican War veteran. He was an Army captain stationed in the New Mexico territory and, like many Army officers from the South, resigned to join the Confederacy when the Civil War began — becoming an instant Confederate brigadier general.
Sibley was an idea man. He invented the Sibley tent and stove that were widely used in the Union Army. He also had a well-known drinking problem and was nicknamed the “walking whiskey keg.”
In 1861 Sibley met with Confederate President Jefferson Davis and proposed a grand plan to lead an invading army through New Mexico to capture the gold fields in Colorado. He then would march west to conquer Nevada and California, and maybe seize part of Mexico while he was at it.
Bob Newhart could have made this a telephone sketch: President Davis, I’ve got Henry Sibley on the phone from Texas. Yeah, the whiskey keg guy. He wants to invade New Mexico. … What’s in New Mexico, Henry? … Yes, I know there’s nothing there. Why do you want to invade it? … You want to go to Colorado? And get the gold? And then go to California? Have you been drinking again, Henry?
History did not record Sibley’s conversation with his president, or whether Davis rolled his eyes when he heard Sibley’s plan. But hey, the Confederacy was going broke and Colorado’s gold would come in handy. Sibley also claimed he could do all this with a small army that would not need traditional supply lines because the local population would rally to his support. It’s easy to imagine Davis saying the 19th-Century equivalent of “Sure, what the hell.”
So a drunken general launches a bold invasion and expects his army to live off the land. In New Mexico. What could possibly go wrong?
Battle on the Rio Grande
Sibley’s force of Texas volunteer cavalry left San Antonio in November 1861 and won an easy victory at Mesilla, near El Paso, where most residents favored the Confederacy. Then he advanced up the Rio Grande valley toward Fort Craig, south of Socorro, where he expected to replenish his supplies by taking the Union fort.
Union forces in New Mexico were commanded by Sibley’s former boss, Colonel Edward Canby. When most of his regular troops were transferred east to fight Confederates in Missouri, Canby hastily recruited a mixed force of inexperienced New Mexico militia and Colorado volunteers. To counter Sibley’s invasion he concentrated his troops at Fort Craig.
When Sibley’s 2,500-man army advanced up the east bank of the Rio Grande, Canby sent 3,000 Union troops across the river on Feb. 20, 1862, to keep the Confederates from crossing and attacking Fort Craig. The two-day battle at Valverde ford was hotly contested with around 200 casualties on each side. The New Mexico volunteers were used to fighting Indians but were new to traditional warfare, and many spoke only Spanish. Most fought well, however, including a unit commanded by legendary Indian fighter Kit Carson.
The battle included some unusual tactics. A Confederate company of lancers — guys on horses with nine-foot spears — charged what they thought were green New Mexico militia but turned out to be a crack Colorado unit. The lancers were nearly wiped out in a volley of rifle fire, and the survivors dumped their lances and picked up rifles. It was the first and last time lancers were used in the Civil War.
A Union spy company (that era’s special operations) commanded by a saloonkeeper came up with a clever idea: Send mules loaded with explosives into the Confederate camp and blow the place to smithereens. They loaded several elderly mules with howitzer shells and led them across the Rio Grande at night. When they neared the enemy camp they lit the fuses and sent the mules on their way. But instead of mingling with the Confederate herd as intended, the mules turned around and began following the Union soldiers back across the river. The big bang stampeded some of the Confederate horses but did minimal damage.
And a New Mexican vaquero captured a Confederate cannon by lassoing it from his horse and dragging it off the field.
Sibley did not participate in the battle, by the way. He was “indisposed” (or drunk on his ass) in an ambulance wagon.
The battle ended in a tactical victory for the Confederates after they captured a battery of Union cannons and pushed Canby’s force back across the Rio Grande. But they had lost too many men to accomplish their strategic objective of capturing Fort Craig and its cache of supplies. And they had lost many of their own supply wagons and enough horses to convert some cavalry units to infantry.
Logistics was a big deal in the Civil War because armies needed secure supply lines for miles of wagon trains and herds of cattle. Even well-supplied armies stripped the countryside of everything edible or flammable. Marching without supplies was unusual and risky. Sherman did this successfully in the fertile farmlands of Georgia, but Sibley’s army of 2,500 men and 3,000 horses and mules did not fare as well in arid New Mexico. His force could survive only by capturing Union supplies and getting provisions from the local population.
Sibley had expected New Mexico’s Hispanic population to side with the Confederates. That wasn’t unreasonable: When New Mexico became a U.S. territory after the Mexican War, an uprising by Hispanics and Indians killed the first territorial governor. But while New Mexicans were not big fans of the Anglo government in Santa Fe, they really hated Texans — who had tried to forcibly annex New Mexico to the Lone Star Republic in the 1840s. New Mexican parents used to frighten misbehaving children by telling them the Tejanos were coming for them. The local population generally sided with the Union and served with Union forces. So much for living off the land.
The Confederates next headed for a federal supply depot in Albuquerque, but when they got there the defenders had fled and most of the supplies were gone. They pressed on to occupy Santa Fe March 13 but found no supplies there, either. So they marched up the Santa Fe Trail toward Fort Union, near Las Vegas, NM, hoping to capture the fort and the supplies they so desperately needed.
Gettysburg of the West?
Meanwhile, a force of Colorado volunteers had been marching south from Denver to reinforce Canby’s Union troops. The two armies met at Glorieta Pass northeast of Santa Fe March 28. Sibley wasn’t present for that battle, either. Neither was Canby.
One of the commanders of the Colorado volunteers was Major John Chivington, a minister-turned-soldier known as the “mad Methodist.” After two days of fighting back and forth along a series of narrow mountain passes, Chivington led part of his force over the mountains, guided by New Mexico volunteers, and destroyed the supply train in the Confederate rear. This ended the battle even though the Confederates had been winning.
New Mexicans call the Battle of Glorieta Pass the “Gettysburg of the West.” That’s a stretch, since the casualties of Pickett’s Charge alone far outnumbered both armies at Glorieta. But just as Gettysburg was the high-water mark of the Confederacy in the East, Glorieta Pass ended the invasion of the West.
Canby’s wife had remained in Santa Fe while her husband was in the field and was treated courteously when the Confederates occupied the territorial capitol. When Confederate soldiers fell back to Santa Fe after the battle of Glorieta Pass, Louisa Canby organized a group of women to nurse wounded soldiers and became known as the “Angel of Santa Fe.”
Without supplies and blocked from further advance, the Confederates’ only option was to go back the way they came. They retreated to Albuquerque but were attacked there by Union forces. Several Confederate cannon, buried by retreating Texans to keep them out of Union hands, were dug up and displayed on Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza for many years.
At this point Canby saw no need to risk a full-scale battle with the depleted Confederates. Since they already were retreating, he merely followed them and encouraged them to keep going.
Long road to Texas
To avoid Canby’s forces on the main road along the Rio Grande, the Confederates retreated along a more difficult route through the mountains and the Journado del Muerto (dead man’s journey) Desert in search of food and water. Along the way they were harassed by angry New Mexicans, rattlesnakes and the occasional Comanche raiding party. Their retreat was even more difficult because they insisted on dragging along half a dozen cannons they had captured at Valverde. The 1,700 ragged, starving survivors of Sibley’s army finally reached safety in El Paso on May 4.
The Confederates had marched 346 miles from El Paso to Glorieta Pass, nearly three times the distance of Lee’s advance to Gettysburg and 60 miles farther than Sherman’s march through Georgia.
Canby finished the war as a major general after a variety of assignments. In 1872, while commanding U.S. forces in the Pacific Northwest, he was killed by Indians: the only general to be killed during the Indian Wars.
Chivington emerged from the Battle of Glorieta Pass a hero and was appointed to command the Colorado Military District, but his reputation was ruined in 1864 when he led the Sand Creek Indian Massacre.
Sibley continued to lead Confederate forces but was court-martialed due to alcoholism in 1863. He served briefly as a military adviser in Egypt until alcohol and illness ended his career. He sued the U.S. government for royalties on his tent and stove patents but lost because he had fought on the other side. He died broke in 1886.
The New Mexico campaign attracted little notice. President Lincoln followed each battle from the telegraph office, but Valverde and Glorieta Pass were far from the telegraph and rail lines that connected the rest of the country. With everything else going on — the Monitor and Merrimac, McClellan’s Peninsular campaign and the battle of Shiloh — a few thousand troops in faraway New Mexico would not have made headlines even on a slow news day. No newspaper reporters made the trek to New Mexico. Neither did photographers like Matthew Brady and no contemporary photographs exist.
Even the battlefields are mostly gone. The Rio Grande changed course and obliterated most of the Valverde battlefield, which now is part of Ted Turner’s nature reserve. Interstate 25 paved over most of Glorieta Pass.
New Mexicans still aren’t fond of Texans. Some voted against our last governor, Susana Martinez, because she grew up in El Paso. There was a campaign sign that read: “Susana es una Tejana.”