Megan Kate Nelson has made an invaluable contribution to broadening our understanding of the Civil War in her riveting new book, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. She has looked far to the West to explore the undertold story of the war in the deserts and mountains of the New Mexico territory (modern-day Arizona and New Mexico). The evocative title of her book comes from a soldier’s observation that what was playing out in New Mexico was, in fact, a “three-cornered war” between Union, Confederacy, and Native peoples.
Nelson has discovered letters, diaries, and records in Southwestern archives — far away from the traditional repositories of Civil War materials — that tell the story of this period as it was experienced by the people who were there. She uses these primary records to vividly bring the reader into this “forbidding landscape, with rolling deserts breaking suddenly into volcanic ranges and mesas” where a soldier could feel the “effects of the elevation, and of the semi-aridity of the climate.”
The first reaction to Nelson’s narrative is likely surprise — the Civil War really reached the lands of chili peppers and cacti? And the answer is not just yes, but that fighting in the desert was quite important from a strategic perspective. The Southwest was a gateway to both ocean ports and gold mines and its exploitation could swing the balance of victory or defeat. The Confederacy’s eastern ports were under blockade and it saw an opportunity in the West: it shared a border with New Mexico territory, which was part of the Union. In 1861, a Texas legislator named John R. Baylor led 300 Confederate troops into the New Mexico territory. This was the first Confederate invasion of Union territory — two years before Gettysburg — and Confederate Secretary of War Judah P. Benjamin saw it as “opening a pathway to the Pacific.”
In February 1862, Jefferson Davis proclaimed the establishment of the Confederate Arizona Territory in what is today southern New Mexico and southern Arizona. Though it was thousands of miles from the Confederate capital of Richmond, the leadership considered this conquest important for, as Nelson calls, “Confederate manifest destiny” and ultimately to grow their “empire of slavery.” In early 1862 — coinciding with Confederate victories in the East — Confederate troops commanded by Henry Hopkins Sibley went on to capture Albuquerque and Santa Fe.