Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln: Few presidents have been so connected and so often compared. Obama served in the Illinois legislature, just as Lincoln did. Obama announced his candidacy from the steps of the old state Capitol in Springfield, Ill., where Lincoln delivered his famous “house divided” speech. Like Lincoln, he rode a train to his inauguration, where he put his hand on the same Bible that Lincoln used.
But even without Obama, we would be hearing a lot about Lincoln this year because the 200th anniversary of his birth comes on Feb. 12, 2009. Scores of book, celebrations, and TV specials are in the works.
It’s impossible to discuss Lincoln without bringing up the Civil War. As a schoolboy in Colorado, I had to learn about the war, even though it seemed to have happened far away: Shiloh, Gettysburg, Vicksburg, Chickamauga — all the important battles happened in the distant East.
But the West was a battleground, too.
When the fighting started in 1861, the West was mostly territories. California and Oregon were states, and Nevada became one in 1864 — not because its population warranted statehood, but because Lincoln feared he might need those three electoral votes in the presidential election.
There was no Wyoming, Idaho, or Montana. Washington Territory stretched east to the Great Divide, then south along Oregon’s eastern border. Nebraska Territory extended all the way across the top of Colorado Territory. North of Nebraska, Dakota Territory stretched to the Canadian border. New Mexico Territory also included present-day Arizona and a little more. Oklahoma was Indian Territory — where five nations had allied with the Confederacy.
This was an immense land that Lincoln had to keep in the Union. For one thing, the gold of California and silver of Nevada were vital to financing the war. The Southern mail route to California through Texas and New Mexico was replaced with a more central route across present Wyoming — the route of the fabled Pony Express, and then the transcontinental telegraph line, to keep the West connected with the East. And during the Civil War, along that corridor, construction began on the transcontinental railroad to cement that connection.
Lincoln strengthened federal power, as well as his own political power, in the West by carving out new territories. Territories elected their own legislatures, but their governors and other executive officers were appointed by the President. With more territories, there were more places to put loyal Lincoln men in charge in the West, and they could ensure that the territorial militias were on the Union side.
Thus, Arizona was split from New Mexico in 1863, as was Idaho from Washington, and Montana became a territory a year later. The present political map of the West, much of it a grid of surveyors’ lines indifferent to topography, is a result of the Civil War and Lincoln’s need to administer the West.
Most Westerners then were Unionists; one way Lincoln kept them loyal was by not enforcing the unpopular conscription laws in the territories. In other words, many of our pioneers were draft-dodgers — but even if they didn’t fight for the Union, they didn’t fight against it, either.
Even so, there was considerable Confederate sentiment in Tucson, and a fair number of Colorado’s pioneer miners in 1861 hailed from Georgia, site of America’s first gold rush in 1829. Prevailing Union sentiment in Colorado persuaded most of the Georgians to leave — or at least keep their secessionist opinions to themselves — but Tucson was a different matter.
In 1861, the Confederacy claimed a Territory of Arizona. Its borders were not those of today’s Arizona. The Confederate Arizona was the southern half of the New Mexico Territory of that day (essentially, today’s New Mexico and Arizona combined).
To secure this claim, the Confederacy mounted two military campaigns from El Paso, the westernmost city in Texas. The first, led by Col. John Baylor in 1861, captured Mesilla, N.M., and pushed federal forces up the Rio Grande. The second, led by Gen. Henry H. Sibley in 1862, pushed the federals even farther north. The goal was to capture the gold fields of Colorado, then move west, and cut California off from the Union.
The Confederates captured Albuquerque, then Santa Fe. But they got little or no co-operation from the New Mexicans, who refused to sell them forage or food, and the Union army burned its supply caches as it retreated.
U.S. Col. E.R.S. Canby assembled militia volunteers at Fort Union near Las Vegas, N.M. including a Colorado force that marched south from Denver. On March 26-28, 1862, the armies met at Glorieta Pass east of Santa Fe.
The battle itself was a draw, but a New Mexican soldier, Manuel Chavez, knew the ground. He led some of the Colorado volunteers, commanded by Maj. John Chivington, around the battle to the rear, where the Confederate supply train was parked. Chivington’s “Pikes Peakers” burned the wagons with their cargo and bayoneted the draft animals.
Some call this battle the “Gettysburg of the West.” Without supplies, Sibley was forced to retreat all the way back to El Paso, and thus ended the Texas effort to conquer Colorado.
Sibley had also sent a Confederate force to Tuscon. The four federal forts in Arizona had been abandoned, due to manpower shortages, at the start of the war. So Gen. James Carleton marched east from California, leading 2,000 Union soldiers. Along the way, they fought the westernmost battle of the Civil War, about 80 miles from Yuma, Ariz., at Picacho Pass on April 15, 1862.
Carleton chased the Confederates back to Texas, then took over New Mexico. Without rebels to fight, he turned to the Navajo, putting Kit Carson in charge of the campaign that relocated them to the Bosque Rendondo.
Meanwhile Chivington commanded Colorado volunteers at the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre — a tragedy that resulted, in part, from the shortage of trained and disciplined regular soldiers, who were needed in the bloody battles in the East.
So the Civil War did happen in the West, even if we never learned about it in school. Lincoln helped draw our modern map, and built a military that in time vanquished the Native Americans.
And in a way, the Civil War was about the West. Lincoln’s main campaign plank was “no expansion of slavery to the territories” — that is, the West. The South could not abide this, and tried to leave the Union. The shooting started, some of it out here, to determine what kind of place the West would become.
Today, President Obama faces many challenges, but nothing quite like secession and the need to maintain control over a vast and lightly populated domain. Even so, he has reminded us that “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America…. We are one people.”
That sounds like what Lincoln had in mind.
Ed Quillen lives in Salida, Colorado. He is a regular op-ed columnist for the Denver Post.
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