Author: Henry Hopkins Sibley

Publisher:

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 212

ISBN-13:

In 1862, far from the bloodied fields of Virginia and Tennessee, some 2,000 miles west of Washington and Richmond, the Civil War raged in the mountains and deserts of the Southwest. With an army of zealous Texas recruits, many of them in the fullness of their youth, Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley marched what became the Army of New Mexico across the burning deserts of the Texas trans-Pecos to Fort Bliss. Driving north into the verdant Mesilla Valley, Sibley hoped to overrun the Union adobe bastion of Fort Craig, push up the Rio Grande and seize the supply depot at Alburquerque, raise the Stars and Bars over Santa Fe, and march on Fort Union, another vital supply depot and the gateway to Colorado. The eventual objective of the campaign, as Sibley purportedly told one of his artillery officers, was the eventual conquest of California. "On to San Francisco" was to be the battle cry of Sibley's army of conquest. A continental Confederate States of America stretching from Richmond to San Francisco might well speed diplomatic recognition by Great Britain and France, a vital component, Jefferson Davis realized, for the independence of the infant southern republic. Civil War in West Texas and New Mexico provides new and exciting details to Sibley's ill-fated and grandiose dreams for a Confederate empire in the Southwest. Of the 147 individual letters the letterbook contains, only eight have been identified as having been published in the Official Records. In particular, the letters show how Sibley organized his small army, enlisted officers at the brigade and regimental levels, and sought to supply it with arms and equipment. In addition, as many as 150 individuals, many of them well known, are named in the letterbook. This new study makes for important reading for anyone interested in the Civil War.