The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West by Megan Kate Nelson published by Scribner (2020). Hardcover $28.00; Kindle $14.99.
Meghan Kate Nelson’s earlier Civil War book, Ruin Nation: Destruction and the American Civil War was distinguished both by its topical originality and its fine writing. Her new volume, The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West, is also a terrific read. It has the added virtue of being written for the general reader.
Nelson traces the history of the Civil War years in the Southwestern territories of Arizona and New Mexico through the lenses of important participants in the conflict. Because this is a “three-cornered war,” The individuals who carry the story forward are Unionists, Confederates, and Native Americans.
The Confederates, nearly all Texans, were fighting as much to establish Texas sovereignty over New Mexico as they were to establish a left-flank for the Confederacy. The Native Americans saw an opportunity to regain control over their own destinies as the once solid white race divided into two fratricidal factions. The Unionists were desperately trying to forge alliances with native and Latino people who had only been conquered by the United States a dozen years earlier.
Henry Hopkins Sibley, a man you may never have heard of before, planned, organized, and led the longest and deepest Confederate invasion of Union territory. Sibley had a penchant for drink at the moments when whatever talents he had for military command were most needed. Opposing Sibley was a collection of Anglo commanders, among them the famous Kit Carson, leading mostly Latino New Mexico volunteers. The Latinos were derided as “Greasers” by the whites they would fight and die beside.
The book does a good job at combining the military, social, and political history of the invasion. The central figures of the book are vividly portrayed. The scenes of the armies on the march and the forces in combat will satisfy those hungry for a “battle book” about Valverde and the Glorieta Pass. Nelson gives equal coverage to the “little wars” waged between the Apaches and other nations and the United States and Confederacy.
The book also describes the horrible impact of post-war “reconstruction” on the indigenous peoples of the Southwest. Elimination of challenges to the Federal government by small confederacies of Native Americans led to the corralling of bands who resisted the central government. When these recusants were put into concentration camps, a combination of natural disasters and cruel incompetence led to many deaths among the captives. As Nelson says, the post-war effort to refound America as the empire of liberty was founded, in part, on the destruction of Native America.
My only criticism of the book can be found in this line from near its end:
“Of those people who fought for control of New Mexico and Arizona in the 1860s, it was the Apaches and the Navajos who remained…”
Of course, anyone who knows New Mexico knows that while the Anglos of the Union Army and the Confederacy left, Native Americans were not the only people who remained. New Mexico’s largest ethnicity in 1865 was Latino, and Latinos would stay in New Mexico long after most of the Gringos were gone. The agency of the territory’s Nuevo Mejicanos is not sufficiently explored in Nelson’s book. Most had only lived in the United for thirteen years when the invasion occurred and their loyalty the Federal government was not taken for granted by either Unionist or Confederate leaders. Had they turned against the Union, New Mexico would have been difficult to hold in the Union. One of the focus characters in the book should have been Latin.
This criticism aside, this is very good telling of a story that is unknown to most Americans.
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