A Civil War History of the New Mexico Volunteers and Militia by Jerry D. Thompson (review)

Jerry D. Thompson’s comprehensive review of the men who joined the New Mexico volunteers and militia during the American Civil War assembles virtually every surviving shred of evidence, including muster rolls, service records, memoirs, and official reports, to paint an exhaustive picture of the wartime service of the nuevomexicanos who answered their new nation’s call. The work reduces the focus on “great men,” such as Colonel Christopher “Kit” Carson, and instead emphasizes the men who replaced departed Federal troops and enabled the territory’s military campaigns. In so doing, Thompson highlights the institutional racism that has diminished the service record of the New Mexico volunteers and forces a reappraisal of accepted understandings of events in the territory during the war.

Thompson, Regents Professor of History at Texas A&M International University in Laredo, Texas, extends his expertise on the Civil War on the southern border, and especially on the Hispanos caught up in the larger struggle. This massive volume is divided roughly in half, with the first four hundred pages devoted to a narrative of the volunteers’ and militia’s service, while the second half lists every known member of the various units raised in the territory during the war, alongside other appendixes. The narrative covers the two principal campaigns in the territory: the 1861-1862 Texan invasion successfully repulsed at the battle of Glorieta, and the genocidal campaign against the Navajos that resulted in their temporary confinement on the squalid Bosque Redondo reservation in the Pecos Valley. The irony emerges that New Mexico remained staunchly pro-Union despite the widespread prevalence and practice of Native American slavery among the territory’s citizens. The narrative is straightforward, relying on both primary sources and published accounts, especially Don E. Alberts’s excellent The Battle of Glorieta: Union Victory in the West (College Station, Tex., 1998), but Thompson offers a new interpretation of the Confederate victory at Valverde. While the Union loss is often blamed on the collapse of the Second New Mexico Infantry, in reality, General Edward R. S. Canby may have scapegoated his local auxiliaries to mask his own mishandling of events, especially pushing Alexander McRae’s battery too close to the Texans without adequate support, resulting in the loss of that artillery and the battle.

The argument that emerges throughout the work is the constant and persistent racism the volunteers and militia endured at the hands of most of their Anglo commanders in the territory. Officers with surnames such as Hubbell, Holmes, and Lewis tended to receive lenient treatment for transgressions, while those named Sena y Baca or Tapia often suffered harsh treatment in the military justice system. In addition, volunteers and militia often went unpaid and uncompensated, even well after the war, when their lack of English language skills disadvantaged them in documenting and receiving compensation for wartime service and Confederate depredations.

Thompson can be described as something of a historical Will Rogers, seemingly having never met a record he did not transcribe. The narrative bogs down in too many places due to the excessive and often redundant transcription, especially in chapters 12 and 13. While one or two examples would have sufficed to make his point, the pages devoted to paraphrased transcriptions make the work far more detailed but far less readable than, say, Hampton Sides’s best seller Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West (New York, 2006), which covers much of the same ground.

In the end, Thompson’s magisterial volume will likely remain the authority on New Mexico’s wartime military organizations and the men who served in them for years to come.