Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands: 1861–1867 by Andrew E. Masich (review)

Andrew E. Masich's important new book is not your typical Civil War history. Extending well past Appomattox and spilling across international borders, Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands fundamentally reorients our perspective on this familiar period. It also greatly expands the cast of characters involved. In addition to the standard Union and Confederate soldiers, Masich's study contains a whole host of ethnic and national groups—Hispanic Americans, Mexican Republicans, French imperialists, Apaches, Navajos, Pueblos, Pimas, Papagos, and the list goes on.

It's precisely this diversity—and the sovereignty that these various groups claimed—that transformed a conflict between North and South into a series of wars throughout the borderlands of the West. In short, the Civil War multiplied within the Southwest. And after six years of the bloodiest combat that the region had ever witnessed, the balance of power tipped irrevocably in Anglo-Americans' favor.

For centuries, cycles of raid and reprisal had defined the military rhythm of the Southwest—which, for Masich roughly encompasses New Mexico, Arizona, northern Mexico, and parts of Texas and California. But beginning with Confederate secession in 1861, the nature of warfare changed dramatically. As federal troops were relocated to eastern theaters in order to put down the rebellion, bands of Apache and Navajo warriors responded by greatly expanding the scope and scale of their raiding. This federal power vacuum did not last, however, and within a few years U.S. forces established a much greater western military presence than ever before. Thousands of professional U.S. soldiers first beat back a Confederate invasion, then virtually destroyed the military power of these nomadic and seminomadic tribes. In the process, they brought to the region a system of "total war" and remade nearly every aspect of life in the Southwest.

Masich covers a range of interrelated civil wars, though three major conflicts comprise the bulk of his study: the Confederate invasion of New Mexico and subsequent Union counterattack; James H. Carleton's total war against primarily Navajo and Apache tribes; and Benito Juarez's military campaign against French intervention in Mexico.

To students of the Civil War, the most familiar element of this story will likely be the Confederate invasion of New Mexico in 1861–62, led by Col. John R. Baylor and then Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley. Several scholars—Roy Colton, Donald Fraser, Alvin Josephy, L. Boyd Finch, and Megan Kate Nelson, among others—have chronicled this history, and Masich's new account ranks right up there with the best of them. He explains how Confederate forces seized most of New Mexico, carving out the southern part as the Confederate Territory of Arizona by August 1861. But the key to the control of the arid Southwest, Masich argues, was logistical forethought, and in this capacity Sibley was sorely deficient. When Union forces destroyed his supply train at the battle of Glorieta Pass, Sibley and his invasion force—which once numbered over twenty-five hundred men—had to beat a hasty and costly retreat to Texas.

Masich's conceptual masterstroke is in linking this Confederate war with the interrelated conflicts between Americans and Indians, as well as Juaristas and French imperialists. After turning back Sibley's Confederates, U.S. troops consolidated control over the American Southwest by unleashing a brutal campaign against the Mescalero Apaches and Navajos. Whereas Native American warrior tribes held the balance of power within the region prior to the 1861, Masich argues, after several years of war and internment on the Bosque Redondo they were decisively displaced. Meanwhile, U.S. soldiers funneled materiel to Juarez's beleaguered forces in Mexico, which helped him even the odds and eventually dethrone the ill-fated Emperor Maximilian.

1865, of course, marks the formal end of the American Civil War. But the civil wars of the Southwest borderlands continued for another two years, as Masich compellingly demonstrates. Only by that point would the...