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  • Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser
  • Walter Nugent (bio)
Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. xi, 273. $32.95 hardcover)

This is not a long book. But short, compact books, like short, compact boxers, can be lean and solid, and they can hit well beyond their weight. William S. Kiser's Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands is such a book. Its subject is the New Mexico Territory from the U.S. takeover under Stephen Watts Kearny in 1846 to the end of the Civil War, and how the territory fit into U.S. ideas and implementations of Manifest Destiny, along with the parallel but aborted imperialist plans of proslavey Confederates.

Kiser has published three earlier books on the New Mexico region, so he is well prepared and well immersed in the sources to carry out Coast-to-Coast Empire. Its 184 pages of text are followed by sixty-five pages of end notes (nearly all of which are citations to English and Spanish sources, rather than content notes), a twenty-page bibliography, and an index. It is a serious work, as befits a story of occupation, resistance, [End Page 85] warfare, subjugation, conflict with Indians, and the attempted capture of the territory by and for the Confederacy.

In an "Introduction" of about a dozen pages, Kiser explains the contrast, perceived then and later, between the economic uselessness of New Mexico and its imminent strategic value for a transcontinental railroad, telegraph connections, border defense, and possibly slavery extension. "Thus," he writes, "while most outsiders who traveled between Missouri and New Mexico after 1821 had economic incentives foremost in mind, they also set in motion the imperial and ideological processes that enabled military occupation twenty-five years later" (p. 12).

Then follow six chapters and a very brief conclusion. Chapter one recounts the exploratory efforts from Zebulon Pike's ill-fated incursion in 1807 until the end of Spanish trade restrictions in 1821. It also describes the start of the Santa Fe trade from that point to the mid-1840s, noting Senator Thomas Hart Benton's efforts to provide federal subsidies for the trade and create a true Santa Fe Trail in 1825. The result: "The Santa Fe trade … shifted New Mexico's economic dependency from Chihuahua to Missouri, effectively externalizing the local economy to the eventual detriment of Mexico" (p. 38).

Chapter two describes "the occupation and conquest of New Mexico" in 1846. These pages are unusually specific on the Americans' parley with Governor Manuel Armijo; how a commission created by Kearney developed the fifty-page "Kearny Code" to govern the territory; how President James K. Polk "condemned" parts of the code; the disorderliness of the American soldiery; the rumblings of rebellion among the local people; the uprising at Taos with the murder of Governor Charles Bent in January 1847; and the American counterattack under Sterling Price. The thirty pages of narrative text rest convincingly on 180 end notes.

Chapter three concerns the Indian wars that began "just weeks after Kearney's occupation of Santa Fe" and which continued through the 1850s. Kiser vividly portrays the draconian policy of army commander Colonel Edwin Sumner, who waged "unlimited warfare." His successors "perpetuated it and even elaborated on it" (p. 84). Kiser wisely lets all these atrocities speak for themselves. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) strongly disagreed with the army's position, to little avail. Nobody was happy in New Mexico in the 1850s: not the BIA, the army, the civil government, the Navajos or Apaches or Utes or Comanches or Pueblos, the Anglo settlers, nor the Hispanics. In various bloody encounters, dozens of soldiers and uncounted Indians perished.

Enter the slavery/antislavery controversy in chapter four. By mid-1848, the question of whether New Mexico would be a slave territory arose in Congress. The Compromise(s) of 1850 admitted California as [End Page 86] a free state but left Utah and New Mexico as popular-sovereignty areas. Kiser emphasizes that proslavery southerners never really thought New Mexico would...

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