Coast-To-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser (review)

One of the most oft-used paintings in U.S. history classrooms is probably John Gast's "American Progress" (1872). For most readers, the image is familiar: An angelic woman in white rises above a scene of U.S. expansion, as American settlers and technological innovations advance across the North American continent and scatter Native Americans and wildlife in their wake. It is usually used as an illustration of "Manifest Destiny," the idea that nineteenth-century Americans believed a continental U.S. nation was god-ordained and thus inevitable, and acted accordingly.¹ As an illustration of historical reality, however, this portrait has received much critique in recent decades. Historians have recast U.S. expansion as a contingent and contested process shaped by "Mexican" and "American" residents with flexible identities and loyalties, powerful Indigenous groups who retained control of vast territories for years after the supposed U.S. conquest of the Southwest, and material interests and market forces that could cut against U.S. nation-building as much as in its favor.² In his provocative new book, William S. Kiser challenges scholars to revisit Gast's vision, even if he does not discuss him by name. "Manifest Destiny," he contends, was of central importance to U.S. political, economic, and military endeavors in the Southwest, transforming New Mexico, even as New Mexico came to exercise an important influence on the nation as a whole (7).

Kiser sets the stage for this argument with two chapters explaining the U.S. acquisition of New Mexico, and by extension, the rest of what is now the U.S. Southwest. Countering scholarship that has painted the late-colonial "Spanish Borderlands" as economically dynamic, and the Mexican state as an important player in residents' lives, Kiser characterizes early-nineteenth century New Mexico as "neglected" and "dependent" (19).³ He argues that it was not until enterprising Anglo Americans successfully opened the Santa Fe Trail that this began to change. "Trapped in the doldrums of an insolvent economy and an indifferent government," he writes, "some New Mexicans began to see the logic of international commerce and aligned themselves with the United States" (24). By allowing such commerce, Kiser contends, "Mexico unwittingly consented to the future conquest of its far north" in 1846 and 1847 (30).

Subsequent chapters examine how U.S. efforts to realize its "Manifest Destiny" influenced New Mexico in the two decades after 1848, and in turn how New Mexico influenced national political debates and sectional tensions. Chapter 3 considers U.S. perspectives on policy toward New Mexico's Indigenous peoples. Kiser argues that it was in part because the United States did not recognize Native American tribes as legitimate nations that it underfunded military operations. Logistical and funding difficulties, he argues, helped ensure that realizing the country's "destiny" proved more difficult than political elites had first imagined. Chapters 4 and 5 cogently argue that New Mexico occupied an important place in national debates surrounding slavery and sectional political power. He builds here upon his 2017 book Borderlands of Slavery in showing how Americans understood and participated in the diverse labor systems they encountered in New Mexico, including debt peonage and Indian slavery, and how territorial efforts to legislate slave codes sparked national concern and debate.⁴ Sectional politics mapped onto debates over railroad expansion as well, as two proposed routes for a transcontinental railroad that crossed through the New Mexico territory were challenged by northern concerns that such routes would unduly benefit the slaveholding South. A final chapter threads these themes by examining New Mexico during the Civil War. Building upon recent scholarship showing the importance of the West as a theater of war during this period, Kiser shows that the failure of the confederacy to realize its vision of a "coast-to-coast empire" ultimately helped ensure...