Updated--Author Interview--Andrew Masich (Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands)

Niels Eichhorn Discussion

Hello H-CivWar readers,

today, we feature Andrew E. Masich. He is the President and CEO of Senator John Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, PA. He has published extensively on the American West, including Cheyenne Dog Soldiers: A Ledgerbook of Coups and Combat (University Press of Colorado, 1997) and The Civil War in Arizona: The Story of the California Volunteers, 1861-1865 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006). His most recent publication is Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands, 1861-1867 (University of Oklahoma Press, 2017), which has won the Nau Book Prize for 2018. Also see our review by Cecily Zander--Masich Review

The interviewer today is Patrick Kelly. He is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas-San Antonio. His work includes “The North American Crisis of the 1860s”(Journal of the Civil War Era, September 2012). (If you are interested in conducting interviews for H-CivWar please reach out to eichhorn.niels@gmail.com)

It is very interesting how the Western historians have decentered our understanding of the Civil War by incorporating the history of the West into our understanding of the wider implications of this conflict.  Given the subject of your book, the Civil War in the American Southwest, I’d like to start our interview by examining that new perspective.

In A Misplaced Massacre, Ari Kelman write, for “Native people gazing east from the banks of Sand Creek, the Civil War . . . looked like a war of empire, a contest to control expansion into the West, rather than a war of liberation.” This is what I would call a Civil War pessimistic outlook. In Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands you discuss the fate of multiple indigenous groups during the 1860s in truly exceptional detail. I’m thinking of your discussion of the Navaho, Mescalero Apache, Maricopa, Pima and, in neighboring Mexico, the Lower Pimas, Ópatas, and Yaquis.

In what ways would you agree or disagree with Kelman’s formulation that, from the point of view of the Southwest borderlands, the Civil War looked more less like an emancipatory war and much more like a war for empire?

AEM: I was very deliberate in titling my work, “Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands,” rather than “THE Civil War in the Southwest Borderlands.” American Indian nations/tribes/bands were likely unaware of the sectional strife over slavery in the United States. The Cheyennes that Ari Kelman wrote about in his excellent book did not understand what the white man’s war was all about and referred to African Americans as “black white men,” believing them not much different from their paler companions. I do not believe that Indians looked eastward toward the coming storm of the Civil War and conquest. Most focused on local external threats. They worried about the scarcity of food and game (buffalo for the Cheyenne) and disruption of their traditional ways (including raiding enemies for food, captives, and other commodities). 

They did recognize that the Civil War years brought soldiers in ever increasing numbers. For some Indian peoples, these troops were allies while for others they were foes. Similarly, Hispanos north and south of the U.S-Mexico border fought their own civil wars. The diverse peoples (Indian, Hispano, Anglo) of the Borderlands were ethnocentric and focused outward, suspiciously eying enemies, old and new, while seeking trading partners and military alliances.

The Civil War exacerbated old animosities, created power vacuums and new alliances, and fanned the long-smoldering embers of conflict into flames of war that reached new levels of violence. At one time I considered the title, “Civil Wars in the Southwest Borderlands” in order to reinforce the notion that there were in fact multiple concurrent wars between and among peoples. Some clashes were triggered by the Civil War while others were continuations of preexisting struggles. Depending on one’s point of view, the civil wars of the Southwest Borderlands were at once struggles for empire, power, dominance, freedom, survival, and identity. 

I was fascinated by your discussion of the U.S. general, James Henry Carleton.  Your write Carlton “shaped and determined the course of the civil wars in the Southwest borderlands.”  As your book demonstrates, he was a bit of a logistical genius, a proponent of the struggle of Mexican liberals against the French intervention, but also the man behind the infamous Navajo Long Walk and the incarceration of the Navajo and Mescalero Apache at the notorious Bosque Redondo reservation.

Bouncing off the first question, what is your read Carleton and his men in the California Volunteers in the process, for better or worse, of U.S. empire-building during the Civil War? 

AEM: James H. Carleton is a complex and fascinating figure. He is a study in contrasts and contradiction. A Maine Yankee and ardent Union man, in the 1850s he had sold the first African American slave in New Mexico and had later come under fire for his supposed Southern sympathies (his wife was a Southerner) while stationed in California at the beginning of the war. He was cultured and literary (he authored an acclaimed book on the Battle of Buena Vista and corresponded with Charles Dickens) and yet as the hard-riding commander of frontier Dragoons, he could be unyielding, ruthless, and vindictive.

In many ways, he represents the most forward-thinking of American military men of his time. He was at once sympathetic to the plight of indigenous peoples and the most implacable of foes. Like Kit Carson, one of his most trusted subordinates, he believed that whites were to blame for the degradation and destruction of Indian peoples and cultures. He endeavored to save both—attempting to prevent contact between the westering whites and the natives, rooting out corruption in the Indian service, providing food, clothing, educational opportunities, religious instruction, and land that could be guarded from incursions by Anglos and Hispanos. He lamented the loss to history of Indian cultures and ordered artifacts sent to museums and dictionaries of native languages be made. 

Carleton summed up his views on the fate of American Indian peoples in a response he penned to a query from the Doolittle Commission, later published in a Report on the Condition of the Indian Tribes…

“Maintain the Indians upon such reservations, and resist the encroachments of the whites. It must come to this sooner or later; because, from the rapid spread over the unoccupied lands of the tidal wave or “bore” of the great and advancing ocean of palefaces, you will soon have no places suited by climate and extent to which to remove them, so that they can be remote from the settlements. Therefore, place them upon reservations now, and hold those reservations inviolate. In the great and rising sea here prefigured, those reservations will be islands; and, as time elapses and the race dies out, these islands may become less and less, until, finally, the great sea will ingulf them one after another, until they become known only in history, and at length are blotted out of even that, forever.”

At the same time, he launched a ruthless and relentless war against those Indians who were not willing to surrender and relocate to government reservations. He believed that waging a decisive “total war” against tribes identified as “hostile” was more humane in the long run than the death by starvation and attrition that would inevitably result from a protracted conflict. His genius for logistics and waging war in the arid Southwest made him the most deadly-efficient and effective military commander in the region. 

His was a tireless advocate for the economic development of the territories through mining, and he thought that populating the Southwest with military colonizers would hasten statehood and prosperity. In many ways, his views were prophetic. Love him or hate him, much of what he imagined or engineered came to pass in the years that followed the California Volunteer invasion and 1861-67 occupation of the Southwest Borderlands. 

I’d like to offer a counterfactual. Let’s say that, somehow, the South won the Civil War.  What would that have meant for the future of the many Indian groups in the Southwest you examine?  Would a Southern victory allowed the region’s indigenous peoples to retain their autonomy, and for how long?

AEM: “What-ifs” are always risky for historians. But if I were to write the screenplay for this fictional scenario, I might imagine John Baylor (one-time Governor of Confederate Arizona, zealous slayer of Comanches and Yankees alike) as the Confederate Governor of the reconstituted Confederate Territory of Arizona that would extend from California to Texas.

Baylor would finish the work of exterminating, or capturing and selling to ready Mexican buyers, Comanche (and other peoples of the Southern Plains ) women and children. A similar fate might befall the captive Navajos at Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. Baylor and the Confederate administration might cut deals with the French-backed Mexican Empire of Maximilian to hunt down and kill or enslave Apache raiders north and south of the border. The O’odham peoples of Mexico (the lower Pimas and Papagos) as well as the Ópatas would likely seek alliances and suffer the ravages of civil war. Peonage and slavery would be institutionalized, and the raid-trade economy of the borderlands would continue as before. 

However Napoleon III and Maximilian fared in their imperialistic “Mexican Adventure” (would Juárez and the liberals be defeated or would they survive by cutting a deal with the Confederates in exchange for the cession of territory from Mexico’s northern frontier states of Sonora and Chihuahua?), Mexico would be subject to filibustering Southerners and Confederate imperialism. In any case, whether an Empire or a Republic, Mexico’s future, and that of its Indian and mixed-race people, might be vastly different.

Your book adds a new dimension to our understanding of the continental dimensions of the Civil War, especially the relationship between Union forces in Arizona and Mexican liberals such as the Ignacio Pesqueria in neighboring Sonora.  I was wondering if by ending the book in 1867 you were, in part, signaling to your reader the importance of the transnational dimensions of the Civil War in the American Southwest.

AEM: Civil wars never end, they just seem to simmer until something happens to boil them over again. I chose to conclude my book in 1867 because that is when the civil wars in the Southwest Borderlands started to wind down. Conflict between the U.S. government (with its new-found Indian and Hispano allies) against tribes deemed hostile continued well after rebel armies surrendered in the East. The last of the California and New Mexico Volunteers mustered out of service in 1867, and Mexico’s own civil war came to an end with Maximilian’s execution in 1867.

To truly understand the breadth and impact of the American Civil War, it should be viewed as a transnational event. The civil wars of the Southwest Borderlands were certainly transnational—especially when we consider the conflicting notions of borders, boundaries, and identities of the nations, tribes, bands, and ethnic groups involved. 

The American Civil War had triggered new conflict (e.g. Union vs Confederate) in the Borderlands, but it had also rekindled older animosities. The Civil War in the West was connected to the war in the East but different. In the West, new alliances, a tidal wave of federal military might, and an Anglo-American commitment to total war fueled violence among the diverse martial cultures of the peoples of the Southwest. The resulting war brought new levels of lethality in the struggle for power and dominance in the Southwest Borderlands.

Andy, thank you for this enlightening conversation and for taking the time to share some aspects of your award-winning with us here on H-CivWar.