Remembrance & Historiography
At
the end of the campaign Albert Peticolas, having just endured the horrid
retreat from New Mexico, noted in his journal that “our operations out here
will all be lost in history, when such great struggles are going on nearer
home…”[1]
The Civil War in the Southwest would indeed be considered a sideshow, though it
would receive a few articles in Battles
and Leaders of the Civil War. One of the writers, Brigadier-General Latham
Anderson, attempted to argue the importance of the campaign. He wrote that if
Sibley’s men had reached California, they would have doubtlessly created a
strong presence in the state and created large implications for the Union war
effort. With California’s coastline added to Confederate territory, the already
strained Union blockade would have lost any effectiveness. However, such grand
ramifications, even when expressed by a Civil War veteran and late 19th
Century general, remain speculative as Sibley’s campaign was done in before it
could ever get out of New Mexico.[2]
Only one Confederate, Teel, provided an article in which he castigated Sibley.
“He did not husband his resources, and was too prone to let the morrow take
care of itself,” he wrote. Teel believed that if Baylor had been given command,
“the result might have been different.”[3]
There was some argument among the Union contributors over Canby’s leadership,
but this failed to spark any great historical inquiry into the campaign.
Some veterans kept memories of the campaign more alive through unit histories or published speeches. Once these survivors had died off, the war for the Far West became a piece of trivia, unknown by many. It often did not garner a mention in general Civil War histories, including Bruce Catton’s centennial trilogy. This is not to say that historians totally forgot about it. Several books were published in the 50s and 60s. Sibley’s campaign was presented in Robert Lee Kerby’s The Confederate Invasion of New Mexico and Arizona (1958), Martin Hardwick Hall’s Sibley’s New Mexico Campaign (1960), and several other works. Hall’s account of the campaign was the expansion of a doctoral dissertation, fleshed out with a wealth of newly discovered sources. Arthur Wright’s The Civil War in the Southwest (1964), is actually oriented around the adventures of James Carleton’s California Column rather than Sibley’s battles with Canby and the Coloradans.
