NO MERE SIDESHOW

IN THE SPRING OF 1861, all eyes were on South Carolina and Virginia. After the bombardment of Fort Sumter, large volunteer armies gathered at camps in the East, pledging to fight for the Union or the Confederacy. Professional soldiers and officers in the U.S. Army streamed in from posts west of the Mississippi. Many had resigned their commissions to fight for the South; others had been ordered east by President Lincoln’s War Department. That early in the war, it seemed unlikely that any of the fighting would take place farther west than Texas—in the territories of the desert Southwest.

In June 1861, a meeting in Richmond changed that.

At that meeting, former U.S. Army officer Henry Hopkins Sibley convinced Confederate President Jefferson Davis that he could recruit an army of Texans and lead them west to take New Mexico Territory and then Southern California. From there, the Far West’s states and territories were all within easy reach, and the Confederacy would have access to the gold fields of the Sierras and Pacific ports to ship their cotton around the world. This would help fund the war in the East and create a continental Confederacy well-positioned to expand its empire of slavery once the Union had been defeated.

The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West tells the story of the 1861-62 Sibley Campaign as well as several other campaigns in the Southwest—a theater so often overlooked in histories of the Civil War.

One of the Texans who volunteered to make Sibley’s vision a reality was 23-year-old lawyer William Lott Davidson. His story, told here, helps us understand the motivations of Texas soldiers who stayed out West and fought. Davidson, who saw action at the Battle of Valverde and then was wounded at Glorieta Pass a month later, crossed paths with others whose stories also shape the history of this region. That included Union Private Alonzo Ferdinand Ickis, who mustered into the army at a gold mining camp in the Colorado mountains and fought against Davidson at Valverde, and the famed frontiersman Kit Carson, who led the 1st New Mexico Volunteers—the Civil War’s first interracial army.

Davidson, Ickis, and Carson are three of the nine people whose stories are interwoven in The Three-Cornered War. Their collective experiences give readers a fuller sense of the Civil War Southwest’s complex history.

The struggles for power in the Southwest were an important aspect of the overall conflict and no mere sideshow. Expansion into the West had been driving the North and South apart long before the war, and control over the Anglo settlement of states and territories west of the Mississippi remained a central concern from 1861 to 1865.

The fights in the Southwest had a domino effect on the war in the East. After their victory at Valverde, the Texans took Albuquerque and Santa Fe, but were pushed back from Glorieta Pass when Union troops destroyed their wagon train. Without provisions, the campaign could not continue. When Davidson and his comrades staggered back to Texas in the summer of 1862, the gateway to the West’s ports and gold closed. From then on, the Confederacy had to finance the war by increasing burdens on its citizens.

Davidson penned a series of letters about the Sibley Campaign, which he and many other Texan veterans considered an important moment in American history. This wasn’t