How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [123]
Watts had recently arrived from Indiana, where he had spent his youth, become a lawyer, and served for a term in the state legislature. He got along well with the New Mexicans and did well for himself, too. After a few years as a judge, he resigned to go into private practice, specializing in Hispanic land claims. His clients were not the campesinos scratching out a meager living on parched parcels; they were the grandees, the wealthiest families with Spanish land grants that encompassed thousands of acres. In some instances, Watts did work for no money, accepting land instead. He soon became both wealthy and well connected with the region’s leading families.
When Watts had first headed to Santa Fe, young Francisco Perea, who came from a prominent Nuevo Mexicano family, was heading to St. Louis. He had just finished college in Manhattan at the Bank Street Academy. During the years that Perea was away, a new fuse was lit in New Mexican politics. In 1853 James Gadsden purchased a region of Mexico on behalf on the United States. The region, which was added to the New Mexico Territory, was needed to build a second transcontinental railroad through the South. Northern states believed such a railroad would provide new economic opportunities in the South and help wean it away from slavery. Southern states believed such a railroad was vital for slavery to survive. They saw it as linking the slave state of Texas to the slavery-still-possible state of California. The only territory in between was New Mexico.
Slavery had been abolished in Mexico in 1820, and Mexican law had been preserved in New Mexico. This was the new fuse that Congress lit when it officially created the Territory of New Mexico as an adjunct to the Compromise of 1850. In return for granting New Mexico’s dream of regaining its former land, it loosened the bolts on its inherited law by saying this particular territory could decide for itself whether or not to permit slavery.
Few if any Hispanics aspired to become slave owners. But all remembered that their nemesis, Texas, had begun organizing its War of Independence when Mexico had banned slavery. The same thing was now happening again. “A large number of delegates from different parts of the Gadsden Purchase assembled at Tucson for the purpose of taking into consideration the measures necessary for the organization of a Territorial government,” the New York Herald reported in November 1856. “Many emigrants from Texas this year have stopped in the Purchase, and doubtless if the new territorial government were formed it would soon fill up with a hardy, industrious American population.” The boundaries the Anglos in the Gadsden Purchase had in mind for “Arizona,” as they called it, encompassed the southern half of the New Mexico Territory—thereby bordering both Texas and California.
Hispanics in New Mexico liked the idea of creating a separate territory composed primarily of the Texas transplants. But dividing the territory horizontally would put the planned transcontinental railroad in Arizona. In seeking a vertical division, many New Mexicans thought it wise to espouse nonconfrontational views on slavery so as to minimize Southern support for the “Arizonans.”
Though Watts was an Anglo, his career was based in the Hispanic community. And though he hailed from Indiana, where slavery had never been permitted, he too adopted less-than-abolitionist views regarding slavery—though he joined the new Republican Party, which came into existence primarily for the purpose of opposing slavery.
All these elements accelerated with the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. Perea was in San Francisco the night Lincoln was elected. He later recalled, “The occasion was celebrated by immense processions of men and boys marching through the principal streets to the music of many brass bands, the firing of cannon, and the discharge of anvils. It is needless to say all of us New Mexicans heartily