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Perea now returned to New Mexico just as Watts was leaving it. Watts was headed to Washington, having been elected the territory’s delegate to Congress. In letters to President Lincoln, he urged him to choose New Mexicans for the territory’s appointed positions, despite the fact that New Mexico’s leading citizens were ambivalent about slavery. He warned that appointing outsiders would offend New Mexicans, pointing out that slavery was not their foremost concern (Texas was). By choosing New Mexicans, the president would win their hearts and, should war erupt, their loyalty.2 Lincoln heeded this advice, though he took a lot of heat for it. Watts’s insights proved to be right. The man who proved it was Francisco Perea.

Perea had returned to discover that his birthplace was in crisis. As Southern states began seceding from the Union, Anglos in the Gadsden Purchase began seeking the establishment of a Confederate Territory of Arizona. Traveling throughout the Rio Grande valley, Perea visited the leading Hispanic families and urged them to commit their loyalty to the United States. His efforts succeeded. Hispanic New Mexico produced a greater percentage of volunteers for the Union army than any other state or territory.3

Perea’s success validated not only Watts’s advice regarding appointments but also Watts’s insight regarding New Mexico’s fear of Texans. Perea’s most effective argument for loyalty to the Union was that if the Confederacy accepted Arizona as a territory, it would send Texan troops to defend it.

And indeed they did. In July 1861 the Second Regiment of Texas Mounted Rifles entered the Gadsden Purchase. Perea had enlisted in the Union army, where he commanded one of the brigades assigned to oust the Texas troops. Over the course of several battles, Union forces finally prevailed.

Watts, meanwhile, was fighting the battle of the boundary. He introduced a bill in Congress for the creation of an Arizona Territory that would be divided by a vertical line along the 109th meridian. New York Congressman William A. Wheeler argued that dividing the territory was unnecessary, noting that the only logic for the location of the proposed Arizona-New Mexico border was that it continued the line dividing Utah and Colorado. When Watts responded with the reason for its location, he also shed light on why the Texas-New Mexico line had been located so far east of the Rio Grande valley. Because of the location of that Texas-New Mexico line, Watts pointed out that his proposed Arizona-New Mexico line “divides the Territory of New Mexico into two equal parts.”

The boundary battle, however, was about more than geographic equality. It was also about ethnic equality. Watts knew that this moment, on the floor of the House of Representatives, was the time and place to attack this head on:

There may be a well-grounded dispute in the minds of some people as to who are white and who are black. [Laughter] There are many men in the Territory of New Mexico who, by living constantly in the open air and exposed to the rays of a burning sun, have become bronzed in complexion.… Whatever may be their color, the treaty stipulations between the United States and the republic of Mexico have invested them with all the privileges and immunities of American citizens.… [T]he first duty which the government owes to its people is to give both military and civil protection. In this case, the government is under a double obligation.… [Mexico was] compelled to relinquish her right to a portion of her territory and her right to protect a portion of her people, endeared to her by ten thousand pleasant memories and hopes, and doubly endeared by ten thousand painful forebodings for the future.

Watts linked this understanding of the Hispanic population’s experience with the issue of boundaries:

I know how the people of New Mexico felt—I know how I felt—when a preceding Congress, merely for the purpose of beautifying the lines of the new Territory of Colorado, took sixty miles broad and two hundred and fifty miles in length