Civil War in the West

Little did I know that when I set out to follow John Brown –which is to say, the historical struggle over slavery and how this was tied up with the struggle over the territory and boundaries of what is now the western United States – that I would end up at so many Civil War battle sites. The latest was Fort Union in northeastern New Mexico, an imposing Adobe structure situated on the confluence of two paths of the Santa Fe Trail.

Fort Union storehouse,
north of Las Vegas, NM

The programming at that site was unremarkable, and the far less resourced than Fort Craig, sited on the Rio Grande between present day Truth or Consequences and Albuquerque, NM, which gave me a lot more to think about.

I grew up in Colorado, and for me the Civil War was something that took place back east and had little to do with the settler colonial history that I inherited.  Not unlike many other folks, I was schooled that the Union was always ever going to win, and what was won was emancipation.  But as John Brown understood it, abolition was not just about the South, but was about the “cowardice” of the North: “If the American people did not take the courage and end [the conflict in Kansas] speedily, human freedom and republican liberty would soon be empty names in these United States” [JB, 129-130]. Fort Craig tells of the America that was won.
Fort Craig was near the Battle of Valverde, one of the most important battles in the Confederate's Southwestern Campaign (lots, if not all, of these sites claim a significance of that magnitude) to secure access to the Pacific and Colorado mineral prospects. Some accounts say the South won the battle, while others say the Confederacy lost. What is clear is that by the time of Reconstruction, and the Indian Wars, the territorial prison that was sited there was racially segregated. So too were the soldier barracks and hospital.

Fort Craig Sally Port and Guardhouse,
north of T or C, NM

Here’s a description of the Sally Port and Guard House from the official plaque onsite. It quotes from an 1874 Surgeon General’s report on military posts:

“On one side of the sally-port [of entry to the fort], is the guard room … and in the rear of this a room … used for colored prisoners. On the opposite side of the sally-port is a room … used for the confinement of white prisoners… The guard room and room occupied by white prisoners are warmed by open fireplaces, but there is neither fireplace nor stove [for the] colored prisoners. The prison-rooms had, during a period of three years, an average 16 men confined in them – the greatest number reached was 32… In one corner of the guard room is a trap door opening upon a stairway which leads down to cells where prisoners are kept in solitary confinement…. Each cell is 5 feet 7 inches long, 2 feet 10 inches wide, and 4 feet 10 inches high… Eight augur holes and the chinks around the doors are the only means of admitting air and light from the passage-way into the cells… The men, with seldom more than a single blanket, sleep upon the earthen floor, which, from being frequently sprinkled to lay the dust, contains much moisture. Colds and rheumatism are frequent among the inmates…”

The placards proclaim the construction of the “New” Hospital to be an “advancement, both architecturally and socially” over the jail because the segregated wards were equally heated and ventilated.

I'm not sure how easily John Brown reconciled his abolitionist commitments with the free staters. In the geopolitics of slavery and territory, Brown condemned the cowardice of the North, and its stance toward Kansas after Lawrence was attacked by pro-slavery forces:

“This was just the kind of protection the administration and its tools have afforded the free state settlers of Kansas from the first. It has cost the United States more than a half million, for a year past, to harass poor free state settlers in Kansas, and to violate the law, and all right, moral and constitutional, for the sole and only purpose of forcing slavery upon that territory. I challenge the whole nation to prove before God or mankind the contrary. Who paid the money to enslave the settlers of Kansas and worry them out? I say nothing in this estimate of the money wasted by Congress in the management of this horrible, tyrannical, and damnable affair” [JB, 137].

Still, Brown seems to have been satisfied with a territorial achievement in Kansas; it was one that tipped the national power relations against slavery. While he vehemently opposed the idea of a free state for white labor alone, it also seems that he thought he could move on from Kansas after rousting the pro-slavery “border ruffians,” having contributed to securing it as a free state. This was so, even though most of the migrants settling there were interested not in Black emancipation, but in the end of slavery as an economic practice that undercut "free labor." Nor were they interested in Black people, freedmen or not, sharing in that territory. As Du Bois wrote about the free state settlers to Kansas: “they found themselves in three parties: a few who hated slavery, more who hated Negroes, and many who hated slaves” [JB, 104].

But what happens when what is territorialized is the color line, and a color line that facilitates the suppression and displacement of indigenous nations? This is the question evident at Fort Craig (and obliterated from consideration at Fort Union), and the one that Du Bois asked.  Following guerilla war in Kansas, a “cruel relentless battle on both sides with murder and rapine – the last expiring flame of the four years war dying down to sullen peace […]

"So Kansas was free. In vain did the sullen Senate in Washington fume and threaten and keep the young state knocking for admission; the game had been played and lost and Kansas was free. Free because slave barons played for an imperial stake in defiance of modern humanity and economic development. Free because strong men had suffered and fought not against slavery but against slaves in Kansas. Above all, free because one man hated slavery and on a terrible night rode down with his sons among the shadows of the Swamp of the Swan – that long, low-winding and sombre stream ‘fringed everywhere with woods’ and dark with bloody memory. … Behind them lay five twisted, red and mangled corpses. Behind them rose the stifled wailing of widows and little children. Behind them the fearful driver gazed and shuddered. But before them rode a man, tall, dark, grim-faced and awful. His hands were red and his name was John Brown. Such was the cost of freedom.

“But behind it was greater cost: a million Indians lived in North America when the white man came, with a world of cultures behind them and may beginnings of civilization. … They received the white Europeans with curiosity and kindness. They gave them food and gold. In turn the white man stole and killed and tried to enslave, and their last theft was land. They stole the land of America from the Indians, used its wealth of fruit and gave it over to the rape of aristocrat, Puritan, slave and immigrant. Kansas was the last chapter of this great theft” [JB, 108-109].

Kansas was the last chapter geopolitically in what newly conquered territory would be slave or free, but the territorialization of these spaces – or the process of achieving hegemony over this territory – continued through the so-called Indian Wars, and continues to this day.

Traversing these many forts and battle sites in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico (and soon Kansas), is a reminder of the geopolitics and social relations of territorializing a settler colonial state. Some of these forts have been abandoned, like Fort Bowie, Camp Furlong, Fort Craig, Fort Union, or Fort Sumner.

Fort Bliss military museum,
El Paso, TX

Others, like Fort Bliss or Davis Monthan, or Laughlin, still live and these histories have been built upon and overlaid with new forms of weaponry for territorial conquest or domination, and policing powers that mark a conflict over who may live on this territory and in what forms of (un)freedom.