Civil War
When the American Civil War began in April 1861, Kit Carson resigned his post as federal Indian agent for northern New Mexico. He joined the New Mexico volunteer infantry organized by Ceran St. Vrain. Although New Mexico Territory officially allowed slavery, geography and economics made the institution so impractical that there were few slaves within its boundaries. The territorial government and the leaders of opinion all threw their support to the Union.
Overall command of Union forces in the Department of New Mexico fell to Colonel Edward R. S. Canby of the Regular Army’s 19th Infantry, headquartered at Ft. Marcy in Santa Fe. Carson, with the rank of Colonel of Volunteers, commanded the third of five columns in Canby’s force. Carson’s command was divided into two battalions, each made up of four companies of the First New Mexico Volunteers, in all some 500 men.
Early in 1862, Confederate forces in Texas under General Henry Hopkins Sibley invaded New Mexico Territory. They aimed to conquer the rich Colorado gold fields and to redirect the resource from the North to the South.
Read more about this topic: Kit Carson
Famous quotes related to civil war:
“Since the Civil War its six states have produced fewer political ideas, as political ideas run in the Republic, than any average county in Kansas or Nebraska.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“... there was the first Balkan war and the second Balkan war and then there was the first world war. It is extraordinary how having done a thing once you have to do it again, there is the pleasure of coincidence and there is the pleasure of repetition, and so there is the second world war, and in between there was the Abyssinian war and the Spanish civil war.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)