Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands by William S. Kiser Ariel Kelley Coast-to-Coast Empire: Manifest Destiny and the New Mexico Borderlands. By William S. Kiser. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Pp. 228. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) During the nineteenth century, exasperated soldiers and statesmen contended that the cost and effort required to garrison the New Mexico territory was more trouble than it was worth, so they suggested that the United States return it to Mexico. The region’s arid climate, isolated settlements, hostile indigenous tribes, and mixed-race inhabitants who resisted Americanization contrasted sharply with what was regarded as the obvious potential of California and the cotton fields of Texas. Why then did the federal government spend millions of dollars to acquire and develop it? In Coast-to-Coast Empire, William S. Kiser argues that New Mexico was a vital part of American expansionism, Manifest Destiny, and the sectionalism of the 1850s. As a conduit between Texas and California, New Mexico’s location was strategic and key to accessing the boon of Pacific trade and asserting dominance over the Southwest. Northerners and southerners alike, therefore, set their sights on controlling the territory and impressing their political and ideological views on the region’s inhabitants in a contest that eventually devolved into bloody warfare during the Civil War. Kiser opens by documenting how the Santa Fe Trail reoriented New Mexico’s economy toward the United States and paved the way for the territory’s conquest during the U.S. war with Mexico. In a series of thematic chapters, he delves into the military takeover of New Mexico and its later Indian Wars. Consistent with arguments made by Robert Wooster and other scholars who identify the U.S. Army as the most visible agent of empire, Kiser stresses that the federal government used substantial numbers of regulars to secure the territory, despite astronomical costs, because Americans believed that New Mexico was the most accessible path to the Pacific and achieving continental supremacy. In the 1840s, the military occupied Santa Fe and crushed the Taos Rebellion to establish a foothold. The territory’s military leadership then initiated various measures designed to ensure the area’s success as a migration route to California, including surveying potential railroad routes and pursuing hostile Navajos, Apaches, and Utes. Thus, the bluecoats stood as a testament to United States commitment to Manifest Destiny and New Mexico’s part in it. Symbolism was also important as North and South battled to impose hegemony over New Mexico. In a refreshing take on the well-trod topic of sectionalism, Kiser analyzes how New Mexico presented a thorny paradox for popular sovereignty because it nominally disavowed the peculiar institution, elsewhere even as it clung to coerced labor in the forms of debt peonage and Indian slavery. Free-soilers found little joy in New Mexico’s “anti-slavery” stance when it relied on unfree labor. On the other hand, southerners argued that laws sustaining the region’s traditional labor system [End Page 122] implicitly protected black chattel slavery. After disunion, the Confederacy attempted to replicate Major General Stephen W. Kearny’s success during the war with Mexico by promising freedom and protection, but alienated New Mexicans resisted and dashed Confederate dreams of taking California. People resistant to joining the Union just fifteen years earlier had become citizens vested in the United States. Coast-to-Coast Empire is an excellent example of how combining multiple historical approaches and reexamining well-known events reshapes our understanding. What emerges from Kiser’s exhaustive research and skillful intertwining of the U.S. war with Mexico, the Indian Wars, popular sovereignty, and other topics is a nuanced argument that concretely establishes the significance of New Mexico within the discourse on Manifest Destiny, expansion, and sectional loyalty. This well-written and thought-provoking volume is sure to appeal to specialists interested in military, borderlands, western, and Civil War studies. Ariel Kelley University of North Texas Copyright © 2019 The Texas State Historical Association