In 1861 and 1862, in the vast deserts and rugged mountains
of the Southwest, eighteen hundred miles from Washington and
Richmond, the Civil War raged in a struggle that could have
decided the fate of the nation.
In the summer and fall of 1861, Gen. Henry Hopkins Sibley
raised a brigade of young and zealous Texans to invade New Mexico
Territory as a step toward the conquest of Colorado and California
and the creation of a Confederate empire in the Southwest. Of the
Sibley Brigade's sixteen major battles during the war, their most
excruciating experiences came during the ill-fated New Mexico
Campaign.
Civil War in the Southwest tells the dramatic story of that campaign
in the words of some of the actual participants. Noted Civil War scholar
Jerry Thompson has edited and annotated eighteen episodes written by
William Lott "Old Bill" Davidson and six other members of Sibley's Brigade
that were originally published in a small East Texas newspaper, the
Overton Sharp Shooter, in 1887-88.
Written "to set the record straight," these veterans' stories
provide colorful accounts of the bloody battles of Valverde,
Glorieta, and Peralta, as well as details of the soldiers' tragic
and painful retreat back to Texas in the summer of 1862. With
his extensive knowledge of Sibley's campaign, Thompson has provided
context for the eyewitness accounts-and corrections where needed-to
produce a campaign history that is intimate and passionate, yet accurate
in the smallest detail.
History readers will find much to ponder in these unique first-person
recollections of a campaign that, had it succeeded, would have radically
altered the history of the Southern Confederacy and the United States.
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JERRY THOMPSON is an award-winning author or editor of eighteen
books on the history of the Southwest, including Confederate General
of the West: Henry Hopkins Sibley. Provost and Vice President for
Academic Affairs and professor of history at Texas A&M International
University in Laredo, Texas, he holds a doctorate in history from
Carnegie-Mellon University and serves as general editor of the
Canseco-Keck History Series for Texas A&M University Press.
Number Four: Canseco-Keck History Series
