A Sword, a Kepi and the Battle for the American Southwest

By Christopher Graham

In “Southern Ambitions,” currently on exhibit at the Museum’s Historic Tredegar location, the kepi and sword of Capt. William H. Cleaver represent Confederate ambitions in the Southwest. This article explores the full story behind those artifacts.

When “Mexicans” killed William Cleaver in New Mexico he had no way of knowing that the United States Congress had already consigned his mission to oblivion with legislation.

The Confederate Cleaver had been the instrument of other ambitions.

Cleaver’s Company D of the 7th Texas Mounted Infantry joined Brigadier General Henry Hopkins Sibley’s column heading west in the autumn of 1861. Moving through west Texas one company at a time, a marching order designed to ease the burden on periodic watering holes, the “Sibley Brigade” sought to secure the New Mexico Territory — and overland routes to southern California — for the Confederate States.

The desert Southwest opened to American resource exploitation and settlement when the United States stripped the territory from Mexico with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. Sibley’s column threatened the scattered United States Army outposts that had sprung up in the 1850s along the Rio Grande River valley stretching up from Fort Bliss in El Paso to the territorial capital at Santa Fe.

Those forts and the American presence overlaid a much older human geography. All through the territory that stretched from the Rio Grande to the Colorado River at the border with California, generations of settlers from the Spanish colony of Mexico had staked claims to ranches, farms, and missions.

And before the Spanish entrada in the 16th century, the Native American tribes of Apachería straddled what became the U.S.-Mexico border and the Diné people (known more commonly to Europeans as the Navajo) lived in the northern part of the territory. The Apache and the Mexicans had engaged in decades-long low-level warfare: Apaches raided Mexican ranches for cattle and horses; Mexicans took Apache in reprisal raids and enslaved them in their households and farms. The entry of the United States Army, American gold miners, and shortly thereafter, a Confederate force, destabilized the entire region.

Because the Hispanos in New Mexico, Mexican-descended people in American territory who occupied the land when under Spanish and Mexican control, practiced a form of slavery, many of them welcomed Sibley’s Confederate column. They also welcomed the Confederates’ promise to protect them against the Apache.

The sword of Capt. William H. Cleaver

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The Confederates were happy to oblige, but also carried with them greater ambitions. They had a global vision for their nation and New Mexico was essential to it.

Back in Texas, in 1861, Cleaver’s men admired the young captain for the military bearing he had honed at the Kentucky Military Institute. He punctuated that panache with a sharp new uniform made by a tailor in San Antonio. Cleaver had acquired the cloth from Texas’ state penitentiary in Huntsville. The prison doubled as a textile factory, churning out tightly woven brown jean cloth for Confederate soldiers across the southwest.

The factory represented the Confederacy’s industrial ambitions. The nascent nation viewed itself primarily as a supplier for the factories of Britain and the North: cotton for their mills and, they hoped, minerals from the southwest as well. But Confederates did not neglect their own industrial development. The war, in fact, accelerated their interest in domestic manufactures. Confederates had cotton in abundance but lacked a source of wool. Texas had proven a promising source (at least before the fall of Vicksburg made it inaccessible), portending a great future for the wool industry there and in the arid lands beyond.

Yet, the Confederacy had more global ambitions and the southwest proved essential to them.

All western nations engaged in global commerce in the first half of the nineteenth century; Confederates had done so as Americans prior to 1861. They recognized the market potential of the Pacific world and its shipping routes to China as well as anyone and hungered for a piece of it.

The discovery of gold in California spurred the development of overland wagon routes to San Francisco, and the American government, under the oversight of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, had begun to survey potential railroad routes to connect east and west beginning in 1853. Since then, Americans eyed the deep-water ports at San Francisco and Los Angeles.

With a transcontinental nation, Confederate politicians, journalists, and policymakers imagined the global spread of a slave based economy in service to international markets. Confederate propagandists like newspaper publisher Henry Hotze in London and Rose O’Neal Greenhow attempted to dazzle European leaders with this potential. Confederate diplomats appealed to Spanish officials who still oversaw slave colonies in the Caribbean. They wistfully envisioned an alliance with slave-holding Brazil. This bloc, they imagined, that spanned from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Ohio to the Uruguay River, could be the cornerstone of global prosperity.

If that meant drawing a bit of Mexican territory away from Mexico City and toward Richmond, so be it. Henry Sibley dispatched one of his officers, Captain James Reilly, to treat with the governors of Chihuahua and Sonora states. He offered an alliance with the governors against the Apache in return for exclusive rights to transport commercial and military goods into the Confederacy through Mexican ports. Like Los Angeles, the Mexican port of Guymas beckoned these Confederates.

Governor Luis Terrazas offered perhaps a too-diplomatic response: the deal sounded good, but he could not make international agreements in place of Mexico City. Reilly walked away thinking he had secured the partnership. But other of Sibley’s officers ruined whatever feeble hope they had when Colonel John Baylor pursued a band of Apache into Mexico and ended up punitively murdering a pair of Catholic Indians enslaved in the household of a consequential local landowner. Confederates never had much luck crossing borders.

In the meantime, Cleaver’s regiment trailed the Sibley Brigade’s advance up the Rio Grande in the spring of 1862. It remained in reserve or on garrison duty as the Confederates defeated United States forces at Valverde in southern New Mexico. And it stayed in what Confederates called the Territory of Arizona, while Sibley moved north to Santa Fe and eventual defeat at Glorietta Pass. At that fight, the Confederates held the field, but suffered a strategic defeat because United States troops managed to destroy the Confederate supply train.

Captain William Cleaver’s kepi, which is missing its bill.

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The desert southwest is a terrible place to conduct a military operation with thousands of men. The United States had a slightly easier (if not shorter) supply route between Santa Fe and the well-traveled midwestern wagon roads that pierced the Great Plains. But the Confederate forces received no supplies at all from their attenuated connection through Texas to an already struggling homefront. When they arrived in the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico, Sibley's only re-supply came from what they had captured from fleeing Union troops.

The land, too, yielded few crops, cattle, and sheep from dispersed settlements and never enough to feed hungry men. And after Glorietta Pass, a source for food, clothing, blankets, medicine, and ammunition simply did not exist.

In this environment, Sibley could not sustain his command. He withdrew from Santa Fe, from Albuquerque, and abandoned posts along the Rio Grande one by one as he shuffled units back to Texas.

Brigadier Gen. Henry Sibley

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The 7th Texas was among the last to leave; spread out between the towns of Doña Ana and Mesilla, its soldiers suffered in the dry heat.

Captain Cleaver decided to act. William Lindsey, who, as a veteran in 1897 shared the story, was there.

“Boys, we want to go home, a dear place to a soldier, but we have no supplies,” Cleaver addressed his troops. “There is no settlement for five hundred miles, only these barren plains lie before us. I am going over to Mexico to get some beeves and I want volunteers to go with me.”

Across the Rio Grande River from his station sat the haciendas of several Hispano families. They had once been Mexican citizens, but his target was not in Mexico. That land that they lived upon had become part of the United States in 1854 with the Gadsden Purchase, and the people there became Americans when the border passed over them.

Lindsey and twelve others stepped forward. On the last day of June, Cleaver and his men crossed the river. Upon traveling several miles, the Captain sent Lindsey back to guide more soldiers in.

Cleaver may not have realized that the settlers he intended on plundering were well-practiced in anticipating livestock raids from generations of raids and reprisals between themselves and the Apache. He led his men directly into an ambush. With no way out, Cleaver ordered a charge in which most of his men were killed. His horse got bogged in mud, and the desperate man emptied “two Colt’s revolvers… before he went down.”

Cleaver’s vest made from Huntsville Penitentiary cloth. Along with a jacket, coat and sash, they are the only known Confederate uniforms surviving from the Sibley Campaign.

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The Hispano defenders captured Lindsey and the old veteran claimed that they wagged the bloody clothing of his dead comrades in his face. He later escaped and returned to Texas.

One month before Cleaver crossed the Rio Grande, the United States Congress passed the Homestead Act. On the very day that he and his men attempted to steal cattle, July 1, it passed the Pacific Railway Act. These two pieces of legislation established United States programme for settlement and development of the American West. That would happen not with the Confederate ambition of slavery and cotton, but with the capitalist engine of railroads and the labor of free men.

The Confederate ambition of an empire of slavery and raw materials lay, alongside William Cleaver, dead in the New Mexico dust in 1862.

Chris Graham is the Museum’s Exhibits Curator. His article draws from two recent works, “The Three-Cornered War: The Union, The Confederacy, and Native Peoples in the Fight for the West” by Megan Kate Nelson and “Colossal Ambitions: Confederate Planning for a Post-Civil War World” by Adrian Brettle.