Governing Against All Odds in the 1850s

New Mexico Territorial government did not make an auspicious beginning in the 1850s. The first four governors, appointed by Presidents Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan, were James S. Calhoun, William Carr Lane, David Meriwether, and Abraham Rencher. They faced formidable challenges and were obliged to function with few resources and little support from Washington.1 These were men who had been successful in life before they reached New

Mexico: two of them were lawyers, one a medical doctor, and one an army colonel. Among them they had held numerous elected offices at the local, state and national levels.

Problems with the nomadic, and hostile, Indian tribes were at top of their lists. The fact that, with but a few periods of respite, Indian raiding, and counter-raiding, had been going on since the Spanish arrived in the late 16th century, didn’t make the matter less important to New Mexicans in the middle 19th century. Many American citizens, who had been Mexican citizens only a few years before, favored American rule because they hoped that the newcomers would do a better job of dealing with the hostiles than had the earlier Spanish and Mexican governments. They didn’t, of course. Conflict between civil and military leaders, who both believed they had the upper-hand in dealing with Indians, also created difficulties. While governors had more implied political power, military commanders controlled the most important commodity in the territory: money.2

There was unhappiness among those New Mexicans who had favored statehood over territorial status. And too, there were those citizens who vehemently opposed any form of American rule, and they were not reluc- tant to make their feelings known. The early governors were well aware that New Mexico’s first civil executive, Charles Bent, who had been appointed by General Stephen Watts Kearney in 1846, was murdered by Mexican nationalists and Taos Indians only a few years earlier (January 19, 1847).

Changes in the criminal justice system, from the Spanish and Mexican to the American, also required some attention. Under the former, criminal penalties generally included various forms of corporal punishment, exile, labor on public works, fines and/or confiscation of property.3 Under the latter system, incarceration was the normal punishment for criminal acts, and that required the construction and maintenance of prisons; both of which required money.

Population characteristics were a problem, too. The 1850 census reported that New Mexico (which included what is now Arizona and part of southern Colorado) had a population of about 61,500. Historian Ralph Emerson Twitchell estimated that of that number, only about 1,000 were “American born.” It must be noted, too, that Indians were not counted in the census but some sources estimated that 7,000 Pueblo and Hopi people lived in New Mexico by 1851. Ten years later, the territorial population was approaching 94,000, or an increase of about 50 percent. Many newcomers were Anglos who migrated from the east, or Texas, and their makeup was far from monolithic. Those who settled in the northern part of the territory, generally around Taos, Santa Fe and Albuquerque, were largely there by way of Missouri and opposed to slavery and supported the Union. Those who settled in southern New Mexico, generally from the Mesilla Valley and west to Tucson, tended to be Texans, or otherwise southerners, who supported slavery and the Confederacy by early in the 1860s.

The arrival in New Mexico of Catholic Bishop Jean Baptiste Lamy in 1850 further confused matters within the political power structure as well as the religious community.

John Greiner, New Mexico’s first territorial secretary, probably best described the situation:

“Everybody and everything in this … country [New Mexico] appears at cross purposes. In the first place the civil and military authorities are at war. Colonel [Edwin Vose] Sumner refuses to acknowledge the right of the Governor to send Indian agents with him to the Indian country—and will not afford the proper facilities for them to go—and the governor refuses to send them. The governor and secretary of the Territory cannot hitch horses. The American residents are at war with the governor, while the Mexican population sides with him. Even the missionaries are at logger-heads. The Baptist preacher… is at war with the Methodist …and ‘wicewersa.’ [sic]”4

John S. Calhoun did not aspire to the gubernatorial appointment. His wishes notwithstanding, President Millard Fillmore appointed him New Mexico’s first territorial governor in 1851. His troubles began almost immediately.

Calhoun was obliged to operate a government which had no money in the territorial coffers and little authority. After six months in office, he wrote to Washington:

“Without a dollar in our territorial treasury, without munitions of war, without authority to call out our militia, without the cooperation of the military authorities of this territory, and with numberless complaints and calls for protection, do you not perceive I must be sadly embarrassed and disquieted?” 5

Calhoun left New Mexico in May of 1852 and died along the trail to Missouri on July 12. He was interred at Kansas City.

Endnotes

1 Three other men—John Greiner, William S. Messervy and William W. H. Davis—held the office of governor on an interim basis for a short time, and one other, Col. Edwin Vose Sumner, claimed to be “in charge of the Executive Office” for a short time in 1852. Calhoun, Lane, Meriwether, and Rencher were the presidential appointees.

2 Military expenditures for the construction of forts, the purchase of supplies and equipment, and the employment of civilians were the greatest economic factors in the early territorial years.

3 Marc Simmons, Spanish Government in New Mexico.

4 Quoted from Ralph Emerson Twitchell, Leading Facts of New Mexican History.

5 Quoted from Twitchell, as above. Several historians refer to this letter, but none cite details concerning to whom, specifically, it was written. It is not to be found in the New Mexico Archives.

Note: A book by Sherry Robinson published in 2021, James Silas Calhoun, is an excellent source. ▫