Retrieved 15: Arizona's Attempt to Secede

5fish

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Central Florida
You know Arizona secede from the union too... but it was not about slavery directly... maybe states rights? well, future state?

Are some snippets...

Since 1856, settlers in southern New Mexico Territory had sought to split off and organize their own territorial government. Their aspiration got caught up in the growing sectional tensions of the late 1850s and the belief in the U.S. Congress that the impetus to divide New Mexico Territory into two separate northern and southern territories was that the settlers hoped to expand slavery into the southern portion.

The Ordinance of Secession, creating the Arizona Territory and announcing its intention to join the Confederacy, passed in a convention in Mesilla on March 16, 1861, and a second convention at Tucson on March 28, 1861.

Unique among the secession justifications, slavery was not an explicit issue in this document. Despite a statement complaining of the rise of the Republican party in the North and how it “has disregarded the Constitution of the United States, violated the rights of the Southern States, and heaped wrongs and indignities upon their people,” the Arizona Ordinance of Secession never once mentioned the word “slave” or its variations and its specific reasons for secession instead reflect the problems of settlers in a region in which the American imprint was growing but still limited.

Yet except for language expressing solidarity with the slave states, the specific grievances of the Arizona Ordinance of Secession instead reflected the complaints of frontier settlers–not slaveholders. Congress recently had halted mail service along the stage line linking southern New Mexico territory with the rest of the country. The Arizona Ordinance stated, “That the recent enactment of the Federal Congress, removing the mail service from the Atlantic to the Pacific States from the Southern to the Central or Northern route, is another powerful reason for us to ask the Southern Confederate States of America for a continuation of the postal service over the Butterfield or El Paso route, at the earliest period.” The settlers also were angry at the failure of federal troops to halt Apache Indian raids directed at them. The Ordinance exclaimed, “the Government of the United States has heretofore failed to give us adequate protection against the savages within our midst and has denied us an administration of the laws, and that security for life, liberty, and property which is due from all governments to the people

https://cwemancipation.wordpress.com/2011/03/28/sometimes-the-civilwar-wasnt-about-slavery/



 
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