Jeff Biggers: A Mexican Immigrant’s Act of Honor

Jeff Biggers, author of “Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland,” is currently at work on a history of Arizona politics, “State Out of the Union: Arizona and the Final Showdown Over the American Dream” (Nation/Basic Books, 2012). More on his work can be found at: www.jeffbiggers.com.

While Arizona’s single brief Civil War skirmish at Picacho Peak between the Texas-led Confederates and Union soldiers from California, on April 15, 1862, is annually taken out of mothballs for celebration, perhaps the state’s most enduring story of honor during the war remains one Mexican immigrant’s courageous act in the face of the Confederate occupation of Tucson.

On Valentine’s Day in 1862, Jefferson Davis signed the territory of Arizona — in truth, southern Arizona, below the 34th parallel — into the rebel states as their westernmost capital. It took the Civil War to bring such long-sought territorial recognition, which came with competing claims and declarations. As the United States Congress dallied, Confederate sympathizers had first gathered in Mesilla, N. M., on March 16, 1861, and hastily claimed that the greater Arizona territory would not “recognize the present Black Republican administration.” A subsequent convention in Tucson elected a delegate to the Confederate Congress.

When the Confederate flag rose from the mesquite poles in Tucson’s depopulated main plaza, the Johnny Rebs were joined by Mark Aldrich, a merchant from western Illinois who had been indicted for but not convicted of the murder of the Mormon founder Joseph Smith, and had also served as mayor. The remaining citizens and merchants in the occupied town, like the mining pioneer Sylvester Mowry, sided with the Confederate forces. A Republican from Rhode Island, Mowry took advantage of his entrepreneurial spirit to provide lead from his mines for their ammunition.