They didn’t want us, but we were stubborn
The United States didn’t want Arizona. Congress only begrudgingly named it a territory in the first place, and to gain statehood — joining the 47 others — was too grand a gesture for this rude, crude land in the Southwestern desert filled with scoundrels and ne’re-do-wells. Just ask anyone east of the Missouri River from 1856 until 1912.
That’s 56 long years; over five decades of wanting and petitioning and planning and building and praying. So, when statehood finally came on Feb. 14, 1912, the party was something spectacular to behold.
But first, there were those 56 years of disappointment.
The first time there ever was anything called the Arizona Territory, it wasn’t even in the United States of America. It was in the Confederate States of America, and it wasn’t anything like the vertical state of today. It was an oblong hunk of land that stretched across southern New Mexico from Texas to California.
Most have forgotten this piece of Arizona history, but if you looked on a map of the country as the Civil War broke out in April 1861, you wouldn’t have found anything called “Arizona.” Its land was swallowed up by the New Mexico Territory with a territorial capital of Santa Fe.
Starting in 1856, the White settlers of this forgotten land had twice petitioned Washington for a separate Arizona Territory, and twice they were told no.
The only thing going for this piece of real estate was the Butterfield Overland Stagecoach, which carried mail, freight and passengers to California. It was a route Southern congressmen had forced through with an obvious eye to the future: This is how the South would get gold from California.
But as Southern congressmen left Washington to form the Confederacy, Northern politicians revoked the Butterfield contract in March 1861, severing small communities like Tucson and Mesilla (now in southern New Mexico) from the rest of the country.
The secession of Southern states gave these rejected folks an alternative, and on March 16, 1861 — a month before the Civil War broke out — a secessionist convention was held in Mesilla, pledging Arizona as a Confederate state. On March 28, another convention in Tucson ratified the move, and Arizona again declared itself a slave state.
Historian Robert Perkins surmises that Washington could have stopped this secessionist movement if it had been more considerate. Instead, it did the opposite. It pulled Union troops out of Arizona to mass along the Rio Grande, leaving the population unprotected from Mexican bandits and Apache Chief Cochise, who already was at war with White intruders.
Cochise saw the retreat of the “Blue Coats” as a victory and launched a rampage that terrorized the area.
Help came from rebel Lt. Col. John R. Baylor, who captured Fort Fillmore to give the settlers some protection. He declared the area a Confederate Territory, 670 miles long, with all land south of the 34th parallel from Texas to California, and named himself governor, with Me- silla as the capital.
The people of Arizona welcomed Baylor with open arms, holding another convention on Aug. 28, 1861, to ratify his actions and elect Granville Henderson Oury as its delegate to the Confederate States Congress. By Oct. 1, Oury was in Richmond, Va., seeking formal status for Arizona as the South’s only rebel territory.
In early 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis created the Confederate Territory of Arizona. That finally got Washington’s attention, and President Abraham Lincoln swept in, creating the Territory of Arizona on Feb. 24, 1863. He established the boundary line that divides it from New Mexico to this day.
If Arizonans thought that was the first step in becoming a real part of the United States of America, they were sadly mistaken. There is an eerie and cruel irony in this history. Davis officially brought Arizona into his nation on Feb. 14, 1862, exactly 50 years to the day that Arizona became the last of the 48 contiguous states. was so mad that President Theodore Roosevelt seemed to give tacit approval of jointure that it changed the name of Roosevelt Street to Cleveland Street (but would eventually change it back again.)
Arizona started calling itself the “47th state” in anticipation of things turning around, and in 1910, they finally did. Congress overcame its fears and told the territory to write a constitution.
Arizona’s Constitutional Convention opened on Oct. 10, 1910, and ran for 60 days, producing what was then considered either “one of the most progressive” constitutions of any state, or “socialistic and undemocratic.” It did not include voting rights for women but did include the initiative, referendum and recall, including the recall of judges that President William Howard Taft had warned he would never approve. While some in Arizona, including its newspapers, claimed the entire effort was “all for naught” because of the recall, voters loved the constitution, passing it on Feb. 9, 1911, by 12,534 to 3,920.
Taft upheld his promise and vetoed the constitution, telling the Arizona Territory it would never be admitted with that provision. Arizona responded like an obedient child, removing the recall of judges and going back to voters, who approved the sanitized constitution.
Arizona was approved for statehood but would face one more disappointment. It had hoped to be admitted on Feb. 12, the birthday of President Lincoln, who remained a state champion for making it a territory in the first place. But Taft was busy then and didn’t sign until Valentine’s Day on Feb. 14, 1912. Meanwhile, New Mexico, which didn’t tinker with Taft’s rules on a constitution, was admitted as the 47th state on Jan. 6, 1912, making Arizona the 48th.