The change agent
First governor of New Mexico Territory earns a sympathetic new biography
‘JAMES SILAS CALHOUN: FIRST GOVERNOR OF NEW MEXICO TERRITORY AND FIRST INDIAN AGENT’ By Sherry Robinson
University of New Mexico Press (2021, 390 pp.)
At a time when New Mexicans — before they were incorporated into the United States as such — were not sure where to throw their allegiance, newly appointed federal Indian agent James Silas Calhoun arrived in July 1849 to keep the peace.
“No other man, I believe,” noted a fellow agent, “could have kept this Territory from open rebellion.”
Georgia-born self-made entrepreneur and veteran of the Mexican War, former mayor of Columbus, Georgia, Calhoun — not to be confused with the South Carolina political firebrand John C. Calhoun — was only one of six Indian agents at the time in the U.S., whose ignorance of the Native Americans was profound, starting with how many there were and what tribes they made up.
An unlikely New Mexican, Calhoun (then Calhoon) was born in 1799, to Scots-Irish newcomers to Georgia, probably land seekers from North Carolina — “plain, unpretentious, religious people” — Methodists. He grew up as far away from the new Southwestern territory as then imaginable, and was probably orphaned at an early age, perhaps from the repeated malaria outbreaks. From scraps in his background, author and journalist Sherry Robinson does a valiant job of piecing together his life — he wrote copious letters but left no official memoir. No college claims him, although he was certainly educated, and he served as a lawyer, judge, merchant banker, cotton broker, in Milledgeville, then the capital of Georgia, and later Columbus. Seduced by the frenzy of appropriating Creek land during the Seminole War, Calhoun lost his fortune in the Panic of 1837.
Newly widowed in 1841, despondent and relying on his Whig connections (he had supported William Henry Harrison for president), Calhoun was appointed consul at Havana. He learned Spanish. Later, back in Columbus, he managed to become editor of the Columbus Enquirer, where he followed the U.S. annexation of Texas closely, and the inevitable war with Mexico.
Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo, which ended the Mexican American War, in 1848, the United States claimed territory that would become California, Arizona and New Mexico. President Zachary Taylor wanted the new territories to enter the union as free states, and Calhoun, as the wellconnected Whig and friend of the president, was enlisted to help propel statehood. Complicating the issue was Texas’s claim of New Mexico land east of the Río Grande.
Would the new states be admitted as slave states or free? This was the burning question in the nation.
At the time, the unrest in New Mexico territory (much larger than the state is today, embracing most of present Arizona, and parts of present-day Colorado and Nevada) was acute, the mistrust among the diverse population rife — the Spanish settlers had been encroaching on Native American lands for the previous 200 years, prompting raids and counterattacks. The various tribes of Apache, Navajo, Hopi, Ute, Cheyenne, Arapaho and Comanche were often at war with one another, while the Pueblo tribes, of which there were about 20, numbering about 6,524 in 1847, were agrarian and peaceable, Calhoun determined, and could serve as “a stabilizing presence in a region overrun by hostile nomads.”
Indeed, only several years before, in January 1847, the first governor of the newly conquered territory of New Mexico, Charles Bent, had been murdered in his home during the Taos Pueblo revolt. Popular resentment of American military control still simmered, casting a shadow over Calhoun’s work in the territory. In his appointment as the new Indian agent, working with scarce resources, he achieved the first formal peace treaty with the Utes, and allied himself with influential friends like Padre Antonio Martínez, among others. However, as Robinson describes, Calhoun “was realizing the federal government’s great folly in assigning one lone agent to bring order to this cauldron of conflicts.”
In what became known as the Compromise of 1850, California was admitted to the union as a free state, territorial status was awarded to New Mexico and Utah, and the border with Texas settled — for the fee of $10 million. Civil war was avoided, for now, and, as author Robinson writes, “the entire nation breathed a large sigh of relief.”
Calhoun was inaugurated as territorial governor on March 3, 1851 in Santa Fe. New Mexicans were now citizens of a U.S. Territory, with rights: “The fate of New Mexico, under Providence, is in the hands of her own sons, and if wise and patriotic counsels prevail, a brilliant destiny awaits her,” Calhoun declared on this jubilant day.
Robinson makes a good case for how Calhoun, a supreme change agent, and in only 14 months in office as governor, during a time when the Americans did not inspire confidence, “persuaded New Mexicans that they had a stake in the new government.” Ill, overworked, he was traveling back East to visit Georgia in 1852 when he died in Missouri, scarcely 52 years old. The conscientious public servant had brought a coffin along the wagon journey with him.