February 14th isn't just Valentine's Day. It marks the day when Arizona became the 48th state of the United States.
In 2012, Arizona will celebrate its 100th birthday. Between now and our centennial, ABC15 is looking back at Arizona's rich history. That knowledge may help us all build an even better tomorrow.
Phoenix and Arizona might not have come to exist had it not been for the Civil War.
Congress formally split Arizona out of the New Mexico territory in 1863 largely in response to a Confederate claim in 1861 to its own Arizona territory stretching across the southern half of today's states (including the site of Phoenix).
There wasn't much to Arizona in 1860. The census that year counted about 6,400 people living in forts and settlements across the western half of New Mexico, two-thirds of them Indians.
Confederate troops out of Texas had defeated a federal force at Mesilla in August 1861, and a small unit took over Tucson and moved through the Salt River Valley seeking to block a large force of Union volunteers coming east from California via Yuma. The westernmost land fight of the war took place in March 1862 at Stanwix Station, about 80 miles east of Yuma.
A small Confederate detachment led by Lt. John Swilling was burning hay left along the Union's planned route to Tucson when it was attacked by more than 200 troops from the California volunteers. One Union private was slightly wounded.
Two weeks later, at Picacho Peak between today's Phoenix and Tucson, a Union advance guard ran into a Confederate ambush. The skirmish left about a dozen dead, wounded and captured from both sides. Soon afterward, the outnumbered Confederates left Tucson and spent the next six weeks marching back to Texas. Despite the failed campaign, Arizona continued to have a vote in the Confederate Congress until the end of the war.
By the following year, the new Union Arizona territory was formed with a capital at Prescott and Union troops and local volunteers set up various forts, mainly as bases against the Apache and others.
Somewhere about the same time, Swilling, a former Confederate, turned from mining around the town of Wickenburg to farming, utilizing long-abandoned canals. By 1865, he and several other farmers had established Phoenix, and by 1868 there was a post office with Swilling as postmaster.
Still, the 1870 census shows that development didn't come fast to the area. The entire Salt River Valley district of Yavapai County had 240 people, Wickenburg 174.
PICTURES: America in 1861 | America in 1870
The entire territory's population in 1870 was 41,710, and nearly three-quarters were Indians. It had about 14,000 acres in farmland, and 18 factories or shops, none reported in Yavapai County.
A year later, Maricopa County was formed, and a decade after that the modern city was chartered.
For modern-day census statistics, please check the 2011 U.S. Statistical Abstract, http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/
Click "next" to read How the Civil War is still changing America
How the Civil War is still changing America Although the Civil War was 150 years ago, echoes from the first shots on Fort Sumter continue to reverberate across America.
While largely considered a fight between North and South, the impact of the Civil War extended far beyond the Mason-Dixon Line.
A Scripps Howard News Service analysis of census data from 1860 and 1870 illustrates just how deeply the conflict and its aftermath touched virtually every corner of the nation, often in surprising ways.
The census figures show how the bloodiest war in America's 235-year history not only freed 4 million people held as slaves and ended the Confederate insurrection, but in many ways defined the nation that exists today.
In the war years (1861-1865) and after, Congress established national policies affecting education, financial institutions, trade and transportation as well as civil rights that shaped national development and identity.
"The government expanded the economy very fast with the war, but the government itself also grew and became more activist in many areas,'' said Heather Cox Richardson, a Civil War historian at the University of Massachusetts, Andover. "In many respects, there was this release of energy across the country that had been held back by the slavery question."
The 1860 census statistics underscore what schoolrooms have long taught: 23 Union states with two-thirds of the population and most of the manufacturing capacity held a distinct advantage over the 11 Confederate states that were largely rural and agricultural.
The South in 1860 had about 18,000 manufacturing establishments employing roughly 100,000 people; the Union had 110,000 factories with more than 1.2 million workers.
The South's agricultural wealth was substantial, but still less than the North's. Southern farmland was worth more than $2 billion out of $6 billion for the whole nation. The value of people held as property was estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion.
After four years of fighting mostly in the South, two-thirds of the Confederacy's ships and riverboats were destroyed, along with 90 percent of the region's rail lines and thousands of bridges, mills and shops.
Out of some 4 million who enlisted, at least 620,000 Union and Confederate soldiers and sailors died -- more than twice as many due to sickness than in battle. About one in five white men in the South died during the war, changing social dynamics from marriage prospects for women to management practices on farms.
Yet the 1870 census also shows that, in some respects, the devastation of the war was quickly being reversed. In every Southern state but Virginia, there were more manufacturing establishments employing more people and producing material of greater cash value than before the war, although the growth was far behind that seen in the North and West.
"You know how Scarlett O'Hara goes into the sawmill or lumber business after the war in 'Gone with the Wind'? There's a good bit of truth in that fiction," said William Blair, a professor and director of the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center at Pennsylvania State University. "A lot of whites did try to diversify beyond the plantation into manufacturing, mining and timber.''
There were thousands more farms across the South after the war, mainly homesteads claimed by former slaves from abandoned or government-seized plantations. In the next decades, the number of farms would decline again as white owners reclaimed land and tenant farming or sharecropping became an agricultural norm that would last into the 20th century. Because of the changed status of the slaves and because the prices of the region's major cash crop of cotton were in long-term decline, the cash value of farms in Southern states was half or even a quarter of what it had been in 1860.
Across the North, the 1860s saw rapid expansion of industries, railroads and agriculture. Wartime production drove up wages and profits for many businesses, and even a brief recession at war's end didn't slow growth for industrializing cities of the Midwest like Chicago, Cleveland, Indianapolis and Cincinnati. In many cities, a few large plants employed as many people as all of the smaller businesses combined.
Less than half of the national work force was farming in 1870. U.S. industrial production increased 75 percent within just a few years from the end of the war. More than 35,000 miles of new railroad track was laid, including the first transcontinental line, completed in Utah in 1869.
Many scholars say economic expansion was propelled by Northern Republicans taking control of the federal government. They adopted pro-growth policies long thwarted by Southerners in Congress.
"It was one of those rare times in our history where one party could control the agenda, and they made the most of it,'' said Tyler Anbinder, an assistant professor of 19th-century American history at George Washington University in Washington.
Along with full emancipation, extending citizenship to all persons "natural born" and other civil-rights measures, Congress by 1870 established a national banking system and currency. Every dollar slid into a vending machine or cash drawer has a lineage reaching to the "greenbacks" first printed during the war, and Congress also set up a land-grant-college program that continues to educate tens of thousands of Americans today.
Federal lawmakers also passed the 1862 Homestead Act awarding 160-acre farms to anyone who would live on and improve a plot for five years, and they gave away millions of acres to foster railroad construction and mining.
"People say elections really don't settle anything. But the election in 1860 settled something, and it brought tremendous changes to the country that can still be seen,'' said Gavin Wright, an economic historian at Stanford University.
The country emerged with a new sense of identity and destiny. Before the war, the national map showed roughly drawn territories and big gaps left to accommodate Indian tribes between the Mississippi and the Pacific states. Early in the war, the Confederates had sent small expeditions to stake claims to the southern halves of modern-day Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma, which further encouraged the federal government to legitimize control.
By 1870, the boundaries of every current or future state in the continental U.S. were drawn. The census recorded more than a half-million people living in the territories, mainly concentrated near mines or rail lines. The end of the frontier life was approaching and modern metropolises like Denver, Seattle and Kansas City, Mo., were expanding under the encouraging development policies.
While 15 percent of the nation's 39 million people lived in urban counties in 1870, nearly 80 percent of 308 million residents do so today. There were 163 million "improved" acres of farmland in 1870, divided into more than 2.6 million farms. Today, there are 920 million acres of farmland, but 2.2 million farms.
The Civil War did not result in full equality for blacks and other minorities and women. That took nearly another 100 years, while some say it still hasn't been achieved. But Columbia University's Eric Foner, a leading historian of the Reconstruction era, says, "The remarkable thing is not that civil rights failed then, but that it was attempted at all given the attitudes that prevailed."
University of Massachusetts' Richardson added that during the war and Reconstruction, "Americans began to grapple with the question of who is an American citizen and what is the relationship between the government and its citizens. We're still trying to work out those questions even today."
Copyright 2011 Scripps Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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