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Robert E. Lee, "Stonewall" Jackson, and Ulysses S. Grant are names synonymous with the American Civil War. Henry Hopkins Sibley and James Carleton are less familiar or altogether unknown names yet their importance to the outcome of the Civil War cannot be overstated. In 1862, General Sibley of the Confederate States of America (CSA) Army marched his brigade from Texas, along the Rio Grande, and was destined for California. Colonel Carleton, commander of the Union's California Column, led his troops eastward from Fort Yuma with the mission of preventing the Sibley Brigade from reaching California. The leaders in Washington, D.C. and Richmond both understood the importance of possessing New Mexico and Arizona territories as they were the gateway to the ports of California. The Union blockade of the southern Atlantic ports and the rapidly declining financial resources of the CSA were two of the reasons Confederate President Jefferson Davis ordered his troops to move west from Texas. If the CSA had been successful the outcome of the war, and certainly the duration, may have been quite different. The natural resources found in the region, the Pacific ports of California, and openness to slavery were factors that had the ability to drastically change the outcome of the Civil War.

== Finances and the Blockade ==

When the War of the Rebellion began, the South was at a great disadvantage both financially and in terms of manpower. The North boasted a population of 22 million individuals, many of whom worked in one of the 110,000 factories that produced goods worth over $1 billion dollars annually. The agrarian South had just 18,000 factories that yielded $155 million in products during the same time period. The number of individuals in the North dwarfed that of the South, whose 1861 total population was 9 million; 3.5 million of that number constituted chattel slaves. Additionally, for every firearm possessed by the CSA, the Union owned 32.<ref>Eric Foner, ''Give Me Liberty: An American History,''vol.1, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), 486.</ref>Adding to the financial woes of the CSA, on April 19, 1861 President Lincoln ordered a blockade of all southern ports. The blockade not only halted the import of goods to the South, it also stopped the South's exportation of products; namely cotton to England.

[[File:confedscript.jpg|thumbnail|350px|Confederate script. Note the slave in the center of the bill]]