I have just quoted some pertinent excerpts. To see the entire document and a great many other fascinating historical papers, search the title on the American Time Capsule home page.
I love the language here. It is frustration, pure and simple, and thinly veiled. After all, the New Mexican people had, by this time, been respectfully requesting statehood for over fifty years--it was no doubt time to start demanding. By 1901 they had apparently gotten to the point where they plainly stated their arguments, with very little false humility.
New Mexico’s Memorial to Congress
A Plain Presentation of Well-Known Facts Showing Why the Territory Should be Admitted to the Union as a State. 1901.
[The people of New Mexico] respectfully demand... to be admitted into the union on an equal footing with the original states.
a Territorial government is intolerable to a free people...
...because for more than half a century we have been neglected by the nation...
...New Mexico demands statehood because she has shown her right to it...
...she [New Mexico] demands it because she is now better than ever well fitted to assume such higher form of government, as in the last few years she has advanced from fourth to first place as a wool producing and sheep raising section of the nation, and is well on toward first place as a cattle raiser, and her mineral, timber and agricultural interests are vast in extent and are being developed in a phenomenal manner. Railroads are being built, plants erected and industries of different kinds are being established all over the Territory, which has an area as great as that of all the New England States and the State of New York combined.
...[New Mexico] supports more and better public institutions (all built at its own expense when the National Government ought to have built them, we still being a Territory)...
...because it has within its boundaries not less than fifteen cities and towns that are modern, up-to-date places in every respect, and that are far in advance of places in the eastern States that are of equal size...
...[we] have the finest kind of buildings in which to maintain as fine a system of public schools as exist anywhere west of the Central States, or, in fact, anywhere in the whole nation...
...because the people of the Territory are a conservative, law-abiding people, more than 90 per cent of them being born American citizens, attached to the principles of the constitution of the United States...
...because in more than twelve congresses of the United States the fitness of the people of New Mexico for a state government has been fully investigated, and bills passed in one house or both for the admission of the Territory, all of which failed to become a law through one mishap or another...
Remember, in spite of the brisk tone of this document (or, because of it?), the New Mexicans were still not granted statehood for another eleven years.
Well, they certainly didn't lack spunk or forthrightness. Eleven years later? I wonder what the real root of that decision might have been?
ReplyDeleteSounds like they say what they think. Maybe they are wysiwygs? Everyone says that is what I am. A what you see is what you get person! I like that. This was very interesting. I love your header!
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