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TheArizona Organic Act was anorganic act passed in theUnited States federal law introduced as H.R. 357 in the second session of the37th U.S. Congress on March 12, 1862, by Rep.James M. Ashley ofOhio. The Act provided for the creation of theArizona Territory by the division of theNew Mexico Territory into two territories along the current boundary between New Mexico and Arizona. On February 24, 1863, PresidentAbraham Lincoln signed the bill once it had been approved byCongress. The bill established aprovisional government for the new territory. It abolishedslavery in the new Arizona Territory, but did not abolish it in the portion that remained the New Mexico Territory. During the 1850s, Congress had resisted a demand for Arizona statehood because of a well-grounded fear that it would become a slave state.
According toMarshall Trimble, the official historian of Arizona, the Arizona Organic Act can be traced to theNorthwest Ordinance. Business people from Ohio had silver mining interests in the Arizona Territory, and they took their request for Arizona territorial status to Congress. The U.S. Civil War was occurring at the time, and the Union needed silver, which Trimble explains as being one of the main reasons for passage of the Act.[1]
The New Mexico Territory had a long history of enslavement ofNative American people, first by each other and later by Hispanic settlers (cf.Genízaros). Although in 1860 there were relatively fewAfrican American slaves in New Mexico, the legislature formally approved slavery shortly before the Civil War.
During the war, theConfederate States of America established an entity called theArizona Territory, which had different boundaries from modern Arizona. According to historian Martin Hardwick Hall, invading Confederate troops brought an unknown number of enslaved African Americans into the territory. Historian Donald S. Frazier estimates there were as many as fifty black slaves brought by Confederate officials and troops, in his bookBlood & Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest.
