On her Centennial, the story of Arizona’s protracted birth and colorful history in pictures and words IS TOLD THROUGH OUR TIMELINE...

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From ‘Gadsonia’ to ‘Arizona the Great,’ Arizona survived a welter of name changes - and a long-running spat with New Mexico - in the longest statehood admission struggle in the nation’s history.

Romeo and Juliet, Simon and Garfunkel, Wallace and Ladmo. Some names are forever paired in history. Such was not the destiny for Arizona and New Mexico, even though the two were officially linked together for more than half  a century. 

In the early 19th century, both were part of a vast tract of territorial land inherited by the newly independent Mexican Republic. After the Mexican-American War, the U.S. yoked them together in 1850 as the Territory of New Mexico. In 1904, Congress even proposed joint statehood in a strange entity called “Arizona the Great.”
 
Despite the best matchmaking efforts in the distant capitals of Mexico City and Washington, D.C., Arizona was destined for a unique, independent identity. While becoming the 48th state proved an arduous ordeal, it also provided drama and plot twists worthy of a Tom Clancy thriller. The territory’s tumultuous history gave ample cause for fevered celebration when President William Howard Taft’s signature officially admitted Arizona as the last of the contiguous states to the Union on February 14, 1912.

Arizona’s path to statehood began after the Mexican-American War, when Mexico ceded much of what is now the American Southwest in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 and the Gadsden Purchase in 1853. The New Mexico Territory was barren and remote, known only to a few mountain men who had explored it while trapping beaver. Government control was almost nonexistent; far-off Santa Fe was the territorial capital, and Tubac and Tucson in the Santa Cruz Valley were among the few small extant settlements in what is now Arizona. Much of the territory remained the domain of American Indian tribes.

Despite some unsuccessful attempts beginning in 1856 to create a separate Arizona Territory, it wasn’t until the Civil War that Arizona finally broke free of New Mexico. But the conflict proved an all-too-divisive catalyst; two competing “Arizona Territories” were eventually established, the first by the Confederates and the second by the Union. To make matters even more confusing, each had different boundaries and capitals.

Photo courtesy Arizona Historical Foundation Members Arizona Constitutional Convention, Phoenix, October 10 - December 9, 1910

On February 14, 1862, Confederate President Jefferson Davis signed a bill creating the Arizona Territory of the Confederate States. Instead of dividing the territories in today’s familiar east-west manner, the Confederates divided them north-south, with the Arizona Territory consisting of the southern tier of land between Texas and California below the 34th Parallel (just north of Phoenix). Its capital was Mesilla, located north of El Paso. Tucson residents, mostly of Southern origin, seceded from the Union and were joined by Confederate soldiers from Texas called “Arizona Volunteers.” After a skirmish with Union forces from California in the Battle of Picacho Pass on April 15, 1862, the Confederates retreated to Texas. Subsequently, the Confederate Arizona Territory existed only on paper until the end of the Civil War in 1865.

Concurrently, momentum was building in Washington, D.C. to split the ungainly New Mexico Territory. President Abraham Lincoln signed the Organic Act, creating Arizona (thankfully, the original name, “Gadsonia,” was rejected, as was “Arizuma”) as a separate territory from New Mexico on February 24, 1863. The territories were divided along the present-day 32nd Meridian, which had the effect of denying a de facto ratification of the Confederate Arizona Territory.

The Act also moved the capital from the proposed location in Confederate-friendly Tucson to the gold-rush town of Prescott and established a territorial government. In essence, Arizona was moved into a “political limbo where the president appointed the governor and other high officials and in which the one delegate to Congress was vote-less,” notes Lawrence Clark Powell in Arizona: A History.

The territorial capital bounced around Arizona, returning to Tucson in 1867, back to Prescott in 1877, and eventually to Phoenix in 1889. Many early governors were “political carpetbaggers – appointed officials from outside the territory who neither knew nor cared about Arizona’s needs,” according to Odie Faulk’s Arizona: A Short History. Officials often focused on profiting from the territory rather than creating a state.

The first important state constitution was drafted in 1891 in Phoenix. The proposed constitution was highly controversial, with provisions allowing silver to be legal currency. (Congress rejected it.) Another petition for statehood was voted down by Congress in 1893, but it led to the 1894 passage of the Enabling Act, which sanctioned the organization of the State of Arizona. Although President William McKinley, a Republican, promoted statehood in a 1901 visit, most Congressional Republicans remained opposed since Arizona was a Democratic stronghold.

In 1904, a Congressional proposal called for jointly admitting New Mexico and Arizona to the Union as one mega-state called “Arizona the Great” with its capital in Santa Fe. Outraged, Arizonans organized the Anti-Joint Statehood League, and the territorial legislature passed a resolution of protest. Congress provided each territory the opportunity to express its preference in 1906. New Mexico, mostly Catholic and Republican, was in favor 26,195 to 14,735, while Arizona, predominantly Protestant and Democratic, opposed joint statehood 16,265 to 3,141.

Republicans passed a bill through Congress in 1910 that enabled Arizona to hold elections for members of a convention that would draw up a state constitution. Written in 100 days, it was ratified by Arizonans by a vote of almost 4 to 1 on February 9, 1911. In August, Congress approved the constitution and President Taft signed it, but not before deleting a contentious provision for the recall of judges. Arizonans approved the altered constitution and elected a slate of public officials on December 12, 1911.

Arizona Statehood came on Valentine’s Day, February 14, 1912 – coincidentally, exactly 50 years after the Confederates had first declared Arizona a territory. Movie cameras recorded President Taft signing the proclamation, the first time this technology had ever chronicled such an event.

When the news reached Arizona via telegraph, most schools and businesses closed for raucous celebrations and impromptu parades. In Phoenix, Governor-elect George Hunt was inaugurated, although frightened horses cut short the accompanying 48-gun salute. The revelry heralded the end of the longest statehood admission struggle in the nation’s history - slightly longer, even, than New Mexico, which became a state five weeks earlier on January 6.

In its first formal election as a state, held on November 5, 1912, Arizona promptly took advantage of its newly-vested statehood to thumb its nose at Washington by returning the provision to its constitution to recall judges. It would not be the last time Arizona defied federal mandates, forever playing the strong-willed sibling to its more compliant Southwestern litter mate.