Arizona Organic Act

According to Marshall Trimble, the official historian of Arizona, the Arizona Organic Act can be traced to the Northwest 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.

The New Mexico Territory had a long history of enslavement of Native American people, first by each other and later by Hispanic settlers (cf. Genízaros). Although in 1860 there were relatively few African American slaves in New Mexico, the legislature formally approved slavery shortly before the Civil War.

During the war, the Confederate States of America established an entity called the Arizona 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 book Blood & Treasure: Confederate Empire in the Southwest.