Mexican Americans played a major role in the American Civil War (1861-1865). Texas, which was home to a significant portion of the nation's Mexican American population, seceded from the Union and joined the Confederate States of America in February 1861. In the Arizona and New Mexico territories, many elite Mexican American families held views sympathetic to the Confederacy. In New Mexico, wealthy Mexican American crop-farm families openly supported the slave-owners of the South, perhaps due to their own reliance on the forced labor of Native Americans.