Connelly Henry was born in 1800 in Spencer County, Kentucky, United States, the son of John Donaldson and Frances (Brent) Connelly. He was a descendant of Thomas Connelly of County Armagh, Ireland, who settled near Charleston, South Carolina, in 1689.
Connelly was trained in a school kept by a locally noted teacher, James Dozier, and later attended Transylvania University, from which he graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1828.
In 1828 Connelly began practise in Liberty, Missouri, then one of the outermost towns of the frontier, but in a few months closed his office and left with a trading party for Santa Fe and Chihuahua. In the latter city he became a clerk in the store of a Mr. Powell, whom subsequently he bought out. He seems to have been naturalized as a Mexican citizen about 1832. He is said to have made many trips between Chihuahua and Independence, Missouri, at first with pack mules and later with his own wagon trains, and to have been the first merchant to take a wagon train (April 1839 - August 1840) from Chihuahua to Fort Towson and back.
He was in Santa Fe August 12, 1846, when Captain Philip St. George Cooke entered the city in advance of Kearny’s army, and he was chosen by Governor Armijo as his emissary to return with Cooke and negotiate with the general. After the flight of Armijo and the establishment of American rule he proceeded south. Arrested by the Mexican authorities as the bearer of a letter from Kearny to James Magoffin, he was taken to Chihuahua, but was soon released. He then moved to Peralta, in the present Valencia County, New Mexico, resuming his American citizenship.
In the period following the conquest he induced the Mexican inhabitants, in spite of the ugly mood evidenced by the Taos uprising in 1847, to accept and cooperate with the American rule. In the movement to establish a state government he was elected governor, June 20, 1850, but as Congress ignored the action and made New Mexico a territory, he did not serve. During the following ten years he and Edward J. Glasgow, his partner since 1843, established the mercantile business in New Mexico. In 1861 he was appointed governor of the territory, and at the outbreak of the Civil War his influence was decisive in moulding public opinion against the maneuvers of the Confederates.
During the panic caused by the Confederate invasion, under General H. H. Sibley, and the Union disaster at Valverde, February 21, 1862, he acted with coolness and determination, and his indefatigable efforts in support of the army of defense contributed greatly to the rout of the invaders. At the close of his four-year term, President Lincoln reappointed him. For some time his health had been failing, and in 1863 he had visited the east for medical treatment. Believing himself cured, he resumed his duties, but before long his illness returned. He died in office, at Santa Fe, from an overdose of an opiate.
H. H. Bancroft regards him as “a man of good intentions, of somewhat visionary and poetic temperament, of moderate abilities and not much force. ” W. E. Connelly, on the other hand, praises him warmly, and his general estimate is supported by R. E. Twitchell. As a pioneer trader Connelly was, according to the former, “to this commercial new world what Kit Carson, Fremont and others were in their spheres of action. ” He was, moreover, “a gentleman of refinement and intelligence, honorable and upright in all the relations of life. ”
Connelly was married in Chihuahua about 1836 to a Mexican woman, by whom he had three sons. She died, probably in 1843. Later he married Dolores Perea Chavez, a widow, by whom three children were bom to him.
