Gadsden Purchase (1854).The Gadsden Purchase was a wedge of land acquired by the United States from Mexico in 1854. Named after James Gadsden (1788–1858), an American diplomat and railroad entrepreneur, the territory comprised a narrow strip of today's New Mexico and nearly a quarter of southern Arizona. The purchase resulted from disagreements between the United States and Mexico over the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the
Mexican War. Besides defining the U.S.‐Mexican border with an inaccurate map, the treaty obliged the United States to restrain marauding Indians along the border. U.S. failure to enforce this provision led Mexico to claim millions of dollars in damages.
When Franklin
Pierce entered the White House in 1853, he supported the building of a transcontinental railroad through territory claimed by Mexico. To this end, Pierce instructed Gadsden, the U.S. minister to Mexico, to attempt purchase of the Mexican state of Sonora. The Mexican president Antonio López de Santa Anna initially rebuffed Gadsden's offer. But his administration was in desperate financial straits, and Gadsden in December 1853 managed to negotiate a treaty under which the United States acquired a smaller piece of land for fifteen million dollars.
Despite Mexico's willingness to withdraw its damage claims and to abrogate the article pertaining to Indians, the treaty provoked bitter debate in the U.S. Senate.
Antislavery senators opposed the treaty as an effort by slave holders to expand the slave system. Although the opposition succeeded in reducing the size of the purchase and the price to ten million dollars, railroad and land speculators prevailed, and the Senate ratified the treaty in June 1854. The Gadsden Purchase represents a point of intersection between mid‐nineteenth‐century commercial expansionism and the debate over
slavery. While it did facilitate construction of a southern railroad route to the Pacific and the exploitation of mineral wealth in the region, it also helped to fuel the sectional conflict leading to the
Civil War.
See also
Economic Development;
Expansionism;
Foreign Relations: U.S. Relations with Latin America;
Indian Wars;
Railroads;
Southwest.
Bibliography
Rodolfo Acuña , Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 3d ed., 1988.
Richard Griswold del Castillo , The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo: A Legacy of Conflict, 1990.
Norman Caulfield
