Gadsden Purchase

In 1853, Mexico agreed to sell to the United States nearly 30 million acres (45,535 square miles) in present-day southern Arizona and New Mexico. The United States sought land in northern Mexico for a proposed southern transcontinental railroad route that would include a port on the Gulf of California. It also wanted to resolve a boundary controversy that had arisen from errors in John Disturnell's map, which according to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, was the basis for delineating the southern limits of New Mexico. Factional interests in both the United States and Mexico eventually limited the amount of land that changed hands. In the United States, sectional rivalries linked to the railroad and slavery led the Senate in 1854 to ratify an amended treaty that bought only the Mesilla Valley. James Gadsden, U.S. minister to Mexico, had been empowered to discuss, in addition, mutual claims, trade issues, and U.S. rights in Tehuantepec; yet only one of these issues figured in the final treaty. The United States wanted to be relieved of its obligation in Article XI of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to protect Mexico from Indian incursions originating north of the border. Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna succumbed to the fiscal exigencies of his beleaguered government as well as to the fear that an expansionist United States, which had done little to discourage filibustering expeditions to northern Mexico since the war, would take what it wanted by force. Mexico ceded the Mesilla territory and abrogated Article XI of the 1848 treaty in return for ten million dollars.

See alsoGuadalupe Hidalgo, Treaty of (1848)xml .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Paul N. Garber, The Gadsden Treaty (1959).

Josefina Z. Vázquez and Lorenzo Meyer, The United States and Mexico (1985).

Additional Bibliography

Rebert, Paula. La Gran Línea: Mapping the United States-Mexico Boundary, 1849–1857. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001.

Vázquez, Josefina Zoraida. México al tiempo de su guerra con Estados Unidos, 1846–1848. México: Secretaría de Exteriores: El Colegio de México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997.

Winders, Richard Bruce. Crisis in the Southwest: The United States, Mexico, and the Struggle over Texas. Wilmington: SR Books, 2002.

                                        Susan M. Deeds