Gadsden Purchase

The Gadsden Purchase, an 1853 land deal between the United States and Mexico, sought to resolve lingering boundary disputes created by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hildalgo that ended the Mexican-American War in 1848. But the purchase, engineered by a cabal of southern visionaries led by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, later the president of the Confederacy, and James Gadsden, a South Carolina entrepreneur then serving as ambassador to Mexico, sought as well to ensure American access to the flatlands of the Mesilla Valley along the Rio Grande against the future development of a transcontinental railroad that would link the agrarian-rich markets of the south to the lucrative trade routes of the Pacific. Although that railroad would never be built, the purchase created a rich, culturally diverse enclave in what is present-day southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico, a multicultural society that would flourish decades after the Civil War.

By the standards of far more ambitious land deals executed under the protocol of Manifest Destiny during the first half of the 19th century, the treaty that secured the Gadsden Purchase may seem modest—the administration of Franklin Pierce purchased 29,670 square miles (bound roughly to the north by the Gila River and to the south by the Rio Grande) for $10 million (roughly $270 million in contemporary currency). What led to American interest in securing the land were persistent problems over a flawed boundary set after the Mexican-American War by territorial surveying teams and ongoing problems over a treaty provision that had guaranteed American monitoring of the border to interdict Native American raids, particularly from the Comanche and the Apache. That campaign to secure the border had proven ruinously expensive and the border virtually unsealable.

But what drove the Gadsden Purchase was more the potential to use the negotiated land as a site for the development of what was conceived as a transcontinental railroad system that would link southern farm markets to the Pacific, specifically, a train line running from El Paso in southwestern Texas to coastal San Diego. After the war, Gadsden, a career soldier who had become a powerful executive in a South Carolina railroad interest, spearheaded a grand project that determined the most promising line would include the disputed boundary property along the Rio Grande then under the control of the Mexican government.

Pierce, a senator from New Hampshire with southern sympathies as well as an ambitious proexpansionist agenda, was elected president in 1852 and aggressively pursued settling the long-standing border dispute with the Mexican government as a way to acquire the Mesilla Valley. He sent Gadsden [Page 934]to negotiate with the government of the dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna, who across nearly four tempestuous decades had been both the political and military leader of the Mexican independence movement. Although Santa Anna initially rejected the purchase, American negotiators underscored that if the Mexican government refused to sell, it would most likely face military aggression. Santa Anna agreed—the purchase was nearly universally decried in Mexico and Santa Anna would be removed from power within months. After significant modifications of the price by the U.S. Senate, the treaty went into effect June 30, 1854.

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