In 1853 a lot
of Mexicans woke up to discover
that they were living in another
country in which at best they were third
class citizens and at worst considered vermin
to be erased at the earliest
opportunity. A shady international real estate scheme pushed the Mexican/US
boarder south, deep into the deserts
of the future states of New Mexico and
Arizona. Without that land grab desperate Central
American refugees would have had a hell of a lot longer walk to seek
asylum and Trump’s Wall even more useless.
The boundaries
of the continental United States were expanded for a final
time when President Franklin Pierce signed
the agreement for the Gadsden
Purchase on June 29, 1853. The
purchase added 29,670 square miles south of the Gila River and west of the Río
Grande to what was then New Mexico
Territory. The land included the Mesilla Valley which had been
identified as the logical route for
a southern transcontinental railway
which the slave holding South
hoped would tie them to California and
bring that state, or a divided southern half of it, into the slave holding
orbit.
Negotiations with the Mexican government,
first initiated by the James Buchanan administration, were also meant to
clear up boundary issues left
unresolved the Treaty of
Guadalupe-Hidalgo that ended the Mexican
War and resulted in the acquisition
of much of the Southwest and
California by the United States. The
Mexican government was also interested in large compensation from America for failing to live up to
the terms of the treaty by stopping wide-spread raiding into Mexico by Apache
and Comanche tribes from U.S. Territory.
Democrat Pierce, though a New Englander, was Doughface,
was a “Northern man with Southern sympathies”. At the suggestion
of his Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, Pierce selected South Carolina born southern firebrand
James Gadsden as Ambassador
to Mexico with instructions to reach an agreement on border issues and to
secure permission to build a railroad or canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.
But Gadsden had no interest in furthering the scheme for an Isthmus
railroad. Instead he was a promoter of,
and had a financial interest in, a
potential railroad through the Mesilla
Valley.
Gadsden was a former Army officer
who had served with Andrew Jackson in
the War of 1812 and against Indians in Florida. In 1832 he resigned
from the Army to accept appoint by President Jackson as one of the Commissioners in charge of Seminole removal from Florida and Georgia,
a job he perused with ruthless
enthusiasm. He broke with his
old commander and political sponsor, however, during the South Carolina Nullification crisis in 1831 and was a supporter of John C. Calhoun.
As a member of the South Carolina legislature in 1850, he advocated secession from the Union because of the admission of California as a free state. At the time he was also President of the South
Carolina Canal and Railway Co. and was engaged in plans to connect
all southern railroads into a unified network. In 1847 he had helped convene a convention
of southern railroads in Memphis to
that end. The convention endorsed establishing the southern transcontinental route although it
failed to agree on how to finance it.
After California was admitted, Gadsden entered a scheme with Southern sympathizers
in the state to divide it in two, with the southern half embracing
slavery, including the use of slave labor to build the southern
railroad. He proposed importing
1200 settlers from South Carolina and Florida along with “not less than Two
Thousand of their African Domestics”
to populate a special rural district that would ape the Southern plantation economy by raising cotton, rice, and sugar cane.
Although this proposal died in the state legislature, it was
well known in Washington, as was Gadsden’s financial interests in the southern
railroad project.
None-the-less, Gadsden was tapped as negotiator. Secretary
of State William L. Marcy gave him clear instructions to secure the
Mesilla Valley for the purposes of building a railroad through it, convince
Mexico that the US had done its best regarding the Indian raids, and elicit
Mexican cooperation in efforts by US citizens to build across the Tenhuantepec
isthmus.
Gadsden arrived in Mexico City to
find General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna
had been returned to the Mexican Presidency
for the seventh and final time. As an
ardent nationalist Santa Anna was
opposed to territorial concessions
to the U.S. and determined to get reparations for continued Indian raids. Moreover, he was deeply offended by
Gadsden’s brusque, insulting demeanor. Gadsden blithely told the President that “the
spirit of the times” would inevitably lead to the secession of Mexico’s
northern states and demanded that he sell most or all of the states of Sonora, Chihuahua, and Baja
California.
Mexico, as usual, was in political and financial turmoil at the time. Gadsden soon realized that Santa Anna
desperately needed cash to revive and rearm the Mexican Army in defense of expected aggression
by the American government and from Filibusterers
like William Walker who had
recently tried to capture Baja
California with 50 men.
After informing Marcy of the Santa Anna’s desperation, Gadsen received new
instructions to negotiate for the sale of six large parcels of
land and that the price for them would include reparations for the Indian raids
and absolution from any U.S.
responsibility for future raids. Prices
ranged from $50 million for Baja California and large swaths of the northern
Mexico states to $15 million for the main proposed railroad corridor along the
Mesilla Valley.
He was also instructed to keep pressing for the Tenhuantepec isthmus
route. Gadsden soon abandoned all
pretext of seeking the isthmus route, which would have been in competition with
the proposed southern transcontinental route.
He also quit pressing for wider land concessions in order to
quickly secure his railroad route.
In the end Santa Anna was glad to sell mostly wasteland which would also serve as a buffer between Mexico
and the hostile tribes to the U.S. for $15 million.
The U.S. Cabinet began reviewing
the treaty in January of 1854 and although Jefferson Davis was disappointed
that further territorial concessions were not obtained and others were upset by
the loss of the Isthmus route, the treaty was sent to an uncertain fate in Congress in February.
There it immediately became ensnared in sectional conflict over the Kansas-Nebraska
Act and the extension of slavery to
new western territories. Many Northern
senators were particularly concerned about the possibility of the southern
railroad, which would have both conflicted with their own interests in a northern route and possibly become a “conduit of chattel slavery into the
West.” On April 17 the Senate voted 27 to
18 in favor of the treaty, falling three votes short of the necessary two-thirds required for approval.
Davis urged that the President save the treaty by accepting several modifications
including re-opening the possibility of the Isthmus route, giving the U.S. the
right to use “when it may feel sanctioned and warranted by the public or
international law” in protection of construction of a canal or railroad across
the Isthmus, and a reduction of territorial concession by 9,000 square miles
with a corresponding drop in purchase price of $10 million. The changes were enough to secure additional
northern votes and the treaty finally passed by a vote of 32 to 12.
Gadsden presented the amended treaty to Santa Anna who reluctantly
agreed. No progress was ever made on
securing concessions for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec project. In the end, the treaty only really secured a
real estate deal covering some very inhospitable desert land.
Santa Anna’s popularity in Mexico declined because of agreeing to
what was seen as yet another humiliating
concession to the U.S. and because he squandered the infusion of
hard cash from the purchase. He was
removed from power for the final time by the Ayutla Rebellion of 1854.
In the U.S. the political fallout over the ratification debate and
hardening sectional hostilities meant that the railroad through the Mesilla
Valley would never be built. During the Civil War most of the purchase ended up
in the newly created Territory of
Arizona. When the Southern Pacific Railroad finally built
a southern route in the 1880’s it did not follow the Mesilla Valley, but went
further north along a line only partially within the Gadsden Purchase.
Today the land includes Tucson, Bisbee, and Yuma Arizona but is
otherwise sparsely populated and mostly owned by the Federal Government as Indian
reservations, conservation land,
and military reservations. The in the last census the total
population in the Purchase area was about 1,373,000 with three-quarters of
the people residing in the Tucson metropolitan aria.
Many of the brown skinned residents
of the area descend from folks who were there when it was Mexican
territory. Yet in modern Arizona they
were often swept up in the
anti-immigrant hysteria that
was codified in that state’s
draconian laws several years ago before much of their content was declared Unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. Today when they are stopped by Border Patrol
Agents and required to show
identification, they complained loudly—and rightly—that “We didn’t cross
the border, the border crossed us.”
Several U.S. Citizens have been swooped up anyway and spent days, weeks,
even months in custody.
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