James Gadsden (May 15, 1788 – December 26, 1858)[1] was an American diplomat, soldier and businessman after whom the Gadsden Purchase is named, pertaining to land which the United States bought from Mexico, and which became the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico. James Gadsden served as Adjutant General of the U.S. Army from August 13, 1821 – March 22, 1822. Between 1853 and 1856, he served as U.S. Minister to Mexico. He was known commonly as General Gadsden, although he never had a rank above colonel.
Gadsden next decided to quit the U.S. Army, and became a planter in Florida; he served in the Florida Territorial Legislature. Gadsden was appointed as a commissioner during 1823 to help with the organization and the expulsion of most of the Seminole Indian Tribe from their homes in Florida and southern Georgia, along the Trail of Tears to land reservations that had been reserved for them in what is now Oklahoma.
Later, Gadsden served as the president of the South Carolina Railroad company from 1840 to 1850. When first completed in 1833, the line was the longest railroad in the world under one management. As an engineer he directed the construction of the branch to Columbia, completed 1842, surveyed a proposed extension to the Ohio River, and helped promote the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, incorporated 1845 (completed in 1857, it was the first U.S. railroad link between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River, but long after Gadsden had turned his attention elsewhere).
By 1846, Gadsden and his associates promoted the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. He urged Georgia and South Carolina to abandon their rivalry and to "discover their true policy in the harmony of a free and unrestricted trade."[6] A late 1840s map shows this railroad would hypothetically have been by way of the southern route from Charleston through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to El Paso, Texas, and then through Mexico to the coast, in what in a few years would be newly acquired American land, after the 1846–1848 war with Mexico.[7] In 1852, the SCRR followed the philosophy laid out by Gadsden during his tenure and moved the railroad's terminus from Hamburg, South Carolina, signaling the end of South Carolina's focus on economic sovereignty.[6]
Much of the boundary between the United States and Mexico had been left unreasonably vague by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that had been signed and ratified by the United States and Mexico during 1848. Gadsden would play an important role in revising the boundary, with the aim to build a southern transcontinental railroad (see below and the article on the Gadsden Purchase).
California
During 1850, Gadsden advocated secession by South Carolina when California was admitted to the Union as a free state. Gadsden considered slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation."[8]
When the secession proposal failed, Gadsden, working with his cousin Isaac Edward Holmes, a lawyer in San Francisco since 1851, and the California state senator Thomas Jefferson Green, attempted to divide California in two. They proposed that the southern half would allow slavery. Gadsden planned to establish a slaveholding colony there based on rice, cotton, and sugar. He would use slave labor to build a railroad and highway, originating in either San Antonio or on the Red River, that would transport people to the California gold fields. Toward this end, on December 31, 1851, Gadsden asked Green to secure from the California state legislature a large land grant located between the 34th and 36th parallels; it would eventually serve as the dividing line for the two California states.[9]
A few months after this, Gadsden and 1,200 potential settlers from South Carolina and Florida submitted a petition to the California legislature for permanent citizenship and permission to establish a rural district that would be farmed by "not less than Two Thousand of their African Domestics". The petition stimulated some debate, but it finally expired in committee.[10]
Following the war between Mexico and the United States, disputes over the boundary line brought the two nations near to renewed conflict in the Mesilla Valley of New Mexico, north of El Paso.[11] In May 1853, President Franklin Pierce appointed Gadsden as the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Mexico, with instructions to purchase more land from Mexico as part of a settlement of the Mesilla controversy, for the prospective railroad route across southernmost parts of what are today New Mexico and Arizona, to end the possibility of disputes concerning control of the Apache along the border, and other more minor issues.
Gadsden successfully performed this mission by negotiating with the Mexican government in Mexico City for the purchase of more land from Mexico for southmost New Mexico and Arizona, and by establishing the boundary between the United States and Mexico as two long line segments between the Rio Grande at the westmost tip of Texas all the way to the River Colorado at the eastern boundary of California. This treaty is known as the "Gadsden Treaty", and it resulted in the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico of about 30,000 square miles (78,000 km2) of land in northmost Mexico for $10,000,000.
In the fall of 1856 Gadsden retired as minister to Mexico, and returned to Charleston where he died in 1858. The sectional crisis of the late 1850s and subsequent Civil War delayed construction of a proposed southern transcontinental railroad to California along the 32d parallel, just to the north of the Mexican border. Between 1878 and 1881, though, the Southern Pacific Railroad (now part of the Union Pacific Railroad) built the section of the southern transcontinental between Yuma and El Paso within the Gadsden Purchase territory.[12] At the same time, 1880–1882, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad completed a transcontinental link through the Gadsden Purchase and then southwest to a terminus at the port of Guaymas, in the state of Sonora, Mexico. Completed October 25, 1882, this line was later acquired by the Southern Pacific.[13] Today, the rail link across the Gadsden Purchase on the southern transcontinental is one of the busiest in the Western Hemisphere.
^Kiser, William (2011). Turmoil on the Rio Grande, the Territorial History of the Mesilla Valley, 1846–1865. College Station: Texas A & M University Press. pp. 72–76. ISBN978-1603442961.
^Devine, David (2004). Slavery, Scandal, and Steel Rails, the 1854 Gadsden Purchase and the Building of the Second Transcontinental Railroad Across Arizona and New Mexico Twenty-five Years Later. New York: iUniverse Inc. pp. passim. ISBN0595329136.
