GADSDEN PURCHASE

The Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was the last territory acquired by the United States within the boundaries of the lower 48 states. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce (1853–1857) instructed James Gadsden, his minister to Mexico, to buy as much of the northern Mexico territory as possible, with the idea of using it as a southern route for a transcontinental railroad. Gadsden, a former railroad administrator from South Carolina who had long supported a southern railroad linking the Gulf Coast with California, was given instructions to offer Mexican leader Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna (1794–1876) up to $50 million for some 250,000 square miles—including the Gila River basin in modern Arizona, parts of Baja California, and the bits of northern Mexico that had not been annexed in the Mexican War (1846–1848).

The purchase was part of Pierce's plan to unite a divided country by expanding American interests aggressively into foreign territories, a plan known as "Young America." The Gadsden Purchase was opposed by Northern antislavery senators, who suspected Pierce's long-range plan was to obtain land for the expansion of slavery—an explosive political issue in the early 1850s. It was also opposed by some southern senators who wanted even more land. Unable to stop the deal, these senators managed to limit Pierce's purchase to 55,000 square miles for $15 million.

The Gadsden Purchase added to U.S. territory, but it also emphasized the gulf that separated North and South. Some northern senators who opposed the Purchase were under pressure to do so from northern railroad interests. By December 1853, a rail route that ran through the Gadsden Purchase had already been completed, and the northern interests were campaigning hard for territory north of the Missouri Compromise line to be organized. This led to the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854, which broke the Compromise and allowed expansion of slavery into areas from which it had legally been excluded 34 years earlier. The northern railroad was finally established in the Pacific Railway Act (1862), which set aside public land for the building of the first transcontinental railroad, completed in 1869.

See also: Transcontinental Railroad

FURTHER READING

Cochran, Thomas Childs. Frontiers of Change: Early Industrialism in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1981.

Garber, Paul Neff. The Gadsden Treaty. Philadelphia: Press of the University of Pennsylvania, 1923.

Nevins, Allan. Ordeal of the Union. New York: Collier Books, 1992.

Potter, David Morris. The Impending Crisis 1848– 1861. New York: Harper & Row, 1976.

Taylor, George Rogers. The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860. New York: Rinehart, 1951.

THE ONLY EXPANSIONIST ACHIEVEMENT OF THE PIERCE ADMINISTRATION WAS THE GADSDEN PURCHASE. AND EVEN THAT CAME TO LESS THAN SOUTHERNERS HAD HOPED.

James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era, 1988