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The Gadsden Purchase (shown with present-day state boundaries and cities)

The Gadsden Purchase (known as Venta de La Mesilla in Mexico) is a 29,670 mi² (76,770 km²) region of what is today southern Arizona and New Mexico that was purchased by the United States from Mexico in 1853 for $10 million. The initial purchase treaty was signed in Mexico in 1853, but a very different treaty was finally ratified by the U.S. Senate and signed by President Franklin Pierce on June 24, 1854. The purchase included lands south of the Gila River and west of the Rio Grande.

After the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the border disputes between the United States and Mexico remained untoled. Land that now comprises lower Arizona and New Mexico was part of a proposed southern route for a transcontinental railroad. U.S. President Franklin Pierce was convinced by Jefferson Davis, then the country's Secretary of War, to send James Gadsden (who had personal interests in the rail route) to negotiate the Gadsden Purchase with Mexico. Under the resulting agreement, the U.S. paid Mexico $10 million (equivalent to about $230 million in 2004 dollars[1]) to secure the land. The matter about the money was to be very conflictual: even though the agreement specified $10 million, the US Congress agreed on only $7 million ($163 million in 2006 dollars). When the money finally arrived in Mexico City $1 million ($23 million in 2006 dollars) was missing, thus resulting in a total of only $6 million ($140 million in 2006 dollars). The treaty included a provision allowing the U.S. to build a transoceanic canal across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, though this option was never exercised. With a few exceptions, such as the resolution of the Chamizal dispute, acquisition of land in this purchase defined the present boundaries of the continental United States.

The Gadsden Purchase was intended to allow for the construction of a southern route for a transcontinental railroad. On December 30, 1853, U.S. Minister to Mexico James Gadsden and Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna agreed on the price of $10 million for the Gadsden land, which valued the included territory at around $340 per square mile ($130/km²) or about 53 cents per acre.

As the railroad age blossomed, many southerners wanted to build, or at least provide a route for, a southern transcontinental railroad, linking the South with the Pacific coast and providing expanded trade opportunities (and possibly expansion of slave territory). However, the topography of the southern portion of the Mexican Cession was too mountainous to allow a direct route, and what possible routes existed tended to run to the north at their eastern ends, which would favor connections with northern railroads. Interested southerners tended to prefer New Orleans as the eastern terminus of the southern route, but to avoid the mountains, the proposed railroad would have to swing south into what was then Mexican territory. Gadsden, a South Carolinan, was an ardent supporter of a southern railroad, but he envisioned it being built to Charleston, South Carolina. Gadsden was interested on this purchase since he acquired shares of the railroad company that would unite Texas and California.

As originally envisioned, the purchase would have encompassed a much larger region, extending far enough south to include most of the current Mexican states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas as well as all of the Baja California peninsula. These original boundaries were opposed not only by the Mexican people but also by anti-slavery U.S. Senators who saw the purchase as tantamount to the acquisition of more slave territory. Even the small strip of land that was ultimately acquired was enough to anger the Mexican people, who saw Santa Anna's actions as yet another betrayal of their country and watched in dismay as he squandered the funds generated by the Purchase. The Gadsden Purchase helped to end Santa Anna's political career.

Outraged at the reduced size of the purchase, American William Walker led an army from California into Sonora and declared independence for the Republic of Sonora consisting of the remaining non-purchased state of Sonora and the whole of the Baja California peninsula.

The purchased lands were initially appended to the existing New Mexico Territory. To help control the new land, the United States Army established Fort Buchanan on Sonoita Creek in present-day southern Arizona on November 17, 1856. The difficulty of governing the new areas from the territorial capital at Santa Fe led to efforts as early as 1856 to organize a new territory out of the southern portion of the New Mexico Territory. Many of the early settlers in the region were, however, pro-slavery and sympathetic to the South, resulting in an impasse in Congress as to how best to reorganize the territory.

The shifting of the Rio Grande would cause a later dispute over the boundary between Purchase lands and those of the state of Texas. (See Country Club Dispute.)

The Gadsden Purchase historical mark near Interstate 10

In 1861, during the American Civil War, the Confederacy formed the Confederate Territory of Arizona, including in the new territory mainly areas acquired by the Gadsden Purchase. In 1863, using a north-to-south dividing line, the Union created its own Arizona Territory out of the western half of the New Mexico Territory. The new U.S. Arizona Territory also included most of the lands acquired in the Gadsden Purchase. This territory would be admitted into the Union as the State of Arizona on February 14, 1912, the last area in the lower 48 to receive statehood.

• Mexican Cession
• U.S.-Mexico border
• Historic regions of the United States
• Country Club Dispute

• Yale Law School's Avalon Project Text of the Gadsden Purchase Treaty
• US Geological Survey Large map
• 1855 map with some proposed railroad routes
• National Park Service Map including route of the Southern Pacific railroad finally built in the 1880s
• ISBN 0595329136 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
• Arizona Daily Star Land sale still thorn to Mexico