James Gadsden

American diplomat

• Born: May 15, 1788
• Birthplace: Charleston, South Carolina
• Died: December 26, 1858
• Place of death: Charleston, South Carolina

Although Gadsden was an accomplished soldier, engineer, and railroad executive, his lasting fame came as the U.S. minister to Mexico during the mid-1850’s. While in Mexico City, he negotiated what became known as the Gadsden Purchase, by which the United States acquired a strip of Mexican territory that now forms the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico.

Early Life

James Gadsden was born into one of South Carolina’s most reputable families. The family’s prominence came from Gadsden’s paternal grandfather, Christopher Gadsden, who owned several stores, a commercial wharf, and a plantation. He also served in the South Carolina Assembly and organized Charleston’s resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765. Ten years later, Christopher acted as a delegate to the Continental Congress and eventually served as a Revolutionary War general.

Christopher’s son, Philip, lived in the shadow of his famous father. Philip entered his family’s mercantile business and stayed in Charleston his entire life. He married Catherine Edwards, whose father was also a local businessperson and Revolutionary War patriot. Desirous of a large family, the couple managed sixteen offspring. Philip, a devout member of the Protestant Episcopal Church, taught his children, through mild discipline, about Christian moral principles. He also gave his sons the best formal education. They were sent to a well-known preparatory school, the Associated Academy of Charleston, and then shipped to Connecticut for a classical education at Yale.

In 1803, when Philip’s third son, James, reached Connecticut, he was welcomed by his two older brothers, C. E. and John. Away from home for the first time, young Gadsden found comfort in the companionship of his siblings. There were also new friendships, including one with John C. Calhoun, a fellow South Carolinian. Within a few decades, Calhoun would become a national political figure exerting great influence on James. It is possible that in later years the pious Philip was most proud of his eldest son C. E., who pursued the ministry and became a Protestant bishop. His son John emerged as a U.S. attorney but died at a relatively young age. The path of the younger James often appeared uncertain, and in the end, more closely resembled the diverse pursuits of his grandfather, General Christopher Gadsden.

Life’s Work

James Gadsden graduated from Yale in 1806 and returned to Charleston. The recent death of his grandfather led him to enter the family’s mercantile business. After several years, he grew restless and prayed for new opportunities. His prayers were answered in 1812 with the outbreak of war between the United States and Great Britain. With the help of his congressman, he was commissioned a second lieutenant in the U.S. Army and trained in the Army Corps of Engineers. Military service changed his life forever.

Gadsden’s military career lasted ten years. Early in the war he helped prepare for the invasion of Canada and saw action in several major battles. He was later dispatched to New York to build defenses in Brooklyn and Harlem Heights. In 1815 Gadsden transferred to New Orleans, Louisiana, to assist General Andrew Jackson in the construction of fortifications along the Gulf of Mexico and the southwestern frontier. The flamboyant Jackson took the young lieutenant under his wing, making him his personal aide-de-camp. President James Madison asked Gadsden, who was already the chief engineer of the New Orleans district by 1816, to evaluate all regional defense posts. The next year, Gadsden accompanied Jackson in a campaign against the Seminole Indians of Spanish Florida. Jackson, on his own initiative, captured several Spanish garrisons—actions that soon led to the acquisition of Florida by the United States.

Gadsden had distinguished himself in the Seminole War; as a result, he was promoted to captain and placed in charge of all construction works in the Gulf of Mexico frontier. Several years later he received two of the army’s most senior administrative positions. In October, 1820, he was appointed inspector general of Jackson’s Southern Division with the rank of colonel. In 1822, at the request of Secretary of War John Calhoun, President James Monroe appointed Gadsden adjutant general of the entire army. His appointment was opposed, however, by many politicians who disliked Monroe and Calhoun; ultimately, the Senate forced Gadsden out of office.

In late 1822 Gadsden returned to Charleston to resume his business career. However, Calhoun once again intervened by asking his friend to negotiate a treaty with the Seminoles. Gadsden consented, moved to Florida, and did not return to South Carolina for sixteen years. In September, 1823, he signed the Treaty of Fort Moultrie, which effectively relocated the Seminole Indians from central to southern Florida. Afterward, he agreed to survey the boundaries of the new reservation. In 1824, he received appointment to Florida’s first legislative council, accepted a federal contract to survey a major roadway in the territory, and married Suzanna Gibbes Horte.

After his marriage, Gadsden tried to establish roots as a planter near Tallahassee, Florida, but, bored with the slow pace of plantation life, he set his sights on politics. He attempted to associate himself with the legend of war hero Jackson and relied on the general’s friends for political support. Between 1825 and 1837, he campaigned five times, all unsuccessfully, to become the territory’s delegate to the U.S. Congress. During this time he declined several federal job offers and finally settled for a position as Florida’s assistant engineer. His primary activities focused on improving the territory’s transportation network with new roadways, canals, and railroads. This brought him into frequent contact with local Seminole Indians. In 1832 he became involved in new treaty negotiations to move the Seminoles west. When President Andrew Jackson dispatched the army to remove the American Indians, the Indians resisted, starting the seven-year Seminole War. Gadsden served in various administrative capacities during the war, but by 1839 he had grown disillusioned and moved to the safety and stability of South Carolina.

Gadsden quickly immersed himself in Charleston’s business community. He had brought from Florida new ideas for increasing commercial activity in the port city and the entire South. Several years earlier he had recognized the potential of coordinated railroad networks for Florida’s economic development. For that purpose he had advocated a southern rail line from New Orleans to the Atlantic coast. He promoted this vision in Charleston but on an increasingly large scale. In 1840 Gadsden was elected president of the new Louisville, Cincinnati, and Charleston Railroad and remained in that position for ten years while the company was reorganized as the South Carolina Railroad Company. Throughout the 1840’s, he actively promoted the idea of a southern transcontinental railroad stretching from Charleston to San Diego, California.

Plans for a transcontinental railroad had political ramifications. Northerners also wanted the economic benefits of a national railroad and had proposed a northern line running through Chicago, Illinois, to San Francisco, California. Moreover, they feared that a southern route would expand slavery to the southwestern territories. Such fears were well founded. Gadsden, for example, owned more than one hundred slaves and supported the practice of slavery in the West. In fact, he wanted to use slave labor to build the new railroad. As slavery became an increasingly controversial issue during the 1850’s, he joined his friend Calhoun in the secessionist movement that ultimately led to the Civil War. However, it was diplomacy, not rebellion, that brought him lasting fame.

Through the influence of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, a fellow Southerner, Gadsden was appointed U.S. minister to Mexico in May, 1853. He hoped to resolve various disputes between the United States and Mexico that had arisen since the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo . Most important was the demarcation of a border separating the two nations that allowed adequate land for a southern transcontinental railroad. In December, 1853, after months of negotiation, Mexican dictator Antonio López de Santa Anna signed a treaty to sell land (45,535 square miles) in northern Mexico to the United States for fifteen million dollars. The U.S. diplomat proceeded to Washington, D.C., and presented the treaty for ratification.

Congressional approval of the Gadsden Purchase did not come easily. The Senate, like much of the country, was divided over the issue of slavery in the Western territories. Many northerners were not inclined to buy Mexican land likely to benefit southern slave owners. When some senators revised the treaty by radically decreasing the size and price of the land purchase, it failed to attract enough votes for passage. Finally, a new compromise was reached and ratified on April 25, 1854. In its final version, the treaty stated that the United States would buy 29,640 square miles of land for ten million dollars and that certain protections would be given to U.S. railroad investments in Mexico. Gadsden returned to Mexico City and received de Santa Anna’s approval of the revisions. He remained the U.S. minister to Mexico until October, 1856. After retiring to South Carolina, his health declined rapidly. He died the day after Christmas, 1858, at the age of seventy-one.

Significance

Like his paternal grandfather, James Gadsden lived a remarkable life and participated in many important currents in antebellum U.S. history. As a soldier, engineer, and negotiator, he played a central role in the development of Florida and the Old Southwest. Consequently, several military installations, towns, and counties in the southeastern United States have been named in his honor. The significance of Gadsden’s life, however, transcends regional importance.

From a national perspective, Gadsden’s activities often signaled the progress and problems associated with U.S. territorial expansion. At the time of his birth, the nation consisted of only the original thirteen states, but the country expanded rapidly south and west. A dozen years after the Louisiana Purchase, he joined Andrew Jackson’s conquest of Florida at the expense of native people and a European power. In the spirit of manifest destiny, Gadsden also welcomed the annexation of Texas and other territories farther west, especially after the United States defeated Mexico in war.

During this time Gadsden became one of the nation’s leading proponents of a transcontinental railroad. An ardent southern Democrat who favored free trade and the expansion of slavery, his motivations for a southern rail line were economic and political. As the U.S. envoy to Mexico, Gadsden enthusiastically acquired land crucial to the construction of a southern railroad extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Although this railroad was not realized in his lifetime, the ratification of the Gadsden Purchase represented one of the last major sectional compromises before the Civil War and signaled the end of contiguous U.S. expansion on the continent.

Bibliography

Blassingame, Wyatt. The First Book of American Expansion. New York: Franklin Watts, 1965. This elementary book describes the Gadsden Purchase within the context of the territorial expansion of the United States from the Louisiana Purchase to the annexation of Hawaii.

Clary, David A., and Joseph W. A. Whitehorne. The Inspector General of the U.S. Army, 1777-1903. Washington, D.C.: Center of Military History, 1987. Contains brief discussions of Gadsden’s career as inspector general of the Southern Division and as adjutant general. It is a detailed source for understanding the U.S. Army’s early development and administration.

Devine, David. 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. Lincoln, Nebr.: iUniverse, 2004. Describes how Gadsden advocated the need for a southern cross-country railroad, and explains his role in acquiring land from Mexico to eventually construct this route. Also examines how the Southern Pacific Railroad Company began constructing lines east of California in 1875, more than twenty years after the Gadsden Purchase.

Garber, Paul N. The Gadsden Treaty. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1923. For many decades this book has served as the standard account of the Gadsden Treaty. It remains the most descriptive book and provides considerable background on James Gadsden.

Godbold, E. Stanly. Christopher Gadsden and the American Revolution. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982. This is a full-length biography of Gadsden’s influential grandfather. Aside from analyzing Christopher’s role in the American Revolution, the book is an excellent source that describes the Gadsden family and antebellum life in South Carolina.