James Gadsden

Biography

Little is known about the life of Gadsden, especially his early life. It is known that he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, during 1788, and that he was a grandson of the American Revolutionary War hero Christopher Gadsden, for whom the Gadsden flag was named. It is also known that Gadsden earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University in Connecticut, completing this degree during 1806.

Army service

Soon after his graduation, Gadsden joined the U.S. Army. He served as a commissioned officer commanded by General Andrew Jackson, who was to be elected President of the USA during 1828. Gadsden served Gen. Jackson both during the War of 1812 against the British Army, and against the American Indians in the newly purchased (1819) Territory of Florida during the early 1820s. While Gadsden was serving in the Army in Florida, Gadsden established Fort Gadsden along the banks of the Apalachicola River in the "Panhandle" region of Florida on the site of a former British fort that had been occupied by escaped slaves. He also helped to establish Fort Brooke with George Mercer Brooke at the site of the present-day city of Tampa, Florida.

Seminole expulsion

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 so-called "Trail of Tears" to land reservations that had been reserved for them in what is now Oklahoma.

Years later Gadsden County, Florida, was named in his honor, and also the city of Gadsden, Alabama, and the town of Gadsden, Arizona.

Railroad executive

Later Gadsden served as the president of the South Carolina Railroad company from 1840 to 1850. In this role, Gadsden and his associates decided to promote the construction of a transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. This railroad would hypothetically have been by way of the southern route from Georgia through Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to El Paso, Texas, and then through the newly acquired American land that would decades later become New Mexico and Arizona. Finally, after crossing the River Colorado into California, it would have crossed the Mojave Desert and the mountains to the seaport city of San Diego, California.

After much surveying work had been done in the Southwest, it was decided that a railroad across the land that later became central New Mexico and central Arizona would be infeasible. Also, 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 (see the article on the Gadsden Purchase).

California

Gadsden had endorsed nullification during 1831. During 1850 he 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.”

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.

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.

Gadsden Purchase

During 1853, Gadsden was appointed by the U.S. Government as the new American minister to Mexico, with instructions to purchase more land from Mexico for the prospective railroad route across southernmost New Mexico and Arizona, and to end the possibility of disputes concerning the location of the boundary between the two countries.

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.

The railroad proposed for just to the north of the Mexican border was never built. However, the land bought by the Gadsden Purchase later contained the site of Arizona's second largest city, Tucson, the minor cities and towns of Casa Grande, and Yuma, Arizona, Lordsburg and Deming, New Mexico, and it defined the status of the area north of the Gila River, that later became the metropolitan area of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Mesa, Glendale, and Tempe, Arizona.

Most of the land south of Phoenix where tentative plans had been made to build a transcontinental railroad is desert land that is not suitable for much human inhabitation. Nearly all of this federally owned land was eventually reserved as a large, sparsely inhabited American Indian reservation, testing and combat-practice ranges for the U.S. Air Force, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, Coronado National Forest, Sonoran Desert National Monument, Ironwood Forest National Monument, Saguaro National Park, and the Fort Huachuca Military Reservation of the U.S. Army.

Gadsden was buried in St. Philips Church Cemetery in Charleston, South Carolina.