gadsten purchase

On THIS DAY IN HISTORY December 30, 1853, a treaty was signed where Mexico sold the United States 29,000 square miles of territory in the area that would eventually become southern Arizona and New Mexico. That deal, however, was part of a plan related to the worsening North-South conflict leading up to the Civil War. The Gadsden Purchase is an important historical footnote for several reasons. Firstly, it established the current border between the United States and Mexico, and it mostly resolved border disputes arising from the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. At the end of the Mexican-American War in 1848, the United States paid $15 million to acquire territory from Mexico that eventually became the state of California, and parts of the territory that would become Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah. Mexico also gave up any claims on Texas as part of the treaty. The land represented about 55 percent of the land owned by Mexico before the war. In the following five years, there was a push to acquire even more territory from Mexico, and the two countries disputed the Mesilla Valley area. President Franklin Pierce, at the urging of Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, sent Davis’ friend James Gadsden to Mexico as an ambassador. Gadsden was a former military officer, an aide to General Andrew Jackson, and the past president of a South Carolina railroad company.