How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [99]
Faced with these realities, the South’s two foremost advocates for states’ rights, Jefferson Davis and John C. Calhoun, found ways to justify federal involvement in the building of a southern transcontinental railroad. Davis, at the time secretary of war in the Pierce administration, maintained that federal expenditures to enable such a railroad were legitimate because it might be needed for national defense.2 And while Calhoun, in his keynote address to the 1845 Memphis Commercial Convention, asserted that building railroads was beyond the purview of Congress, he allowed as to how the government, as owner of the land on which such a railroad would be built, could grant alternate sections of the land to the railroads, since such grants would raise the value of the land the government retained.
Gadsden was also present at that convention. It was there that he proposed two possible routes for such a railroad—one terminating in San Diego and the other in Mazatlán, a port on the Mexican coast opposite the southern tip of Baja California. San Diego, at that time, was also in Mexico. Since federal investment, not an agreement with Mexico, was the issue at hand, how were the Memphis conventioneers planning to pull this off? War with Mexico?
Less than a year later, that’s exactly what happened. What they were thinking in 1845 may be suggested by what surfaced in 1853 when Gadsden received his instructions regarding the purchase. He was authorized to spend up to $65 million to acquire a region that included most of what are now the Mexican states of Baja California, Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas.
Gadsden’s mission, 1853
Gadsden’s mission sparked a new voice of opposition in the person of Senator Thomas Hart Benton, whose doubts began with the underlying premise that the land was necessary in order to build a southern railroad through the Rockies:
We have a fine … route on the parallels of 34 and 35, by Albuquerque, corresponding with the center of the southern states. The route gained by the [Gadsden] treaty is not even a sectional route. It is too far south to be southern. It is not only beyond the center, but beyond the limits and latitudes of the southern states; and is besides … through country so utterly desolate, desert, and God forsaken that Kit Carson says even a wolf could not make his living upon it.
Benton went on to speculate regarding a darker causes for locating a railroad so far south:
What is the reason of this strange deflection? I will tell you.… The city of New San Diego. Here it is—[holding up a map]—here it is, and with explanatory notes showing that it is a “port.” … New San Diego, then, is the governing point in the southern proposed railroad route to the Pacific Ocean. And who owns this city on the map which has suddenly become a governing point in our legislation and diplomacy? It is said to belong to the military.
To Benton, a railroad located so far south, when considered with the fact that Gadsden had been authorized to acquire far more of Mexico, suggested that proslavery interests sought to expand the South—through purchase, if possible; through military actions, if necessary—and consequently increase the number and influence of slave states.
Benton’s claim of an alternate southern rail route
Why then would Mexico be willing to sell? Not because it wanted to. The United States was its greatest threat. Even as Gadsden was in Mexico City seeking to purchase a wide swath of territory, a privately raised army of Americans under the leadership of William Walker illegally invaded sparsely populated Baja California and briefly declared it an independent republic before being chased out by local Mexicans. Fortunately for Gadsden, however, Mexico was burdened by $17 million of debt from its recent war with the United States. President Santa Anna therefore grudgingly agreed to sell only enough land to raise sufficient