The Gadsden Purchase

The Cathedral, Mexico City, Mexico
William Henry Jackson, photographer, circa 1884-1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, signed the Gadsden Purchase in Mexico City on December 30, 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, giving the U.S. claim to approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona, for the price of $10,000,000.

U.S. Secretary of War Jefferson Davis had sent Gadsden to negotiate with Santa Anna for this tract of land which many people, including Davis, believed to be strategic for the construction of the southern transcontinental railroad. Many supporters of a southern Pacific railroad route came to believe that a transcontinental route which stretched through the Gadsden Purchase territory would greatly advantage southern states should hostilities break out with the north.

The first transcontinental railroad was, however, constructed along a more northerly route by the "big four" of western railroad construction—Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. A southern transcontinental route through territory acquired by the Gadsen Purchase was not a reality until 1881 when the tracks of the "big four's" Southern Pacific met those of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in the Territory of New Mexico.

• Search the Today in History Archive on the terms Santa Anna and Jefferson Davis to learn more about two of the principals involved in the Gadsden Purchase.
• Read accounts of the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Search on Southern Pacific and transcontinental railroad in California As I saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900, selecting "Search the full text of the collection."

  
  Southern Pacific Railroad Transfer Boat Carrier, New Orleans, Louisiana, circa 1905-1915.
  Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

• Search across the American Memory pictorial collections on Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, or railroad for more images.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Arizona or New Mexico for more information on the history of each of these states. Read, for example, about the Arizona Territory.
• Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande documents the religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural Northern New Mexico (and Southern Colorado). Until about twenty-five years after the Gadsden Purchase, the area's remoteness contributed to a chronic shortage of clergy, a vacuum filled by extraordinary Hispanic religious and ceremonial music: alabados (hymns), folk drama, wedding songs, and dance tunes like the "Varsoviana (Varceliana)."
• Search on the term Jefferson Davis and railroad in the Transportation and Communication section of Map Collections (1500-Present) to see a number of maps which were ordered by the Secretary of War. See, for example, a Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean signed by Millard Fillmore. These maps accompanied reports of explorations for a transcontinental railroad route. Also search on New Mexico or Arizona in Map Collections (1500-Present) for additional representations of the topography of the southwest United States.

United States Immigration Service Building
Robert Runyon, photographer, between 1900-1920.
South Texas Border, 1900-1920

John Peter Altgeld

Chicago, Aerial View, Chicago, Illinois
American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920

Turn-of-the-century progressive reformer John Peter Altgeld was born in Germany on December 30, 1847. Despite his humble origins as the son of immigrants, Altgeld was resourceful and passionate, successfully amassing a small fortune in real estate in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. He was sympathetic to the plight of the poor and other victims of the second industrial revolution. Committing himself to politics, Altgeld was elected to the superior court of Cook county (1886-91), won his party's nomination for governor (1892), and was elected by the farm and labor vote.

Illinois State Penitentiary, Joliet, Illinois, circa 1890-1901.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

As governor, Altgeld achieved much, including improvements to the penal system and passage of early child labor legislation. However, he is most famous for his pardon of the German-American anarchists involved in the Haymarket Riot, an 1886 labor protest for the eight-hour day. The protest escalated into a violent confrontation in which seven policemen were killed. Altgeld, petitioned by Clarence Darrow, labor leaders, and others, argued that the trial had been unfair because the judge was prejudiced and the jury stacked.

A year later, Altgeld refused to use federal troops to suppress the Pullman Strike when the American Railway Union protested a reduction in salary without an accompanying reduction in the cost of company-owned housing and other expenses. Ultimately, President Grover Cleveland ordered 2,500 federal troops to Chicago to suppress the strike, exercising his authority to protect mail and interstate commerce. Altgeld's progressive era legislation and commitment to the laboring classes made him a hero to activists, workers, and farmers, and an enemy of big business.

Grover Cleveland, 1888.
Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

• For more information about the history of American reform, labor, and politics, see these American Memory collections:
  • African American Perspectives
  • American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I and the 1920 Election, 1918-1920
  • A Century of Lawmaking
  • Votes for Women: Selections from the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection, 1848-1921
  • "Votes for Women" Suffrage Pictures
• Search for images of Grover Cleveland in Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present.
• Enjoy interior and exterior views of a variety of Pullman railroad cars. Search on the term Pullman in History of the American West, 1860-1920 to see, for example, the interior of the Denver & Salt Lake, Railroad Cars of about 1913, and the the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad's "Tryphosa" Pullman of 1906. Also see the uniform of a Pullman Railroad Conductor.
• Search on the term Pullman in Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920 for additional images.
• Search on terms such as Altgeld, Chicago, or police in Chicago Anarchists on Trial: Evidence from the Haymarket Affair 1886-1887 to learn more about that event. Also examine Trial Evidence related to the Haymarket Affair.

Water Tower and Shop's Entrance, Pullman, Illinois, between 1890 and 1901.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

George M. Pullman, founder of the profitable Pullman Palace Car Company, believed individuals worked best when given a decent salary and fine surroundings. Thus, in the early 1880s he had built a model town and workshops, 14 miles south of Chicago. In the words of Jane Addams, "The president of the Pullman company…had power with which to build this town, but he did not appeal to nor obtain the consent of the men who were living in it." Saddled with regulations, salary cuts, and a recession, employees brought their grievances to Pullman who, believing himself more than generous, turned a deaf ear. What followed was the first national strike in U.S. history, a prototypical confrontation of labor vs. management—the antithesis of Pullman's original vision. Again in the words of Addams the situation paralleled that of Shakespeare's King Lear "…unique…in the magnitude of…indulgence, and in the magnitude of the disaster which followed it."

To see more of the Pullman Plant, examine 15 photos of the Pullman Industrial Complex in Built in America: 1933-Present. Read the data pages which accompany these photos to learn more about the physical plant.