Vanished Vail Episode 14 - The Gadsden Purchase, Transcontinental Railroad, & the Civil War

Welcome foreigner to Vanished Veil, the series where we take you to the special places of Vale. Last time we explored the history of the Mormon Battalion and the context of the Mexican-American War, today we will explore how the aftermath of the war impacted the Tucson Valley. The Mexican-American War had a profound effect on the way in which the United States and Mexico saw each other before the Mexican-American War shared ideas of being republics of ancient kingdoms inspired by the Enlightenment and shared common goals and dreams, but the violence and rhetoric of war shattered the Feelings of camaraderie and their reverberations that are still felt today made signing a peace treaty complicated after two long and bloody years of conflict.

United States predominantly through Superior Logistics and having a much larger economy to support a sustained war effort. marched on Mexico City, the unwavering efforts of the anti-war movement forced Polk and many expansionists to back off their original ambitions to seize all of Mexico and settle all the territory up to the 26th parallel, but they were thousands of miles away. miles away, in Washington. DC and the negotiations were being handled by Nicholas. State Department Chief Secretary Trist attempted to negotiate a fair share and minimize the land settled in the United States. Mexico had fought for decades to expand citizenship and abolish slavery, with the United States ready to take.

Across large swathes of their lands, many Mexicans were at risk of losing their citizenship, and Southern slaveholders were eager to bring plantation slavery to the newly conquered territories. One of the provisions of the peace treaty on which Mexico stood firm was that all About one hundred thousand Mexican citizens now within the territorial limits of the United States would have citizenship at that time, in the United States white men were the only people eligible for full citizenship and voting, so a warning had to be made that there would be no distinction. between Hispanics and whites, you are most likely familiar with the lingering effects of this today on survey forms, questionnaires in the census, you will be asked about your race, but there is no option for Hispanics, it is a secondary category, It is a legacy of the racism of the era in which the United States had race-based citizenship exclusively for whites, but needed to create space for the Mexicans they subsumed in the war.

Additionally, Mexico wanted a provision prohibiting slavery in all newly acquired territories, this echoed the failed but very influential non-provision that had been proposed in Congress to stop the spread of slavery to any acquired territories in war; However, this issue would not be resolved in the peace treaty and the resulting tensions between the slave states and the free states would build the tinderbox of the Civil War. The other important provision that Mexico wanted was for the United States military to provide protection against Comanche and Apache attacks to all American and Mexican subjects along the border. President Polk was infuriated by the concessions and fired the appointment's chief secretary, but Tris stayed in Mexico anyway and negotiated. a peace treaty the peace delegation chose the symbolic cathedral in the city of Guadalupe Hidalgo to sign the treaty that gives the treaty its unofficial but more commonly used name saddened the depths of American expansionism but not by much the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ceded 55 percent of Mexican lands they claim to the United States and made the Gila River the new international border.

Now I bet you have noticed that when you look at the map, Tucson and Vale are still in Mexico, you will learn how Tucson and the Vail area would end up in the United States JJ will meet with historian Dave Devine at the Presidio San Agustín del Tucson and learn more about the Gadsden

purchase

. Let's go there now. Foreign. Brilliant. Great to see you. Thank you very much for knowing us. here at the Presidio thanks for having me oh man I can't wait to hear more about the Gaston

purchase

and really how it affects our lives today so let's keep going.

The southerners saw the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo as an attempt to thwart their efforts to achieve a Southern Transcontinental Railroad in 1852 and under the name of Franklin Pierce he was elected president of the United States and Pierce appointed Jefferson Davis as his Secretary of War, who was a senator from Mississippi. Jefferson Davis was a strong supporter of the South.

transcontinental

railroad

line and his suggestion to the president was that we need to acquire more land south of the Gila River, which will allow the southern

transcontinental

railroad

line to be built easily and cheaply and because the Southern Line will be the only line that will be free Davis He suggested that his well-known South Carolina southern railroad executive, James Gatson, be sent to Mexico as an ambassador to negotiate another treaty with Mexico to acquire even more land and Gaston went in 1853 to Mexico City, now having quite a title. awesome and in fact I have it's in my book oh yeah you should read it oh yeah let's do it right.

I just thought, oh, that's incredible, and also, you know, the other thing that's really, really interesting is how all of these individuals managed to absolutely pursue their personal and regional agendas. table and push them forward, can you imagine if Jefferson Davis and I guess I mean potentially Southern California, Arizona, New Mexico could have entered the Union as slave states? That is correct and that would have changed the entire history of this country. Talk about how that. It would have changed history, so James Gadson was appointed Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Quite Potentate to Mexico in May 1853. So I wonder why this means ambassador in office because he was an old man, he was an old man, so I feel that that was like the little cherry on sunday, oh yeah, again, he was a railroad man, that's how he made a living, besides running a plantation, slaves that is, i'm sure he saw this as a way to try getting the land needed for what He had long been pushing for his vision, not really of what the railroad would bring politically also in the states that would have the same vision about how business should be run properly and was also seen as a economic bonanza for any region of the country obtained the Transcontinental Railroad because they saw that this not only carried goods to the west coast and possibly China, but that along the way, because these engines needed water, communities would emerge every 30 years. 40 miles because I needed to get there. more water for those engines and then those communities would grow and they would have all these settlements on lands that were completely uninhabited except by the native peoples, so it was seen as a really big bonanza for whichever part of the country got it and the What they did was that they were opposed to the Americans invading their country and that's why they defended themselves and what seems quite reasonable seems reasonable to me, but most of the native peoples weren't like that, you know? and each one of them, because there were many cities really competing to be that center where the railroad was going to extend westward, which was going to be a great economic advance, that's how it looked, and so there were four possible routes in competition. the northern route, the central route, the south central route and then the 32nd parallel, and each of them started from a different community along or near the Mississippi River, so, as you said, it was seen as a bonanza important economic for any community that had that plum and then I would say that people are going to fight tooth and nail until they get to Congress, people talk about stagnation now, at least about the railroad, it was stagnant for 20 years because in each region of the country their senator said we're getting it and I'm not going to vote for anyone else, so it didn't do anything right because they couldn't compromise, but before that, James Gaston went to Mexico in 1853 and the administration in Washington told him that Its primary responsibility was to acquire more landings south of the Human River for a Southern Transcontinental Railroad at that time.

The Mexican government was under the Santa Ana dictatorship and a rebellion against Santa Ana was brewing, so they needed money to finance an army to try to put down that rebellion. and so he was going to be a willing participant in this not only because he needed money but because it was clear to him that either you sell it to us or we take it militarily, that the United States was not going to waste any time. Here we were going to acquire more land south of the Tequila River one way or another it didn't matter if it already belonged to someone else we needed it so that's right that was all that was needed and then they had negotiations and in the end In 1853 they came up with the treaty that was going to bring enough land to build a transcontinental railroad line south of the Gila River and that boundary was basically a triangular-shaped line and then went up to about eight miles north of where Colorado empties into the Gulf of California when the treaty went to Washington for approval by the US Senate because that is how American treaties are supposed to be approved, could not get enough votes for approval, so everyone is still defending their own interests absolutely in the north.

States Senators from the northern states opposed it because they feared that it would create more slave states Senators from the center of the country feared that it would allow the construction of the southern transcontinental railroad line that had clear climatic advantages over their regions, but Jefferson Davis and some other southerners and some eastern newspapers said this is a great advantage for us because it will allow this railroad to be built and so the policy continued for a while in Washington and the US completely redrawn the border. Senate, that's not the Gadsden line, that's the US Senate line, the purchase price was reduced to 10 million dollars, of which only 7 million were paid, as far as I know, a suggestion Mexico that they had raised for the first time under the Treaty. of Guadalajara is that slavery should not be allowed in this new area because slavery had been banned by the Mexican government shortly after the country of Mexico was created, but that was not a principle in Washington because we had slave states and so Therefore, the treaty was basically completely rewritten in the United States Senate and was eventually ratified even though President Pierce was not a big fan of the treaty and it was approved and James Gatson later repudiated the very treaty that bore his name. because he thought he was imposing conditions on Mexico, what one country should not do to another was basically humiliating.

The Mexican government got this money that Santa Ana was going to use to hire an army to fight this insurgency which of course didn't work because at the end of 1854 he was out of power anyway so Gastón said he didn't claim any responsibility. of the treaty that bore his name anyway, so after the gas and the purchase this Presidio site was transferred from Mexico to the United States and as people still like to say we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us to us for the Mexican Americans who lived, that's right, so the border went down south to its current delineation, uh, Nogales and other places along the border, but that didn't change this area by a couple. of years, uh, because this was here, in the desert, and it would be a couple more years before the American soldiers arrived here and the American soldiers were sent to do the same thing that the Mexican soldiers were here and that was protect This area of ​​the Apache raids, um and that wasn't done with much success, but that's why the Presidio became an American fort.

Basically, the people who lived here became American citizens and the other thing he did was start encouraging the American people, as they were called. which meant that white men, some of whom were originally from Europe, moved here looking to make their fortunes, some of them had been failed businessmen on the east coast, others were simply young men looking to make it in life on their own. So they started coming here and settling in the Presidio and immediately took over the politics of this area. Back then votes were taken and the only people who could vote were white men, until the Civil War began in 1861, when the white men living in the Presidio voted to join the Confederacy and sent a representative to Richmond, Virginia, yes, and of course the Confederacy was under the leadership of President Jefferson Davis and the representatives of downtown Richmond calling for this area to basically be purchased by Gatson.

The area became territory of the Confederate States of America and thatIt happened in 1862. And one of the stipulations that was part of that legislation was that slavery would be encouraged in this area. The other thing that happened in 1862, of course, was American troops. They had been removed from Tucson because there was fear that the Confederacy might try to attack California or that they were attacking in New Mexico, so the troops in the Presidio were sent to New Mexico and that left the people who were here defenseless. and then the Confederacy saw an opening and so they sent a few hundred soldiers from Texas to Tucson in 1862 and so for several months a Confederate flag flew over the Presidio of Tucson, finally, of course, about a thousand troops from California arrived and it didn't drive them away with the Confederates they discovered that those troops were coming, they took off and headed east and returned to Texas.

Tucson was later claimed by the United States government, but what was more important in Washington happened in 1863, leading to the Civil War. It had begun in 1861. What was a dozen southern states that were successful? That meant that political power in Washington had changed dramatically there. No lawyers were an impediment to the construction of a transcontinental railroad line because there were no southerners to oppose it. It's fascinating how the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the Gadsden Purchase laid the foundation for the southern Arizona we call home today, join us next time where we will explore the politics and power struggles that brought a transcontinental railroad line across Ok in southern Arizona.

See you next time, thank you foreigners.