What if the US Had Purchased the Gadsden Purchase as Originally Envisioned?

Great Debates
1

The Gadsden Purchase is a 29,670-square-mile region in southern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico that was purchased from Mexico by the United States in a treaty signed in 1853. Its purchase was intended to allow the construction of a transcontinental railroad along a southern route, and was also meant as a way of settling some lingering issues after the Mexican-American War a few years prior.

As originally envisioned, the purchase would been much larger, and would have encompassed most of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Sonora, Nuevo León, and Tamaulipas, as well as all of the Baja California peninsula, but Santa Ana, the Mexican people, and Northern anti-slavery Congressmen were all against the idea of such a large cession, and all that was purchased was the little bit of desert that’s about a fifth of the size of Rhode Island, the smallest US state, and 2.5 times the population of Wyoming, the least populated US state.

Mexico has 32 states, and all but two of the states the United States proposed purchasing are in the top half population-wise, while all eight are in top half area-wise, with Chihuahua, Sonora, and Coahuila being the three largest, and Tamaulipas and Baja California Sur being in the top ten as well.

In total, the US would have been folding approximately 330,000 square miles of territory (half the size of Alaska, its largest state, and 40% of Mexico’s area) and at current, 16,316,813 people, which is two million more than Illinois, the US’ fifth most populous state, and 15% of Mexico’s current population.

What would have been the consequences of this happening? Would this territory side with the Confederacy when the American Civil War broke out in 1861? What about the Spanish-American War? Having already annexed a huge Spanish speaking land, would the US have held onto Cuba, or maybe even turn the Gulf of Mexico into its own little lake by grabbing other island nations? And what of Alaska and Hawaii? Would the US still have have purchased or annexed them?

And what of Mexico? Not being terribly familiar with Mexican history, I don’t really know what questions to ask about how its history would have changed?

2

No comment on your main thesis, but Rhode Island is about 1500 square miles. The Gadsen Purchase is about 20 time larger than that.

3

I knew that didn’t seem right, and think I inadvertently added an extra zero or two.

Can a mod fix, please?

4

Well, one thing would have been different…had the purchase gone through then I would have been born an American citizen! :stuck_out_tongue:

-XT

5

I don’t things would have been that much different than what happened in territory sold as a result of the Mexican-American war. If I recall correctly, many people in New Mexico and Arizona were kind of swindled out of their land by Anglos. Mexico would have lost several valuable ports, which would probably have been developed more than they are now. It might have changed the decision for movie production to start in L.A.

It definitely would have kept Tijuana as a sleepy berg, because prohibition would have applied there.

Most of all, it probably would have affected the Mexican Revolution a lot, though exactly how it’s hard to say

Incidentally, a portion of that railroad (the San Diego and Arizona Eastern) was built anyway, and it went into and out of Mexican territory, though now it’s operated by the Mexican national railroad system. One of it’s major uses was to transport sand for construction in Southern California.

6

They weren’t anything like that, though, at the time. I don’t have any figures in front of me, but my impression is that the entire area was pretty sparsely populated. That was one reason the US wanted it–it wouldn’t have a huge, unhappy population of Mexicans to assimilate.

With that in mind, I don’t think the consequences would have been all that profound–for the US, at least. The area would have been as peripheral to the Civil War as were the territories of Arizona and New Mexico. Once it was annexed, it would have begun filling up with Americans, so the population would have been mixed as was New Mexico even before the Twentieth Century wave of Mexican immigration.

Mexico would have been shorn of any frontier area into which to expand, even more so than it already had been. I also do not know enough about Mexican history to make any guess as to the consequences.

7

See, that’s the problem: “What if?” scenarios hinge on a pivotal point in history that could have gone either way, and by your own description, that really isn’t the case here.

8

Yes, but Santa Ana was the ultimate decision maker, and though the Mexican people and Northern senators were against it, the executive branch was pretty pro-Southern (future Confederate president Jefferson Davis was the then-Secretary of War) he could have decided to sell the land if he thought it was in either his or Mexico’s best interests.

As it was, the Mexican people felt betrayed even by the little bit he sold, so it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he could have sold the other portion.

I believe you’re correct. My inclusion of the current population figures was just to show how many people the area is capable of supporting, and to indicate the number of people the this alternate Mexico of 2009 would be down.

9

Here’s a Wikipedia link to the Gadsen Purchase.

The problem with taking more than the Gadsen Purchase as in the real time line, was the US didn’t want large number of Mexicans in their territory. They had enough problems in the lands they took, with the Indians (AKA Native Americans) and Mormans.

The areas taken were significantly underpopulated to allow for American (read: White European) settlement. There was even a brief attempt to take ALL of Mexico that was nothing more than an idea. Add to that the populations of Europeans taken into the US through the Mexican Annexation was at least nominally Catholic, if not acutally Catholic, and America wasn’t overly fond of this either.

This argument was made with Cuba as well as the Dominican Republic when both those areas were considered for annexation to the USA. It wasn’t till Puerto Rican and the Phillipines when the US got into “colonialism.”

I think a more intersting “what if” would be if the US didn’t take the area. Phoenix would most likely still be a small town less than 50,000 and Tucson would be in Mexico. The Colorado River which was dammed and today provides water for Phoenix may never have happened. And if it did more water would’ve been diverted to California. Arizona most likely would not be a seperate state but connected to New Mexico or Nevada or Utah or California.

10

My guess would be that the area would have developed pretty much the way Arizona, New Mexico, and west Texas did historically: mostly underpopulated territory until the last fifty years or so.

The loss of this land probably would have had a more profound effect on Mexican rather than American history. A substantial amount of the revolutionary movement in 1910 was based in this area and therefore wouldn’t have existed. Hard to say if that would have helped or hindered the revolutionaries overall. On the one hand, they would have lost their northern base but, on the other, there wouldn’t have been the infighting between the northern and southern forces.

One minor speculation: the Grand Canyon would be a minor local tourist attraction. The Copper Canyon in Chihuahua is significantly larger than the Grand Canyon in Arizona and probably would have become the primary tourist attraction.