by Mark Stein
All persons are hereby cautioned not to settle without my permission on any land of mine in this territory. Said land is bounded as follows:
What followed was a lengthy and precise stipulation of boundaries. But Sutter’s notice went unheeded due to jurisdictional weakness—the very element that had drawn him to this region. With the Mexican War just ended, Congress had not yet established a territorial government, and the military’s forces were depleted by soldiers deserting for the gold fields.
Sutter’s land claims
Unfortunate as the squatters were for Sutter, something worse was arriving in their wake: jurisdictional strength. California’s statehood convention in 1849 marked the imminent establishment of state and federal courts that would become the arena of his undoing.
The statehood convention also established California’s borders, and the debates regarding those borders were intense. Two big issues were at stake. Slavery was the more urgent of the two, and its advocates sought to create two states: a Northern and a Southern California—one free, the other slave. The second issue was water. California had very little of it in its south unless it located its border at the Rocky Mountains in order to include the Colorado and Gila Rivers. Such a border, however, would create a huge state. Opponents advocated a border just beyond the gold-filled Sierra Nevada Mountains, extending south to the Colorado River and along that river to the Gulf of California.
Among the delegates to the convention was Sutter, at whose mill all this had begun. Now out of his element, he spoke briefly only once during the proceedings, adding his support to the majority preference: a single state with the more modest eastern border.
Defining California: four proposals
Meanwhile, the Russian-American Company commenced legal action to foreclose on New Helvetia owing to Sutter’s many missed payments. The crisis was averted by the arrival of Sutter’s eldest son, August (soon followed by the rest of the family, from whom Sutter had been apart for twenty years). To delay foreclosure, Sutter transferred title to all his property to August. August proceeded to have plans drawn up for a town in the squatter-populated area at the juncture of the rivers. He named it Sacramento. Sutter objected vehemently to the plan, both because it was in a floodplain and because he had been trying to sell lots for a town of Sutterville, located on higher ground three miles below the juncture.4 But demand was so high for real estate at the point of entry, August was able to pay off all his father’s debts. Sutter then invested in gold mines, using as collateral property that was now in his son’s name.5
Sutter’s tangled title claims soon became a gold mine for lawyers, representing or suing not only Sutter but also those who had bought land from him to which his title was dubious. The Chicago Tribune reported in July 1858:
Judge Hoffman, of the United States District Court, rejected the claim of Milton Little for 22,197 acres of land opposite Sacramento City. This claim is founded on an alleged grant from Mexico, and among the papers offered in evidence were two certificates signed by [John A.] Sutter and dated in 1845. Judge Hoffman declares himself satisfied that one of these was written in 1857 and ante-dated, and he expresses a suspicion of the good faith of the other. This is the second case in which Judge Hoffman has declared certificates of Sutter dated previous to the American conquest to have been written since and ante-dated.
Not only in the courts but in the streets, the forces of organization were increasingly challenging Sutter’s claims. The squatters now formed themselves into a political association:
Whereas, the evidence that the land in Sacramento County belongs to the United States is becoming clear and more positive everyday.…
Resolved, that we will hold our hold [sic] peaceably, if we can—forcibly, if we must—till a decision shall be had upon this question in the Supreme Court of the United States.
Resolved, that if the bail of an arrested squatter be refused, simply because the bondsman is not a landholder under Capt. Sutter, we shall consider all executions issued in consequence thereof as acts of illegal force and shall act accordingly.6
Sutter’s claims ultimately made their way to the U.S. Supreme Court, the decorum of which was also disrupted by his disregard for boundaries. Two attorneys claimed to be his representative. Once resolved, the legal arguments—involving “conveyances,” “petitions for surplus,” and “parol evidence”—decorously masked the fact that they had been the cause of bloodshed and death in Sacramento. In February 1859 the Supreme Court announced its ruling. It affirmed Sutter’s claim to his original land grant by Governor Alvarado but rejected his second (and twice as large) claim. That claim was based on Governor Micheltorena having sweepingly cleared any rival claims, in return for Sutter’s vow of loyalty to Mexican President Santa Anna.
The decision caused the collapse of Sutter’s shaky finances. His remaining hope was to find a means of keeping his home and the farmland on which it sat. Relief came in 1864, when California provided him with a pension of $250 per month.
Through it all, Sutter remained unchanged. In 1865 a discharged soldier whom he had hired to do odd jobs was caught stealing. Sutter, ever the lord of the manor, ordered the man flogged—as illegal under American law as it had been when he’d done the same under Mexican law. This time Sutter paid a price, similarly without regard to the boundaries of law. “The old adobe residence of General Sutter … together with its valuable contents, was destroyed by fire on Wednesday morning, the 21st,” San Francisco’s Evening Bulletin reported. “The fire was the work of an incendiary [arsonist], supposed to be a discharged soldier, who had been hanging about the premises the past few days.”
With everything in ashes, the Sutters left California, relocating in Lititz, Pennsylvania. Sutter spent his remaining years seeking to salvage something of the fortune that had slipped through his fingers. Shuttling between Lititz and Washington, DC, he had entreaties to Congress prepared on his behalf. “Now in his old age, and in a state of absolute penury,” one such plea stated, “he asks not for one cent for such aid as he rendered to his adopted and profoundly honored government in the extension of its domain to the borders of the Pacific Ocean, and … the untold treasures of California. He asks only that the government shall secure to him so much of its unsold public lands as it has caused to be unjustly taken from him, or its equivalent in money.”7
Every new Congress, over a period of fifteen years, considered another of his appeals. While in Washington continuing his efforts in 1880, Sutter died at the age of seventy-eight. Congress no longer had to decide what it thought about John A. Sutter.
· · · ARIZONA, NEW MEXICO · · ·
JAMES GADSDEN
Government Aid to Big Business
If the Union is to continue to be bounded as it has been extended, from the Atlantic to the Pacific … measures must be adapted to bring nearer together the extremes, by these iron highways which, in stimulating social and commercial intercourse, constitute the strongest bonds of political harmony.
—JAMES GADSDEN, PRESIDENT, SOUTH CAROLINA RAILROAD COMPANY
The life of James Gadsden reveals that there is nothing new about powerful lobbyists winning government funds to support their special interests. Nor is there anything new about individuals leaving high-level government jobs for corporate positions from which they operate as influential lobbyists. Gadsden was an adjutant general in the U.S. Army who left government service and became a railroad president—a railroad president later appointed by President Franklin Pierce to purchase land from Mexico for the purpose of building a railroad. The Gadsden Purchase, which the United States acquired in 1853, also resolved a lingering boundary dispute between the two countries. It now forms the southern end of Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
James Gadsden was born in 1788 to a distinguished South Carolina family. His grandfather had been a delegate to the Continental Congress and, later, a brigadier general in the war itself. After graduating from Yale and serving in the military, Gadsden became the president
of the South Carolina Canal and Rail Road Company. In that capacity, he saw opportunities to connect the South via rail to gold-rich California and ports on the Pacific. A firm believer in slavery, he also saw in the newly acquired western lands the opportunity—indeed, the necessity—to secure its continued legality through additional congressional votes from new slave states. Toward that end, Gadsden joined an effort under way to divide California in two, with slavery permitted in the southern half. To encourage the legislature via the prospect of bringing development to sparsely populated (mostly by Mexican Americans) Southern California, he sent a petition in 1852 bearing 1,200 signatures of people seeking permission to establish a district that would be farmed by “African Domestics.”1 Slavery was a hotly contested issue in California. Gadsden’s plan aroused debate but went nowhere.
James Gadsden (1788-1858) (photo credit 28.1)
The Gadsden Purchase
When President Franklin Pierce decided the United States should seek to purchase land from Mexico, Gadsden was ideally situated for the appointment—just as appointments today often go to corporate executives whose resumes include previous government positions and powerful politicians as references.
The reason the southern railroads said they needed this Mexican land was that it contained mountain passes that did not exist elsewhere in the region. One such pass, in the area still under dispute, was so important that the town where it was situated had been named after it: El Paso.
Still, the purchase of land for the purpose of building a railroad triggered a three-way clash of political power, ideals, and pork. Abolitionists believed the government should not actively promote the economy of the slave-holding South. Southerners responded with outrage, though others in the South who were troubled by slavery argued that promoting industry in the region would help build an economy that need not depend on slavery to be financially viable.
Ideals and pork also came into conflict. Southerners’ commitment to states’ rights had previously led them to oppose federal expenditures for road and bridge construction. Such projects, they believed, were the responsibility of the states. Once the federal government entered in, they argued, it would open the door to ever-increasing centralization of power. Indeed, history has proven them right.
But in this instance most leaders left their ideals on the campaign trail and reached for the pork. Railroads, after all, were beginning to shift the flow of commerce through the north, rather than along the waterways leading to the Mississippi River. Moreover, even if the Southern states could have afforded the $10 million price tag for the Gadsden Purchase, they were barred by the Constitution from negotiating a treaty with another country.
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 funds to enable his military to defend against further incursions by the United States.
The agreement was sent to Washington for approval. Gadsden then pursued the purchase of the rest of the land the United States sought by not so privately meeting with revolutionary elements in Mexico. To further unsettle Santa Anna, he told the Mexican president “the spirit of the age” was such that these northern regions of Mexico would eventually secede to join the United States, so he might as well sell them now.3 Santa Anna responded by having his ambassador in Washington demand that President Pierce recall Gadsden. Pierce expressed his understanding and respect to the ambassador and did nothing. Later, when the agreement was being finalized by the U.S. Senate, Gadsden offended virtually every Mexican by telling Americans living in the country to ignore a call to illuminate all homes in celebration of Mexico’s Independence Day.4 President Pierce then sent word to Gadsden to come home.
James Gadsden did not live to see the railroad for which he had labored so long. He died in 1858. The railroad was delayed by the approach and outbreak of the Civil War. Only after Union troops secured the Southwest in 1862 did planning and construction begin. As it turned out, Senator Benton had been right. Adequate passes did exist through the mountains north of the Gadsden Purchase, and in laying out its main line, the Southern Pacific Railroad did not pass through the Gadsden Purchase.
· · · TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, OKLAHOMA, KANSAS, NEBRASKA · · ·
(SOUTH DAKOTA, NORTH DAKOTA, COLORADO, WYOMING, MONTANA)
STEPHEN A. DOUGLAS
The Line on Slavery: Erasing and Redrawing
The issues
between Mr. Lincoln and myself … are direct, unequivocal, and irreconcilable. He goes for uniformity in our domestic institutions, for a war of sections, until one or the other shall be subdued. I go for the … right of the people to decide for themselves.
—FROM THE LINCOLN-DOUGLAS DEBATES
Illinois Senator Stephen A. Douglas established more present-day state lines than any other individual. Two of those borders later resulted in the location of even more state borders than he had directly established. In addition, because of his role in creating the present-day boundaries of Texas-New Mexico, Oklahoma-Kansas, and Kansas-Nebraska, Douglas twice prevented the United States from breaking apart over slavery. What more must one do to become president? (Answer: Run against someone other than Abraham Lincoln.)
Actually, Douglas beat Lincoln in their 1858 Senate race. That was the election during which the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates took place. It was also after Douglas had created the boundaries that temporarily averted the Civil War. Illinois voters loved Douglas for this achievement, since the state was economically connected to both North and South. It was connected to the North through the Great Lakes to the Erie Canal. It was connected to the South through its rivers, virtually all of which flow to the Mississippi.
Stephen A. Douglas (1813-1861) (photo credit 29.1)
As a towering figure in the struggle to avert the Union’s breakup, Douglas, a short man, was known as “the Little Giant.” Like the towering Lincoln, he rose from difficult circumstances. Born in Vermont in 1813, Douglas was only three months old when his father died. After his schooling, he relocated to Illinois at the age of twenty—again, much like Lincoln, who migrated to Illinois at twenty-one. Both men undertook the study of law.