James Gadsden (May 15, 1788December 26, 1858) was an American diplomat, soldier and businessman after whom the Gadsden Purchase is named, pertaining to land which the United States bought from Mexico, and which became the southern portions of Arizona and New Mexico. James Gadsden served as Adjutant General of the U.S. Army from August 13, 1821 – March 22, 1822. Between 1853 and 1856, he served as U.S. Minister to Mexico. He was known commonly as General Gadsden, although he never had a rank above colonel.
Biography
Little is known about the life of Gadsden, especially his early life. It is known that he was born in Charleston, South Carolina, during 1788, and that he was grandson of the American Revolutionary War hero Christopher Gadsden, for whom the Gadsden flag was named. It is also known that Gadsden earned his bachelor's degree from Yale University in Connecticut, completing this degree in 1806. In university, he was a member of the debating and secret society, Brothers in Unity.
Army service
Gadsden joined the U.S. Army in December 1812. He served as a commissioned officer commanded by General Andrew Jackson, who was later elected president in 1828. Gadsden served Gen. Jackson both during the War of 1812 against the British Army, and, from 1816 to 1821, in protecting the southern U.S. border from raiders — Native Americans, maroons (escaped slaves and their descendants) — based in Spanish Florida. As part of this effort, Jackson directed Gadsden, a member of the Army Corps of Engineers, to build a fort on the Prospect Bluff site. Jackson subsequently named it Fort Gadsden. Gadsden also helped to establish Fort Brooke with George Mercer Brooke at the site of the present-day city of Tampa, Florida. He was appointed Adjutant General in August 1821, but this appointment was not confirmed by the Senate, causing it to expire the following year.
Seminole expulsion
Gadsden next decided to quit the U.S. Army, and became a planter in Florida; he served in the Florida Territorial Legislature. Gadsden was appointed as a commissioner during 1823 to help with the organization and the expulsion of most of the Seminole Indian Tribe from their homes in Florida and southern Georgia, along the Trail of Tears to land reservations that had been reserved for them in what is now Oklahoma.
Years later Gadsden County, Florida, was named in his honor, and also the city of Gadsden, Alabama, and the town of Gadsden, Arizona.
Railroad executive
Later Gadsden served as the president of the South Carolina Railroad company from 1840 to 1850. When first completed in 1833, the line was the longest railroad in the world under one management. As an engineer he directed the construction of the branch to Columbia, completed 1842, surveyed a proposed extension to the Ohio River, and helped promote the Memphis & Charleston Railroad, incorporated 1845 (completed in 1857, it was the first U.S. railroad link between the Atlantic and the Mississippi River, but long after Gadsden had turned his attention elsewhere).
By 1846, Gadsden and his associates promoted the construction of a southern transcontinental railroad from the Atlantic to the Pacific Oceans. He urged Georgia and South Carolina to abandon their rivalry and to "discover their true policy in the harmony of a free and unrestricted trade." A late 1840s map shows this railroad would hypothetically have been by way of the southern route from Charleston through Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas to El Paso, Texas, and then through Mexico to the coast, in what in a few years would be newly acquired American land, after the 1846–1848 war with Mexico. In 1852, the SCRR followed the philosophy laid out by Gadsden during his tenure and moved the railroad's terminus from Hamburg, South Carolina, signaling the end of South Carolina's focus on economic sovereignty.
Much of the boundary between the United States and Mexico had been left unreasonably vague by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo that had been signed and ratified by the United States and Mexico during 1848. Gadsden would play an important role in revising the boundary, with the aim to build a southern transcontinental railroad (see below and the article on the Gadsden Purchase).
California
During 1850, Gadsden advocated secession by South Carolina when California was admitted to the Union as a free state. Gadsden considered slavery "a social blessing" and abolitionists "the greatest curse of the nation."