Mexican Cession - Gadsden Purchase

Gadsden Purchase

It quickly became apparent that the Mexican Cession did not include a feasible route for a transcontinental railroad connecting to a southern port. The topography of the New Mexico Territory included mountains that naturally directed any railroad extending from the southern Pacific coast northward, to Kansas City, St. Louis, or Chicago. Southerners, anxious for the business such a railroad would bring (and perhaps hoping to establish a slave-state beachhead on the Pacific coast), agitated for the acquisition of additional, railroad-friendly land, thus bringing about the Gadsden Purchase of 1853.