TRADUCCION DEL DICTAMEN DE MR. WADSWORTH SOBRE LAS RECLAMACIONES MEXICANAS PROCEDENTES DE DEPREDACIONES DE LOS INDIOS

México: Imprenta del Gobierno, en Palacio, 1873.. 94pp. Original printed blue wrappers. Wrappers a bit worn, small tear to lower left corner of front wrapper and titlepage, several small holes in rear wrapper. Lightly tanned. Overall very good. The rare Spanish translation of Wadsworth's report responding to the claims of 366 Mexican citizens against the American government relating to trans-border depredations by "Apaches, Comanches, and other Indians" in the territory of the Gadsden Purchase. Together, the Mexican citizens sued the United States for a total of over thirty million dollars for damages to self and property incurred between 1848 and 1853. (truncated) Wadsworth flatly rejects their claims on a number of grounds. Fundamentally, he states that "1st. It does not appear that the claimants were injured or harmed 'on authority of the United States.' 2nd. The claims of the claimants, which the Mexican government currently asserts, were settled by the two governments by virtue of the treaty which they agreed to on the 30th of December, 1853 [i.e. the Gadsden Purchase]" (our translation). A large part of Wadsworth's argument hangs on the second point, and he dives deep into the semantics and linguistic details of both the Spanish and English versions of the Gadsden Purchase Treaty, which explicitly absolved the United States of all responsibility for the territory imposed by the 1831 and 1848 treaties. This reading is supported personally by Gadsden, who is quoted to the effect that, even if it is accepted that the United States should police the border, the Mexican government's protests against any troop movements in the lawfully ceded territory "fully justify the assertion that the responsibility for the...success of the stipulation for containing the Indians within American territory, falls on the Mexican government and not on that of the United States."

By way of a brief summary of Spanish colonization of the new world, Wadsworth also argues that the current conflict arises from "the moral effects of a savage war that has lasted centuries without its horrors being mitigated by the influences of civilization" (i.e. between Spanish colonists and Native Americans), and that expecting the United States to suddenly resolve centuries of fighting after the Mexican-American War would be foolish. Quite a scarce report. Rare Book Hub records only one other copy, offered by Dorothy Sloan in 1988, and OCLC records only twelve in the United States. It does not appear that an English version of this report was ever separately published.

A valuable look at the complicated sociopolitical and legal aftermath of the Mexican-American War and the Gadsden Purchase, with much detail on early Mexican and American attempts to determine responsibility for regulating the wide and permeable border which separates them. PALAU 373432. OCLC 3336180. (Inventory #: WRCAM62045)