o, and
California and New Mexico, including what is now Arizona, were ceded to
the United States for $15,000,000. The United States also assumed the
payment of obligations due by Mexico to American citizens to the amount
of $3,250,000, and discharged Mexico from all claims of citizens of the
United States against that Republic. Strict provision was made for the
preservation of the rights of the inhabitants of the ceded territory. The
Gadsden Purchase, in 1853--so called from General James Gadsden, who
conducted the negotiations in behalf of the United States--added 45,535
square miles of Mexican territory to the United States, for which this
country paid $10,000,000, Mexico at the same time relinquishing claims
against the United States for Indian depredations amounting to from
$15,000,000 to $30,000,000. The American Republic thus received in all,
as a consequence of the Mexican War, 591,398 square miles, and the Union
acquired its present boundaries, exclusive of Alaska. The Mexican War
gave to the United States the Pacific as well as the Atlantic seaboard,
and completed the westward movement which had begun with the very birth
of the Republic. It made the United States the great power of the
American continent, seated between the two oceans, with a domain
unequalled in natural resources by any other region of the world.

CHAPTER XXXII.

The Union in 1850--Comparative Population of Cities and Rural Districts
--Agriculture the General Occupation--Commercial and Industrial
Development--Growth of New York and Chicago--The Southern States--
Importance of the Cotton Crop--Why the South Was Sensitive to
Anti-Slavery Agitation--Manufactures--Religion and Education,--The
Cloud on the Horizon.

Approaching that period of civil discord, followed by civil war, which
has left its impress in every corner of the Union, and which was attended
by radical changes in the Constitution and the institutions of our
country, it may be well to review the material condition of the States
when the forces of freedom and slavery began to gather for the great
conflict, first in the forum and later in the field. In 1850 the United
States had a population of 23,191,876, of whom 3,204,313 were slaves.
Only 4,000,000 of the people lived in cities, towns and villages, and of
these but 2,860,000 resided in 140 cities and towns of more than 10,000
inhabitants each. Of the total real and personal property in the United
States more than two-thi