GADSDEN, JAMES (1788-1858), American soldier and diplomat, was born at Charleston, S.C., on the 15th of May 1788, the grandson of Christopher Gadsden. After graduating at Yale in 1806, he became a merchant in his native city, and in the war of 1812 served in the regular U.S. Army as a lieutenant of engineers. In 1818 he served against the Seminole Indians, with the rank of captain, as aide on the staff of Gen. Andrew Jackson. In October 1820 he became inspector general of the Southern Division, with the rank of colonel, and as such assisted in the establishment of posts in Florida after its acquisition. He was adjutant general from August, 1821 to March, 1822, when he left the army and became a planter in Florida. As Federal commission er he superintended in 1823 the removal of the Seminole In dians to South Florida, and in 1832 negotiated with them a treaty which provided for their removal to what is now the state of Oklahoma ; they, however, refused to move, hostilities again broke out, and in the second Seminole War (1836) Gadsden was quartermaster-general of the Florida Volunteers. Returning to South Carolina he became a rice planter and president of the South Carolina railway. In 1853 President Franklin Pierce appointed him minister to Mexico, with which country he negotiated the so-called "Gadsden treaty" (signed Dec. 3o, 1853), which gave to the United States freedom of transit for mails, merchan dise and troops across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and provided for a readjustment of the boundary established by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States acquiring 45,535sq.m. of land, since known as the "Gadsden Purchase," in what is now New Mexico and Arizona. In addition, the provision of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo which bound the United States to prevent incursions of Indians from the United States into Mexico and to restore Mexican prisoners captured by such Indians was abrogated, and for these considerations the United States paid to Mexico the sum of $10,000,000. Ratifications of the treaty, slightly modi fied by the Senate, were exchanged on June 3o, 1854. Gadsden died at Charleston, S.C., Dec. 25, 1858.