John Peter Altgeld
Turn-of-the-century progressive reformer John Peter Altgeld was born in Germany on December 30, 1847. Despite his humble origins and a father who saw no benefit in education, Altgeld read law and was admitted to the bar in Anderson County, Missouri. There, he committed himself to politics and served as city attorney of Savannah, Missouri (1872-73) and county prosecutor (1874-75). Altgeld moved to Chicago in 1875 and continued his legal and political career, next getting elected to the Cook County Superior Court (1886-91). He won the Democratic Party’s nomination for governor in 1892.
As governor, Altgeld made improvements in state institutions and passed reforms in the penal and legal systems, as well as in early child and women’s labor legislation. However, he is most famous for his June 1893 pardon of the three surviving bombers involved in the May 1886 Haymarket Riot, a labor protest in support of the eight-hour day. The protest had escalated into a violent confrontation in which seven policemen were killed. Altgeld, whose law partner was Clarence Darrow, argued that the trial had been unfair because the judge was prejudiced and the jury stacked.
A year later, in May 1894, Altgeld refused to order the militia to intervene in the Pullman railroad strike when the American Railway Union protested a reduction in salary without an accompanying reduction in the cost of company-owned housing and other expenses. Ultimately, President Grover Cleveland sent federal troops to Chicago to suppress the strike, exercising his authority to protect mail and interstate commerce. Altgeld’s Progressive Era-legislation and commitment to the laboring classes made him a hero to activists, workers, and farmers, and an enemy of big business.
Using income derived from his legal work, Altgeld had successfully amassed a small fortune by investing in real estate and construction in Chicago in the second half of the nineteenth century. However, he suffered financial disaster in the late nineteenth century and lost almost his entire estate in 1900.
Learn More
- For more information about the history of American reform, labor, and politics, see these collections:
- African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907
- American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I
- A Century of Lawmaking for a new Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875
- National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection
- Votes for Women–The Struggle for Women’s Suffrage: Selected Images from the Collections of the Library of Congress
- See interior and exterior views of a variety of Pullman railroad cars. Search on the term Pullman in Denver Public Library Digital Collectionsto see, for example, the interior of the Denver & Salt Lake, railroad cars of about 1913, and the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad’s “Tryphosa” Pullman of 1906. Also see the uniform of a Pullman railroad conductor.
- Search on the term Pullman in the Detroit Publishing Company collection for additional images.
The Gadsden Purchase
U.S. Minister to Mexico James Gadsden, and three envoys of the President of Mexico General Antonio López de Santa Anna Pérez de Lebrón, signed the Gadsden Purchase, or Gadsden Treaty, in Mexico City on December 30, 1853. Santa Anna needed money to help defray expenses caused by the Mexican War and ongoing rebellions, so he sold land to the United States. The treaty, amended and finally approved by the U.S. Senate on April 25, 1854, settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, giving the U.S. claim to some 29,600 square miles of land, ultimately for the price of $10 million. The land is what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona.
U.S. President Franklin Pierce, influenced by Gadsden’s friend, Jefferson Davis, sent Gadsden to negotiate with Santa Anna for this tract of land. Many supporters of a southern Pacific railroad route, including Davis, believed that a transcontinental route which stretched through this territory would greatly benefit southern states should hostilities break out with the north.
The first transcontinental railroad was, however, constructed along a more northerly route by the “big four” of western railroad construction—Collis P. Huntington, Leland Stanford, Mark Hopkins, and Charles Crocker. A southern transcontinental route through territory acquired by the Gadsden Purchase was not a reality until 1881 when the tracks of the “big four’s” Southern Pacific met those of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe in the Territory of New Mexico.
Learn More
- Search across Today in History on the terms Santa Anna and Jefferson Davis to learn more about two of the principals involved in the Gadsden Purchase. Search as well on Arizona or New Mexico for more information on the history of each of these states. Read, for example, about the Arizona Territory.
- Read accounts of the history of the Southern Pacific Railroad. Search on Southern Pacific and transcontinental railroad in “California as I saw It”: First-Person Narratives of California’s Early Years, 1849 to 1900.
- Search across the pictorial collections on Mexico, New Mexico, Arizona, or railroad for more images.
- Hispano Music and Culture of the Northern Rio Grande: The Juan B. Rael Collection documents the religious and secular music of Spanish-speaking residents of rural northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. Until about twenty-five years after the Gadsden Purchase, the area’s remote location contributed to a chronic shortage of clergy, a vacuum filled by extraordinary Hispanic religious and ceremonial music: alabados(hymns), folk drama, wedding songs, and dance tunes such as the “Varsoviana (Varceliana).”
- Search on the term Jefferson Davis and railroad in the Transportation and Communication section of Maps to see a number of maps which were ordered by the secretary of war. See, for example, a Map of the Territory of the United States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean signed by Millard Fillmore. These maps accompanied reports of explorations for a transcontinental railroad route. Also search on New Mexico or Arizona in Maps for additional representations of the topography of the southwest United States.
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