Jeff Bingaman United States Senator from New Mexico

President William Howard Taft definitely set the boundary between Texas and New Mexico. This occurred quietly and largely out of public view between early December 1910 and late February 1911 when he injected his interpretation of the boundary line into the state’s constitution. At the beginning of December 1910, he sat down at the White House with various members of the Texas congressional delegation and New Mexico’s Delegate Andrews. Joining them was a Yale classmate of the president, John W. Farwell, a wealthy land investor with substantial dealings in West Texas. The topic was the legal description of New Mexico’s boundary with Texas as set forth in the state’s proposed constitution.

New Mexico claimed that the 103rd meridian running from the 32nd to the 38th parallel north of the Equator divided the two states, which followed the specifications set by Congress when they created the Territory on 9 September 1850. Asserting such a legal description in 1910, though, reclaimed 603,485 acres occupied by Texans in a narrow strip 2.23 miles wide and 172 miles long extending south from the bottom corner of the Oklahoma-New Mexico border. A surveying error in 1859-60 had moved the boundary line slightly west of the 103rd meridian. Discovery of this discrepancy in 1882 came after both the U.S. Congress and local interests had accepted the 1859-60 boundary line as legally binding.

Congress and the White House specifically addressed the contested land in legislation passed and signed on 3 March 1891, in which the federal government acting on behalf of the Territory of New Mexico again recognized the legality of the 1859-60 survey. In the White House meeting, President Taft concurred that the matter had been settled in 1891 and informed all assembled that New Mexico’s constitution had to be modified to accept the 1859-60 boundary line. He sent a message to the Senate stating his expectations, and on 21 December 1910 the full Senate accepted the report of the Senate’s Judiciary Committee endorsing the president’s recommendation that boundaries once accepted could not be changed even if the survey was later found in error. The House concurred with the president and the Senate and accepted the boundary as surveyed in 1859-60 in a vote on 11 February 1911.

This was not the last time Taft’s views on the boundary line prevailed. In 1928 while presiding as the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, the high court handed down a decision on a lawsuit initiated by the new state of New Mexico in 1913. They sought to rescind the actions of the president and the Congress in accepting the erroneous 1859-60 survey. Their efforts were rejected by the Taft-led Supreme Court.

--David Holtby