Alaska Purchase (1867): Seward's Folly and the Russian Sale

The Alaska Purchase was the sale of Russia’s North American colony to the United States in 1867 for 7.2 million dollars. Negotiated by Secretary of State William H. Seward and the Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl, the treaty was signed on 30 March 1867 and the territory was handed over at Sitka on 18 October. Mocked by some at the time as “Seward’s Folly”, the purchase added about 586,000 square miles to the United States and later proved enormously valuable for its gold, fish, oil and strategic position.

Background: Russian America

Russian explorers and fur traders reached Alaska in the 18th century, beginning with the voyages of Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov in 1741. Hunters, many of them Aleut people forced to work for Russian merchants, harvested sea otters, whose thick pelts sold for high prices in China.

From 1799 the colony was run by the Russian-American Company, a state-chartered monopoly with its capital at Novo-Arkhangelsk, today’s Sitka. Russian settlement was always thin, numbering only a few hundred Russians at any time, while Alaska Native peoples, including the Tlingit, Aleut (Unangan), Alutiiq, Yupik and Athabaskan groups, made up the overwhelming majority of the population.

Why Russia wanted to sell

By the 1850s the colony had become a burden. Overhunting had sharply reduced sea otter numbers, and the Russian-American Company depended on government subsidies. Supplying distant settlements across Siberia and the Pacific was expensive.

The Crimean War of 1853-1856 exposed another danger. Britain’s navy dominated the Pacific, and British Canada lay next door. Russian officials feared that in another war Britain could simply seize Alaska, leaving Russia with nothing. Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich, the tsar’s brother and head of the navy, argued from 1857 that it would be better to sell the colony to the United States, which Russia regarded as a friendly rival of Britain.

Russia was also turning its attention to East Asia, where it gained the Amur region from China in 1858-1860. Preliminary contacts with American politicians began, but the American Civil War put any deal on hold.

The negotiation

In December 1866 Tsar Alexander II and his advisers agreed to sell Alaska and authorised Stoeckl to seek at least 5 million dollars. Stoeckl approached Seward, a long-time believer in American expansion across the Pacific, who was eager to buy.

Negotiations moved quickly. The two men agreed a price of 7 million dollars, plus 200,000 dollars to free the territory from the claims of the Russian-American Company. On the evening of 29 March 1867 Stoeckl called on Seward at his home to report that the tsar had approved the terms. Seward insisted on drafting the treaty at once, and it was signed at the State Department at about 4 am on 30 March 1867.

For Seward, Alaska was part of a broader vision. He believed the United States would one day dominate trade across the Pacific and also hoped the purchase might encourage neighbouring British Columbia to join the United States. In the same year, 1867, the United States formally took possession of the uninhabited Midway Islands in the central Pacific, and Seward later sought to buy the Danish West Indies, a plan the Senate rejected.

Approval in Congress

President Andrew Johnson sent the treaty to the Senate the same day. Its success owed much to Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, who delivered a speech of about three hours describing Alaska’s resources and popularising the name “Alaska”. On 9 April 1867 the Senate approved the treaty by 37 votes to 2.

Paying for it was harder. The House of Representatives, locked in conflict with President Johnson, delayed the appropriation of the money until July 1868, when it passed by 113 votes to 43. Rumours spread that Stoeckl had paid bribes to members of Congress and journalists to secure the vote; a congressional investigation found no proof, and historians still debate how much of the money was used this way.

The transfer at Sitka

The formal handover took place at Sitka on 18 October 1867. American and Russian troops lined up before the governor’s house, the Russian flag was lowered, and it reportedly became tangled on the flagpole before being freed and brought down. The American flag was then raised. Because Alaska changed from the Julian calendar used in Russia to the Gregorian calendar, the date was recorded locally as 6 October under the old system and 18 October under the new.

Alaska’s Native peoples were not consulted. Tlingit leaders argued that Russia had never owned their lands and had no right to sell them; the question of Native land rights was not addressed until the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.

Russian rule ended quickly but not completely. The Russian-American Company was wound up, and most of its Russian employees left within a few years, although some settlers and many people of mixed Russian and Native descent stayed. The Russian Orthodox Church remained, and its parishes, many of them made up of Alaska Native converts, continue to this day. Russian place names, Orthodox churches such as St Michael’s Cathedral in Sitka and many family names are lasting reminders of the colonial era.

Was it Seward’s Folly?

The image of a nation laughing at Seward’s “icebox” is exaggerated. Some opposition newspapers, notably Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, did ridicule the deal with names such as “Seward’s Folly”, “Seward’s Icebox” and “Walrussia”. But studies of the press have found that many newspapers supported the purchase, and the Senate approved it by a wide margin. The nickname became popular mainly in later years, when the purchase’s success made the early mockery a good story.

Consequences and later value

At first the United States did little with Alaska, which was governed by the army, then the navy and the Treasury, and became a civil district only in 1884. Gold changed that. Strikes near Juneau in 1880, the Klondike Gold Rush in neighbouring Canada from 1896, which drew prospectors through Alaskan ports, and the Nome rush of 1899 brought tens of thousands of newcomers.

Alaska became a territory in 1912 and the 49th state on 3 January 1959. Its fisheries, the discovery of oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968, and its strategic position facing Asia during the Second World War and the Cold War turned the purchase into one of the best bargains in American history, much like the earlier Louisiana Purchase.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1741: Bering and Chirikov’s expedition reaches the Alaskan coast.
• 1799: The Russian-American Company receives its charter.
• 1866, December: Tsar Alexander II approves the sale of Alaska.
• 1867, 30 March: Seward and Stoeckl sign the treaty in Washington.
• 1867, 9 April: The Senate approves the treaty by 37 votes to 2.
• 1867, 18 October: The United States takes formal possession at Sitka.
• 1868, 1 August: The Treasury issues the 7.2 million dollar payment.
• 1959, 3 January: Alaska becomes the 49th US state.

Why it matters

The Alaska Purchase ended Russia’s presence in the Americas and made the United States a power in the North Pacific and the Arctic. A deal once mocked by some critics brought the country vast natural resources and a strategic frontier facing Asia, and it remains a textbook example of how a territorial gamble can look very different with hindsight.