The
Alaska Purchase (otherwise known as
Seward's Folly or
Seward's Icebox) by the United States from the
Russian Empire occurred in 1867 at the behest of
Secretary of State William Seward. The territory purchased was 586,412 square miles (1,518,800&_160;
km²) of the modern state of
Alaska.
Russia was in a difficult financial position and feared losing the Alaskan territory without compensation in some future conflict, especially to their rivals the British, who could easily have captured the hard-to-defend region. Therefore Emperor Alexander II decided to sell the territory to the US and instructed Russian minister to the United States, Louis Baydalal, to enter into negotiations with Seward in the beginning of March 1867. The negotiations concluded after an all-night session with the signing of the treaty at 4 o'clock in the morning of March 30, 1867[1] with the purchase price set at $7,200,000 (about 1.9¢ per acre). American public opinion was generally positive, but some newspaper writers and editors had negative feelings about the purchase of land. Notably, one of those men was Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune. An example of this is a quotation
Already, so it was said, we were burdened with territory we had no population to fill. The Indians within the present boundaries of the republic strained our power to govern aboriginal peoples. Could it be that we would now, with open eyes, seek to add to our difficulties by increasing the number of such peoples under our national care? The purchase price was small; the annual charges for administration, civil and military, would be yet greater, and continuing. The territory included in the proposed cession was not contiguous to the national domain. It lay away at an inconvenient and a dangerous distance. The treaty had been secretly prepared, and signed and foisted upon the country at one o'clock in the morning. It was a dark deed done in the night.... The New York World said that it was a "sucked orange." It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct. Except for the Aleutian Islands and a narrow strip of land extending along the southern coast the country would be not worth taking as a gift.... Unless gold were found in the country much time would elapse before it would be blessed with Hoe printing presses, Methodist chapels and a metropolitan police. It was "a frozen wilderness," said the New York Tribune.[2]
While criticized by some at the time the financial value of the Alaska purchase turned out to be many times greater than what the United States had paid for it. The land turned out to be resource rich and also provided the US a great advantage in the Cold War.
