The Alaska Purchase

The Senate ratified the Alaska treaty in ten days, thirty-seven votes to two. Then the United States spent seventeen years declining to give Alaska a government.

Everyone has heard that the Alaska Purchase was mocked as Seward's Folly. Mostly it wasn't. Read the newspapers of 1867 as a whole and the clear majority supported the treaty. "Walrussia" and "Seward's icebox" were real jokes, but they came from the enemies of Andrew Johnson's administration and one New York editor who worked the vein hard. The phrase grew in the telling, through the Klondike years and a century of textbooks that liked a vindicated visionary. The myth flatters the people who repeat it: we would not have laughed.

The folly came afterwards. The treaty was signed at about four in the morning on 30 March 1867 for $7,200,000 in gold-a little under two cents an acre. The flag went up at Sitka on 18 October. And then: no courts, no land law, no legal way to own a house or make a will. The Army ran Alaska for ten years and left. For two years the senior federal official in a territory twice the size of Texas was a customs collector. In 1879 the frightened residents of Sitka appealed to a British warship. The Navy took over and shelled the Tlingit towns of Kake and Angoon. Civil government arrived in 1884.

And the people who lived there were never asked. Article III of the treaty set aside the "uncivilized native tribes" for whatever laws Congress chose. At Sitka, Tlingit leaders argued that Russia could not sell what it had never owned. It took a century to win. At the centre stand William Henry Seward, scarred by an assassin's knife the night Lincoln died, who saw Alaska as a step towards Asia; and Eduard de Stoeckl, Russia's minister in Washington for a quarter century, who closed the sale and then spent some of the money in ways that were investigated and never explained.

What you'll learn:

• Why St. Petersburg sold: the Crimean War, a colony it could not defend, and the calculation that Americans made better neighbours than the British
• The two weeks in March: the price haggled from $5 million to $7 million, and the night the clerks were summoned
• Charles Sumner's three-hour speech, the Unangan word that named the territory, and what the two no votes stood for
• What the press of 1867 actually said, and how "Seward's Folly" grew into the whole story
• The fifteen-month fight in the House over the money, Johnson's impeachment, and the bribery allegations against Stoeckl-evidence laid out, verdict left honestly unproven
• Kake in 1869 and Angoon in 1882, with the Navy's reports and the Tlingit accounts side by side
• The road from Article III to the Court of Claims and the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971
• The Treaty of Cession in full, annotated, with a who's who, a timeline, and the money followed to St. Petersburg

This book is for you if:

• You know the words "Seward's Folly" and want to know what actually happened
• You live in Alaska and want the story of how it became American told straight
• You read Civil War and Reconstruction history and want the diplomacy that ran alongside the impeachment
• You want Native sovereignty treated as part of the history, not a postscript

The purchase was quick, cheap and popular. The ownership was the folly.