The United States made a century-old deal – to save the vast territory of Alaska from Russia for $ 7.2 million – on this day in history, Oct. 18, 1867.
The transfer of 665,000 square miles between the future rivals for world hegemony had a major impact on the balance of regional power that is still felt today.
“The purchase of Alaska in 1867 marked the end of Russia’s efforts to expand trade and settlement to the Pacific coast of North America, and was an important step in the rise of the United States as a world power. largest in the Asia-Pacific region,” he writes. Office of the Historian of the United States Department of State.
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After months of international negotiations and political wrangling in Washington, D.C., the agreement was ritually sealed with the lowering of the Russian flag on Castle Hill in Sitka and the raising of the American flag.
October 18 is celebrated every year in the Last Frontier as Alaska Day, a state holiday.
Shown at the signing of the Alaska Treaty of Cessation are (left to right) Robert S. Chew (chief clerk), William H. Seward (Secretary of State), William Hunter (Second Assistant Secretary of State), Mr. Bodisco, Russian Ambassador, Baron Edward de Stoeckl, Charles Sumner (senator), and Fredrick W. Seward (Assistant Secretary of State).
(Getty Images)
Land theft works out to a measly 1.7 cents per acre for twice the land of Texas and more than three times that of California.
Secretary of State William Seward and Russian minister Edouard de Stoeckl negotiated this agreement.
This alliance led to an interest in knowing places. The United States and Russia today are close neighbors. The two nations are separated by a sea of only 2.4 kilometers in the Bering Strait between the islands of Big Diomede (part of Russia) and Little Diomede (part of Alaska).
Today it is said that Russian nationalists are crying even now over the loss of such a great wealth of natural resources.
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“If Russia had Alaska today, the world situation would be different,” Sergey Aksyonov, Crimea’s prime minister, reportedly said in a local TV interview in 2017, on the 150th anniversary of the treaty.
“October 18 is celebrated annually in the Last Frontier as Alaska Day, a state holiday.”
Russian official and Vladimir Putin friend Vyacheslav Volodin said this summer that his nation may try to return Alaska due to US and NATO sanctions due to the war in Ukraine, according to many media reports.
Baranof Island Street, Sitka, Alaska, and St. Michael’s Cathedral. The territory of Alaska was officially transferred from Russia to the United States with a flag ceremony in Sitka on Oct. 18, 1867.
(Photo by Wolfgang Kaehler/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Alaska at that time was seen by both nations as a wasteland.
It is reported that Czar Alexander II was willing to give the country away. American political and media pundits blasted Seward and President Andrew Johnson for wasting millions of tax dollars in what they believed to be an empty, frozen desert.
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“Critics attacked Seward for the secrecy surrounding the treaty, which became known as ‘Seward’s folly,'” according to the Library of Congress.
“The reporter mocked his willingness to spend so much money on ‘Seward’s icebox’ and Andrew Johnson’s ‘polar bear garden.’
Land theft works out to 1.7 cents per acre.
The New York Tribune and its powerful publisher Horace Greeley were among the most vocal opponents of the deal.
Alaska Gold Rush. Starting in the Yukon from Juneau, Alaska. Pictured is Winter and the Pond, 1896.
(Getty Images)
“[Russia’s] position in America was not only worthless … but an expense and trouble which the king would have liked to have done away with,” the Tribune said. reported as early as 1867 when news first emerged of the unexpected agreement, citing the Russian monarchy to. St. Petersburg as a resource.
“The reporter scoffed at the willingness to spend so much money on ‘Seward’s icebox’ and Andrew Johnson’s ‘polar bear garden.’
“Russia would be willing to give that territory to the United States as a gift if it were desirable to the Republic. This is the truth. Likewise, Secretary Seward knew the truth.”
Public opinion began to change in 1880 and the years that followed, with the discovery of many pockets of gold in Alaska.
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Americans began to cover the area during the Alaska Gold Rush, setting it on the road to dominance.
Alaska joined the union as the 50th state on January 3, 1959, while October 18 remains a celebrated date in the state’s history.
“With a parade and a list of events longer than the Fourth of July, Alaska Day is Sitka’s signature celebration, popular throughout the state,” reports the state’s Alaska.org travel site.
