When opportunity knocks, open the door. For Secretary of State William H. Seward, opportunity literally arrived with a knock on the door. On the evening of March 29, 1867, the Russian minister to the United States, Baron Eduard de Stoeckl, showed up at Seward’s house in Washington, DC, as he was playing whist. The minister had a proposition: Moscow was willing to sell Russian America to the United States. Was Seward interested? He most certainly was. Rather than accepting Stoeckl’s offer to meet the next day, Seward answered: “Why wait until tomorrow?” Leaving the card game behind and working by candlelight, the two men negotiated through the night, finally reaching a deal at 4:00 a.m. The United States would pay $7.2 million for the second largest land acquisition in U.S. history.
The secretary of state’s decision, which critics at the time derided as “Seward’s Folly,” proved to be a stroke of genius. The land that opponents at the time dismissed as an empty icebox would pay for itself many times over once explorers found gold and then oil. In a recent survey that the Council on Foreign Relations conducted, members of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations ranked the Alaska Purchase as the twenty-sixth best decision in U.S. foreign policy history.
Manifest Destiny and Territorial Expansion
A former governor of New York and a two-time U.S. senator, Seward had long championed America’s Manifest Destiny. He envisioned the United States expanding across North America and into the Pacific, with new territories being gained by the power of attraction rather than at the point of a gun. In 1853, he forecast that one day
the borders of the federal republic … shall be extended so that it shall greet the sun when he touches the tropics, and when he sends his gleaming rays toward the polar circle, and shall include even distant islands in either ocean.
and he speculated that Mexico City might eventually become the capital of the United States.
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