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5 Exploring Seward’s Icebox And again, you are cut off for the greater part of the time from the world, and are, in fact, as much exiles as you would be in Siberia. Robert Mitchell, 1868 Fortunately, a new role did emerge for the little ship. Following years of service in sweltering tropical climates, Saginaw and her crew were finally in for a drastic change to a beautiful, cold, and mostly unknown region. The ship’s move north was prompted by one of the most cost-efficient yet highly ridiculed territorial acquisitions in American history. Many Americans called Secretary of State Seward’s 1867 purchase of the Alaskan territory “Seward’s folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” or even “Andrew Johnson ’s polar bear garden.” Acquiring 600,000 square miles for around $7.2 million worked out to about two cents per acre, but unless gold had been discovered up there, why on earth do it? (The Klondike gold strike would provide the answer to that question in 1896.) Why extend the borders of the United States to include a high-latitude noncontiguous block of ice? The country had neither the population nor the capacity to settle this northern land. After all, it had the entire western frontier, which came with its own challenges. The New York Tribune captured the general public opinion at the time: 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 large; the annual charges for administration, civil and military, would be yet greater, and continuing. The territory . . . contained nothing of value but fur bearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct. Except for the Aleutian Islands and a narrow strip 148 u A Civil War Gunboat in Pacific Waters of land extending along the southern coast the country would not be worth taking as a gift.1 None of these arguments held water with William Seward. Both Seward and Senator Charles Sumner were dedicated and loyal expansionists, and there was little question that they were going to accept the opportunity offered by the czar. Russia had held onto her distant colony since 1741, and the Russian American Company had grown wealthy by supporting the few trading posts there and removing a bounty in fur seals and sea otters from the productive waters. These rich pelts lined the robes and the boots of the Russian and Chinese officials in the Manchurian north. But with the growing British presence in the Pacific, it looked better to sell to the Americans and get something back for the land than lose it for nothing to the British. (The Russians and the British had fought their own remote and minor Pacific war in the 1850s.) And frontiersmen from both Britain and America were pushing northward into the southern borders. Furthermore, the fur-bearing animals from Alaskan waters had been essentially wiped out, and the cash-strapped Russian government needed the gold. The negotiation, arranged with Baron Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian minister to the United States, was concluded in the dead of night on March 30, 1867. It would be more than a year, however, before Congress finalized the appropriation and the sale was complete for this unpopular purchase. And so the country moved with only half a will toward making its presence known in the new territory. For Seward and Sumner, the acquisition played a strategic role in limiting British involvement in the Americas. Napoleon III had left Mexico, Spain was clearly no longer a contender in South and Central America, and that left only the British, so recently antagonistic during the American Civil War despite their proclaimed neutrality, challenging the Monroe Doctrine in British Columbia. With Alaska, the United States would now surround this British foreign presence on both borders. This flanking move on Canada was openly acknowledged in the press. The goal, as summarized by Sumner, “can be nothing less than the North American continent with the gates on all the surrounding seas.” The purchase of Alaska would “dismiss one more monarch from this continent.”2 The mineral and timber resources, and fur and fishing and whaling grounds in Alaska simply made the deal that much more attractive. Even before the actual sale was completed in July 1868, the U.S. Army had begun sending soldiers...

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