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Russian America because at risk within the Russian Empire as a result of a disastrous war against the British and their allies the French, between 1853 and 1856 and known as the Crimean War. The then Czar, Alexander II and the Russian national Treasury were in a very precarious state. Their condition was such, that the Czar and many of his close advisors, feared that if war broke out again that their “hard to defend” territory of Russian America in Alaska would be a prime target and could be easily captured by the British from the naval bases at Esquimalt on Vancouver Island and their other major base at Vancouver, itself.
The Czar with the assistance of his brother the Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolayevich feared on losing the “colony” without compensation particularly to the British. There, the Grand Duke Konstantin, as early as 1857, began pressing for the transfer of Alaska to the Americans. In a memorandum to Foreign Minister Alexander Gorchakov he stated that: “we must not deceive ourselves and must foresee that the United States, aiming constantly to round out their possessions and desiring to dominate the undivided whole of North America will take the afore-mentioned colonies from us and we shall not be able to regain them.”
This proposal was a topic in the higher echelons of the Russian government throughout 1857 and 1858. Konstantin’s letter was shown to his brother, Tsar Alexander II, who wrote “this idea is worth considering” upon the front page.
Supporters of Konstantin measure to immediately withdraw from North America included Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin and the Russian minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl. Gorchakov agreed with the necessity of abandoning Russian America, but argued for a gradual process leading to its sale. He found a supporter in the Naval Minister and former Chief Manager of the Russian Alaska Company, Ferdinand von Wrangel. Wrangel pressed for some proceeds to be invested in the economic development of Kamchatka and the Amur Basin. The Emperor eventually sided with Gorchakov, deciding to postpone negotiations until the end of the Russian Alaska Company’s patent, set to expire in 1861.
Over the winter of 1859-1860 De Stoeckl held meetings with American officials, though he was previously instructed not to initiate discussions about the sale of the as Russian Alaska Company’s assets.
In the hopes of starting a bidding war, both the British and the Americans were approached. However, the British expressed little interest in buying Alaska. The Russians in 1859 offered to sell the territory to the United States, hoping that its presence in the region would offset the plans of Russia’s greatest regional rival, Great Britain. However, no deal was reached, as the American Civil War was a more pressing concern in Washington.
Nevertheless, communicating primarily with Assistant Secretary of State John Appleton and Senator William M. Gwin, De Stoeckl reported the interest by Americans in acquiring Russian America.
While President James Buchanan kept these hearings informal, the beginnings for further negotiations began. Senator Gwin tendered a hypothetical offering of five million dollars for the Russian colony, a figure Gorchakov found far too low. De Stoeckl informed Appleton and Gwin of this, the later saying that his Congressional colleagues in Oregon and California would support a larger figure. Buchanan’s increasingly unpopular presidency forced the matter to be shelved until a new presidential election.
With the oncoming American Civil War, De Stoeckl proposed a renewal of the Russian Alaska Company’s charter. Two of its ports were to be open to foreign traders and commercial agreements with Peru and Chile to be signed to give “a fresh jolt” to the Company.
In addition, the Czar sought to repay money to its landowners after its emancipation reform of 1861 and borrowed 15 million pounds sterling from Rothschilds at 5% annually. When the time came to repay the loan, the Russian Government was short on funds.
Russia continued to see an opportunity to weaken British power by causing British Columbia, including the Royal Navy base at Esquimalt, to be surrounded or annexed by American territory. Following the Union victory in the Civil War, the Czar instructed the Russian minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl, to re-enter into negotiations with William Seward in the beginning of March 1867. The negotiations concluded after an all-night session with the signing of the treaty at 4 a.m. on March 30, 1867, with the purchase price set at $7.2 million, or about 2 cents per acre ($4.74/km2).
The US$ 7.2 million check used to pay for Alaska ($119 million in 2014 dollars)
The Alaska Purchase was the acquisition of Russian America by the United States from the Russian Empire in 1867 by a treaty ratified by the U.S. Senate.
Russia wanted to sell its Alaskan territory, fearing that it might be seized if war broke out with Britain. Russia’s primary activity in the territory had been fur trade and missionary work among the Native Alaskans. With the purchase of Alaska, the United States added 586,412 square miles (1,518,800 km2) of new territory.
Reactions to the purchase in the United States were mixed, with opponents calling it “Seward’s Folly“, feeling that U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward, the primary American negotiator, got the worst of the bargain.
Originally organized as the Department of Alaska, the area was renamed the District of Alaskaand the Alaska Territory before becoming the modern state of Alaska upon being admitted to the Union as a state in 1959.
American public opinion was not universally positive; to some the purchase was known as Seward’s Folly.
Nonetheless, most newspaper editors argued that the U.S. would probably derive great economic benefits from the purchase; friendship of Russia was important; and it would facilitate the acquisition of British Columbia. Forty-five percent of newspapers endorsing the purchase cited the increased potential for annexing British Columbia in their support.
Historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer summarized the minority opinion of some American newspaper editors who opposed the purchase: “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’.”
It has to be remembered that: Russia’s primary activity in the territory had been fur trade and missionary work among the Native Alaskans.
With the purchase negotiated by Secretary of State Seward, the United States acquired an area twice as large as Texas, but it was not until the great Klondike gold strike in 1896 that Alaska came to be seen generally as a valuable addition to American territory.
Senator Sumner, as chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, sponsored the bill. He told the nation that the Russians estimated that Alaska contained about 2,500 Russians and those of mixed race (that is, a Russian father and native mother), and 8,000 Indigenous people, in all about 10,000 people under the direct government of the Russian fur company, and possibly 50,000 Inuit and Alaska Natives living outside its jurisdiction.
The Russians were settled at 23 trading posts, placed at accessible islands and coastal points. At smaller stations only four or five Russians were stationed to collect furs from the natives for storage and shipment when the company’s boats arrived to take it away.
There were two larger towns. New Archangel, now named Sitka, had been established in 1804 to handle the valuable trade in the skins of the sea otter and in 1867 contained 116 small log cabins with 968 residents. St. Paul in the Pribil of Islands had 100 homes and 283 people and was the center of the seal fur industry.
An Aleut name, “Alaska”, was chosen by the Americans. This name had earlier, in the Russian era, denoted the Alaska Peninsula, which the Russians had called Alyaska (also Alyaksa is attested, especially in older sources).
The seal fishery was one of the chief considerations that induced the United States to purchase Alaska. It provided considerable revenue to the United States by the lease of the privilege of taking seals, in fact an amount in excess of the price paid for Alaska. From 1870 to 1890, the seal fisheries yielded 100,000 skins a year.
The company to which the administration of the fisheries was entrusted by a lease from the U.S. government paid a rental of $50,000 per annum and in addition thereto $2.62½ per skin for the total number taken. The skins were transported to London to be dressed and prepared for world markets. The business grew so large that the earnings of English laborers after the acquisition of Alaska by the United States amounted by 1890 to $12,000,000.
However exclusive U.S. control of this resource was eventually challenged, and the Bering Sea Controversy resulted when the United States seized over 150 sealing ships flying the British flag, based out of the coast of British Columbia.
The conflict between the United States and Great Britain was resolved by an arbitration tribunal in which the waters of the Bering Sea were deemed to be international waters, contrary to the US’ contention that they were an internal sea. The U.S. was required to make a payment to Great Britain, and both nations were required to follow regulations which were developed to preserve the resource.
The signing of the Alaska Treaty of Cessation on March 30, 1867.
The transfer ceremony took place in Sitka on October 18, 1867. Russian and American soldiers paraded in front of the governor’s house; the Russian flag was lowered and the American flag raised amid peals of artillery.
A rather humorous description of the events was published in Finland six years later, written by a blacksmith named T. Ahllund, who had been recruited to work in Sitka only less than two years previously.
“We had not spent many weeks no spent many weeks at Sitka when two large steam ships arrived there, bringing things that belonged to the American crown, and a few days later the new governor also arrived in a ship together with his soldiers.
The wooden two-story mansion of the Russian governor stood on a high hill, and in front of it in the yard at the end of a tall spar flew the Russian flag with the double-headed eagle in the middle of it.
Of course, this flag now had to give way to the flag of the United States, which is full of stripes and stars. On a predetermined day in the afternoon a group of soldiers came from the American ships, led by one who carried the flag.
Marching solemnly, but without accompaniment, they came to the governor’s mansion, where the Russian troops were already lined up and waiting for the Americans. Now they started to pull the [Russian double-headed] eagle down, but whatever had gone into its head it only came down a little bit, and then entangled its claws around the spar so that it could not be pulled down any further.
A Russian soldier was therefore ordered to climb up the spar and disentangle it, but it seems that the eagle cast a spell on his hands, too — for he was not able to arrive at where the flag was, but instead slipped down without it.
The next one to try was not able to do any better; only the third soldier was able to bring the unwilling eagle down to the ground. While the flag was brought down, music was played and cannons were fired off from the shore; and then while the other flag was hoisted the Americans fired off their cannons from the ships equally many times.
After that American soldiers replaced the Russian ones at the gates of the fence surrounding the Kolosh [i.e. Tlingit] village.”
When the business with the flags was finally over, Captain of 2nd Rank Aleksei Alekseyevich Peshchurov(was to become and Admiral) said: “General Rousseau, by authority from His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska.”
General Lovell Rousseau accepted the territory. (Peshchurov had been sent to Sitka as commissioner of the Russian government in the transfer of Alaska.) A number of forts, blockhouses and timber buildings were handed over to the Americans. The troops occupied the barracks; General Jefferson C. Davis established his residence in the governor’s house, and most of the Russian citizens went home, leaving a few traders and priests who chose to remain.
After the transfer, a number of Russian citizens remained in Sitka, but very soon nearly all of them decided to return to Russia, which was still possible to do at the expense of the Russian-American Company.
Ahllund’s story “corroborates other accounts of the transfer ceremony, and the dismay felt by many of the Russians and creoles, jobless and in want, at the rowdy troops and gun-toting civilians who looked on Sitka as merely one more western frontier settlement.”
Ahllund gives a vivid account of what life was like for civilians in Sitka under U.S. rule, and it helps to explain why hardly any of the Russian subjects wanted to stay there. Moreover, Ahllund’s article is the only known description of the return voyage on the Winged Arrow, a ship especially purchased in order to transport the Russians back to their native country. “The over-crowded vessel, with crewmen who got roaring drunk at every port, must have made the voyage a memorable one.” Ahllund mentions stops at the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, Tahiti, Brazil, London, and finally Kronstadt, the port for St. Petersburg, where they arrived on August 28, 1869.
Economist David R. Barker has argued that the U.S. federal government has not earned a positive financial return on the purchase of Alaska. According to Barker, tax revenue and mineral and energy royalties to the federal government have been less than federal costs of governing Alaska plus interest on the borrowed funds used for the purchase.
John M. Miller has taken the argument further, contending that U.S. oil companies that developed Alaskan petroleum resources did not earn profits sufficient to compensate for the risks they have incurred.
Other economists and scholars, including Scott Goldsmith and Terrence Cole, have criticized the metrics used to reach those conclusions, noting that most continental Western states would fail to meet the bar of “positive financial return” using the same criteria and contending that looking at the increase in net national income, instead of simply U.S. Treasury revenue, paints a much more accurate picture of the financial return of Alaska as an investment
Alaska Day celebrates the formal transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States, which took place on October 18, 1867. The October 18, 1867, date is by the Gregorian calendar, which came into effect in Alaska the following day to replace the Julian calendar used by the Russians (the Julian calendar in the 19th century was 12 days behind the Gregorian calendar). For the selling party back in the Russia’s capital city of St Petersburg, where the next day already started due to nearly 12 hours clock time difference, the handover occurred on October 7, 1867 (not 6th) of St. Petersburg time and date under the Julian calendar.