The Sale of Alaska
...sian frontier of the day. It was a common saying among the Russians was "God is in heaven and the Czar is far away" and they used this to justify just about anything. They demanded a heavy tribute of furs from all of the natives they encountered and often took hostages to enforce the tribute. The Kiksadi Clan of the Tlingit Indians chose what is now called Baranof Island as their home, establishing a community, at what is present-day Sitka. The Tlingits lived undisturbed until 1799, when Russian explorers arrived and Alexander Baranof, Manager of the Russian-American Company, built a fort a few miles to the north. The Russian-American Company was a colonial trading company, chartered by Czar Paul I in 1799. The charter granted the merchant-dominated company monopoly trading privileges in Russian America, which included the Aleutian Islands and Alaska; one third of all profits were to go to the czar. Under Aleksandr Baranof, who governed the region (1800–1818), a permanent settlement was established at Sitka and a thriving fur trade organized. However, the settlement was not to last. Due to several clashes between the Kiksadi Indians and the colonies, many settlers were pushed back, or killed. The Russian-American Company was was finally dissolved in 1867, when Alaska was sold to the United States. Russia offered to sell Alaska to the United States in 1859, believing the United States would off-set the designs of Russia's greatest rival in the Pacific, Great Britain. The looming U.S. Civil War delayed the sale, but after the war, Secretary of State William Seward quickly took up a renewed Russian offer and on March 30, 1867. William H. Seward, born in New York State in 1801, attended local schools before entering Union College at the age of fifteen. After graduating from Union in 1820, he read law and was admitted to the bar. In 1823, he established himself in Auburn, New York. In the unsettled political conditions of the 1820s and early 1830s, he identified with the anti-Jacksonians and supported John Quincy Adams, the Anti-Masonic party, and, by 1834, the Whig party. He served as state senator and, in 1838, won his first term as governor. He was reelected in 1840. Seward negotiated the price of Alaska to be $7.2 million (2 cents per acre). The treaty was signed on March 30, 1867 and the transfer occurred at the Russian Alaska capital of Sitka on october 18th of the same year. ("I know that Nature designs that his whole continent, not merely these thirty-six states, shall be, sooner or later, within the magic circle of the American union") - William H. Seward. The end of the Russians efforts to expand trade and settlements to the Pacific coast of North America was marked by the purchase of Alaska and became an important step in the United States rise as a great power in the Asia-Pacific region. For 3 decades after its purchase the United States paid little attention to Alaska, which was governed under military, naval, or Treasury rule or, at times, no visible rule at all. Seeking a way to impose U.S. mining laws, the United States constituted a civil government in 1884. Skeptics had dubbed the purchase of Alaska "Seward’s Folly," but the former Secretary of State was vindicated when a major go...