1867: Alaska Purchase Treaty

On This Day in Politics: March 30, 1867

On March 30, 1867, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Russian minister Eduard de Stoeckl signed a treaty in Washington arranging the sale of Alaska to the United States for $7.2 million in gold. Their signatures followed negotiations that continued through the night. The agreement marked a major expansion of American territory on the Pacific, but signing alone did not complete the transfer. Ratification, the exchange of the approved treaty, a formal handover, and payment followed on separate dates. March 30 therefore commemorates the diplomatic agreement that set those later steps in motion, rather than Alaska’s admission as a state.

Russia had reasons to sell its distant North American possession. Financial difficulties and the strategic pressures exposed by the Crimean War made maintaining it less attractive. An earlier offer to the United States in 1859 did not produce an agreement before the American Civil War intervened. Seward saw the Pacific as an important arena for trade and national expansion. Stoeckl received instructions to pursue a sale, and negotiations with Seward resumed in March 1867. After a message from Russia arrived on March 29, the diplomats worked overnight on the terms. They signed the English and French versions of the treaty at about four o’clock the next morning.

The treaty did more than establish a price. It described the territory being transferred and addressed public property, official records, and the position of inhabitants. Its provisions also exposed the unequal assumptions behind the transaction. A promise concerning eventual citizenship and rights for inhabitants specifically excluded Indigenous tribal communities, placing them instead under the laws and regulations the United States applied to Native peoples. Alaska was not an empty space awaiting ownership: the agreement concerned lands where Indigenous communities already lived. The two governments’ bargain transferred their claims and authority without providing those communities an equal place in deciding the territory’s future.

The Senate approved the treaty on April 9, 1867, and President Andrew Johnson ratified it on May 28. The formal transfer took place at Sitka on October 18. Payment came later still, with the Treasury check dated August 1, 1868. Those stages show how a dramatic diplomatic announcement depended on further governmental action before its terms were carried out. Alaska became the forty-ninth state in January 1959, more than nine decades after the treaty. The purchase reshaped the geography of the United States and its position in the North Pacific. Its significance also includes the continuing consequences of a territorial bargain whose provisions treated different populations very differently.