Mr. Seward's Bargain: Chance or Destiny?

by OSCAR HANDLIN

1

ALWAYS the Americans had been fond of looking ahead to a grandiose future. The history of their development as a people had incessantly fed their faith in progress; and progress they identified with their own continued growth. The unconditional surrender of the South in 1865 dispelled the threat of disunity, and the aspirations of the veterans lately returned from war looked ahead to the prospect of a constantly expanding destiny. They differed only as to the form and direction they supposed that expansion would take.

Few, however, attached their hopes to the continent’s northernmost extremity. Those littleknown, desolate spaces, lost beneath the snow of almost continuous winter, seemed doomed to perpetual emptiness. Little had come of the Russian attempts to plant settlements there. And indeed, no sober statesman, reckoning the balance of possibilities, could foresee the future wealth of Alaska — the outpouring of gold and oil, of furs and fish, of gas, timber, pulp, and tin, with which it was ultimately to enrich the nation.

No more could such a man have guessed at the immense strategic significance of this corner of the North Pacific. True enough, the visionary Tocqueville had once predicted that the United States would someday face the Russian Empire in opposition. But to the Americans who noted it, that prophetic observation referred only to the rivalry between their system of government, and the Czarist despotism. No one, of course, conceived that a shift of interests in the Pacific and a new geography of flight would give this region crucial value at a moment when the United States was locked in massive competition with Russia, with the outcome certain to determine the fate of the whole world. No one, therefore, was then concerned about what the disposition of power might be were Russia established in North America, only four hundred miles away from the borders of the United States.

That Russia did not remain fixed there was due to a series of unrelated incidents: the death of an anxious lover, a humiliating defeat on the fields of Crimea, and the decay of a great Asian empire — to these and to the determination of an aging statesman who valued a neglected corner of the continent for the wrong reasons.

Alaska had been a graveyard for hopes for more than three hundred years. The hopes had risen with the discovery of the new continent. Men whose expectations of fortune were fixed on trade with the gilded East of Cathay and the Indies refused to believe that America altogether blocked them off. As the daring ships probed the long Atlantic coastline, the conviction took hold that somewhere in the Northwest was a passage from sea to sea and onward to the East.

In 1610 Hudson’s fragile vessel had nosed into the great bay that was to bear his name; and in 1776 the British Admiralty Commissioners determined to find the water passage from the Pacific to Hudson’s Bay. Twenty thousand pounds was held out as a prize for the fortunate discoverer, and on its own account the Admiralty sent forth Captain James Cook to try to trace the western coast of America north of latitude 65°.

Cook set off on the voyage from which he was never to return. It took him almost two years to circle the Cape of Good Hope, pass through the South Pacific, and, after discovering the Hawaiian Islands, to move north to the forbidding coast that he was instructed to explore. Looking carefully into every likely inlet, he painfully made his way to above the Arctic Circle, where he was halted by the solid walls of floating ice at latitude 70°. He then withdrew to Hawaii to prepare for another venture in the following spring.

Cook never again saw the white Arctic barrier. A minor skirmish with the Hawaiian natives cost him his life, and the expedition was forced to go back to the North without him in the summer of 1779. His tired seamen pushed the two battered sloops toward the old goal with no better fortune than before, and finally turned back to England.

Such expeditions had been dispatched in the face of the stubborn Spanish claim to all of western America. But foreign activity in the area at last aroused the Spaniards to the necessity of making good the title given them, almost three centuries before, by the Papal line of demarcation. In the 1760s they had taken the first steps toward establishing posts on the California coast at San Diego and Monterey. In the 1770s their ships had come well north of the Columbia River; and in 1788 an expedition under Estevan José Martinez had set out to clear interlopers off the coast. At Nootka Sound (Vancouver Island), in May, 1789, Martinez encountered a group of English traders. Frenchmen and Americans were also active in the vicinity, he learned. But most serious of all were the signs of the steady advance of the Russians.

2

WHILE the conquistadors and the sea dogs of England had led the thrust of European expansion westward, the subjects of the Muscovite. Czar had been moving laboriously eastward across the vast dark spaces of Siberia.

In the 1580s Yermak Timofeiev, a Cossack fleeing the consequences of his brigandage, pushed across the Ural Mountains and defeated the Tartars. Some fifty years later, the Russians had edged across the half-empty plains of Siberia to the Pacific at Okhotsk. Into the nomadic tribes, white traders and hunters and an occasional retinue of tax collectors insinuated themselves. In the 1720s Peter the Great occasionally.turned his attention to the unexploited empire in the East, and it was he who formulated the plans to extend it to America.

At this time no one yet knew whether or not America was joined to Asia, Vitus Bering, a Dane in the service of Peter’s new navy, was directed to find out. His actions showed a daring willingness to take risks and withal a capacity for attention to detail that others sometimes construed as excessive caution. Offended pride once led him to give up his commission; yet the challenge of his task was to lead him on for seventeen years in the service of capricious and unsympathetic masters.

His mission was to cover the six thousand miles from St. Petersburg to farthest Siberia, taking with him the necessary supplies to build his ships at the ocean’s edge and then to map the uncharted seas beyond.

He left the Russian capital on his first journey in February, 1725; and three and a half years later, having built his own ships at the mouth of the Kamchatka River, he traced the northern outlines of the eastern Asiatic coast. At latitude 67° north, he satisfied himself that America and Asia were not connected, and turned back out of fear of the threatening ice floes. Returning to St. Petersburg, he persuaded the government to sponsor a second exploration. He set off again in February, 1734, at the head of a far more elaborate expedition. More than seven years of strenuous preparation and struggle with recalcitrant Czarist officials followed before his ships at last set sail from Avacha Bay in Siberia in June, 1741. This time his course was directly eastward, and before his death on an unknown island, he had charted the Aleutians and the Gulf of Alaska and made the whole area Russian.

Nothing happened thereafter for a half century. The expense of Bering’s expeditions soured Peter the Great’s successors on further Arctic adventures. Besides, they were more concerned with the wars in Europe, in which they pushed forward Russia’s frontiers toward the Baltic and Black seas. The American extremity of the empire was left largely to itself. Onto the Aleutians there drifted a motley crew of frontiersmen. Siberian merchants, toughliving men whose operations extended over two continents, from the fairs of the homeland to the markets of China, were not slow to estimate 1 he fur resources of the new lands. In the van were the hunters, sometimes agents on their own account, sometimes acting for the merchants. The promyshlenniki, as they were called, left, the forests and took to the sea. In the rude boats they built with their own hands they descended on Red Indian settlements, seized the women, drove the men out to hunt for pelts, and when they were ready, made off with the bundled wealth in skins. Now and again the outraged Aleuts revolted; then for a time red men and white outdid each other in cruel massacres, until the superiority of the gun made itself felt decisively.

It was to such masters as these that Alaska had been abandoned by the time Cook sailed northward from Hawaii. But the English expedition was to alter the fortunes of the Russian outpost.

Cook’s men, sailing dejectedly homeward, had stopped off at Canton. In the Chinese metropolis they discovered an amazing market for what they had hitherto little valued — their cargo of furs, sea otter and seal, picked up from the promyshlenniki up north. The fabulous prices tempted the crew to return to the frozen waters from which they had so recently escaped. Only naval discipline kept them on the course toward England.

The news, however, spread around the world. It drew Captain Gray in the Columbia to the river that bears the name of his ship, and led him to pioneer the American China trade. In Russia it prompted ambitious merchants to explore the possibilities of establishing a more permanent and more extensive occupation of America. Were the territory to be exploited efficiently, the new Chinese markets for fur promised extravagant returns.

Three men in particular evolved the plan for its exploitation. Had these succeeded, Alaska might today be Russian.

The first of them, Grigori Ivanovich Shelekhov, was a merchant, a man of considerable wealth who had come east from Russia to Okhotsk in 1776 and had there taken up the strenuous life of a fur trader. He differed from the rest of his competitors in the driving ambition that left him discontented with any but the highest prizes. In a half-dozen years he had formed his own company and was ready to launch the most hazardous enterprise of his career.

His first and immediate design was to plant a colony in America that would become the central receiving station for the whole fur trade. To this end he fitted out a small armada of three ships, and in 1783 led it himself to Kodiak Island, taking along his wife, Natalia Alexeyevna, the first white woman to sail these seas. In a short time a settlement had sprung up at Three Saints Bay. But beyond this, Shelekhov dreamed of establishing a mammoth company, chartered by the Crown, like the British East India Company, that would absorb all competitors and through its monopoly create a personal commercial empire. Once the Kodiak colony was established on a firm footing, he hastened back to St. Petersburg to win acceptance for his scheme in the unfamiliar atmosphere of the imperial court.

The colony he left in the hands of Alexander Baranov, a man endowed with every quality conducive to success but one: he lacked the driving will to disregard human factors, to crush his opponents, to pounce on opportunity. Too often he was ready to compromise, to accommodate those who needed his aid, to trust his friends.

Baranov’s life had been a succession of calamities until his path crossed that of Shelekhov. Baranov too had been a merchant; but dishonest employees had plundered his warehouses, careless ones had allowed his glass factory to fall to pieces, and a rascally partner had made off with his fortune. He was at his wit’s end, facing bankruptcy, in 1790 when Shelekhov offered him the post of general manager of the Kodiak colony. Baranov accepted his lot, although he hated the distant wastes of the East and was ever uncomfortable among the rough, tough men — both red and white — who were to be his companions for the rest of his life.

The new manager had no faith in the cold world which he now entered; he never shared the dreams of a commercial empire in the Pacific that moved his master. But he was a superb administrator. His task was to keep the colony going and to gather pelts, and for that he was eminently qualified. Within a few years he had organized the Aleuts into a remarkable fur-gathering apparatus capable of sending forth in quest of sea otters as many as five hundred seagoing baidarkas — indestructible three-man craft capable of moving through any waters and similar to the smaller kayak of the Eskimo. Within ten years Baranov moved the headquarters of the company forward to Sitka on the Alaska mainland, and shortly thereafter he was able to plant a thriving outpost at Fort Ross in California.

Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg, Shelekhov was less successful in obtaining a company charter. In court circles he met endless evasion; there seemed to be no way of breaking through to a decision. He took seriously each pretext for refusal and wore himself out in the composition of laborious memoranda demonstrating that his proposal was in the interests of the Czar, of the Czar’s subjects, and of the Orthodox faith. He died in 1795, having failed to secure the coveted charter.

Yet, in the Russian capital, Shelekhov had attained one aim that would ultimately bring his great dream within a hair’s breadth of realization. Earlier his social ambitions had led him to choose a wife from among the country gentry. Now they drove him to seek his daughter’s husband among the nobility. A year before his death, he had married his daughter, Anne Grigorievna, to Nikolai Petrovich Rozanov.

3

REZANOV was the scion of a noble family from the province of Smolensk. A member of the new generation, brought up under the pervasive influence of the ideas of the French Enlightenment with its idealization of Nature, he had become imbued with the romance of striving against the wilderness. He was a minor official in Catherine the Great’s court when he met his future wife and her father; and no doubt the old man’s golden visions attracted him as much as the beauty of the daughter. The new son-in-law made Shelekhov’s ambitions his own, but in a grander form.

The company which Rozanov now envisaged would be a commercial empire stretching in an imperial semicircle around the entire North Pacific, from the Kamchatka Peninsula across to the Aleutians, from there to the Alaska coast and down to California, with perhaps a base in Hawaii. Permanent settlements of artisans and husbandmen would make the area self-sufficient, while carefully planned exploitation of its fur resources would give its rulers a dominant position in the China trade and a steady inflow of gold. Fired by this grandiose vision and more skilled than his father-in-law in the ways of the Palace, Rezanov was able to thread the mazes of the court circles, and finally, at the very end of 1799, he secured the charter that created the Russian-American Company.

When Rezanov left Russia for the North Pacific in August, 1803, his hopes seemed well on their way to fulfillment. The young Czar, Alexander I, was of the same romantic generation as he was; and Rezanov had succeeded in gaining his ear in pleading the necessity of spreading Russian civilization to this remote corner of the earth.

And then, who was to stop them? All Europe was divided in war. Britain could spare no energies from the struggle with France; Napoleon had no ambitions here and was anxious to mollify the Russians; soon, in fact, he would meet Alexander at Tilsit to divide up the world between them. As for the Spaniards, they were torn by internal dissensions and could scarcely hold on to what they already had.

Even the sight of Sitka did not dishearten the courtier, Rezanov reached the little settlement in 1805, shortly after the Russians had beaten off the hostile kolosh Indians. The squalor of the place was overwhelming, for the promyshlenniki and their Red Indian cohorts were not in normal times overfastidious in their way of life, and the reek of decaying fish and furs being cured always shocked newcomers. Hard pressed by recent fighting, the Russian settlers had neglected the buildings, which were in sad need of repair. Supplies had dwindled dangerously, scurvy was spreading, and the toll of deaths had begun to mount. It was soon apparent to Rezanov that the colony was doomed unless fresh supplies could be brought it to save it. And those supplies could be secured quickly only from the Spaniards in California. Knowing that such trade was forbidden by Spanish law, he nevertheless resolved to sail south and to make the effort.

In California he found the mission friars willing enough to trade; they sympathized with the plight of the Russians and valued their furs. But the stubborn Spanish commandant of California, Argüello, was more difficult. He was courteous enough to Rezanov, treated him with respect, and lavished on him the best entertainment that the place afforded. But when it came to business, he stubbornly refused to wink at a violation of the law.

But the commandant had a daughter called Doña Concepción. She was a lonely young girl limited in this remote outpost both by the rigidities of Spanish etiquette and by the absence of companionship. The noble young man from faraway St. Petersburg soon won her heart, and she was unable to hide her true feeling for long. Cynically, Rezanov, already married, seized the opportunity to exploit her emotions, in order to convince the father through the daughter. During the long delay on shore, he pressed his courtship vigorously and successfully. He won over Doña Concepción and her parents and the local clergy. And as a prospective son-inlaw, he at last secured the coveted permission to trade. He returned to his own colony triumphant.

Now, however, Rezanov discovered that he was trapped by his own emotions. Originally he had planned to leave Sitka at once to complete the commercial arrangements for the company’s future operations. Already his itinerary was marked out; but somehow he found no pleasure in the thought of setting out to forge links of new trade in Manila, China, and India. He no longer had any heart for that journey.

Instead, his mind kept wandering back to California. He could not forget the lonely girl who waited joyously in the mission for his return. Concepción, who was to have been a mere tool in his hands, had now suddenly become the sole object of his desires. Brooding in his loneliness, he examined his conscience. Was the betrayal he had plotted worthy of him? Did it not make him one with the savages about him? Distaste for his callousness slowly mounted within him as he huddled dejectedly in his filthy, insect-infested quarters.

Then he made up his mind. He would keep his promise. Like the heroes of his imagination, he would surmount every obstacle, forget all material considerations, to save his honor and his love. He decided to return immediately to St. Petersburg to secure the necessary imperial and ecclesiastical dispensations that would free him for a new marriage.

In haste he set out on the long voyage home, impatiently he crossed the sea, and at a forced pace he pushed himself across the great wilderness through the worst of the Siberian winter. At the back of his mind loomed the gloomy realization that the Czar and the Church would not readily consent. But he downed those disturbing reflections in the singleminded fury with which he drove on his animals, his men, and himself.

At Krasnoyarsk, still a long way from his destination, he fell ill. His fevered mind and exhausted body proved unequal to their burdens, and early in 1807 he died.

Doña Concepción never saw her lover return. Thus Alaska never achieved the imperial destiny that Shelekhov and Rezanov had dreamed for it. Bereft of these two leaders, the company lost its driving spirit and sank into a lethargic and unaggressive prosperity. As manager, Baranov had no dreams for conquest. His competence was equal only to the maintenance from existing fur sales of a decent level of dividends to the company stockholders.

At that unimaginative level of operations, the colony survived under Baranov and his successors. Arrangements were made with American merchants and British fur companies whereby the strenuous trapping and trading functions were delegated to others in return for secure annual payments’. Sitka and its outposts grew comfortable and staid; and when, in 1841, it seemed profitable to do so, Fort Ross in California was sold to John Sutter, the Swiss entrepreneur who was to achieve fame within the decade by his discovery of gold.

By this time too the Czars had lost interest. Alexander himself had long before diverted his interests to Europe, where he labored first in collaboration with Napoleon and then for the destruction of the French Empire. After Waterloo, he again thought briefly of his American possession. Absorbed by his mystical scheme of a Holy Alliance, Alexander intended to establish over the whole earth the reactionary peace of which he had become the prime mover ever since he had turned against Napoleon. For a while he imagined that he could sterilize the source of republican infection in the Western Hemisphere and thus keep Europe safe from liberalism and democracy. He labored to keep the revolting colonies of Spain in the hands of the Bourbons; and a pretentious ukase closed the Northwest to all but the Russians. But the Monroe Doctrine and the hostility of Great Britain punctured those pretensions, and thereafter Alaska became only the outermost extremity of Russia’s vast Siberian holdings.

This peaceable stalemate in the North Pacific might have persisted indefinitely. No vital concerns were involved, and Russian sovereignty over these empty wastes seemed likely to go on undisturbed. Then, at midcentury, the repercussions of the momentous collapse of two ancient empires caused a new upheaval in Alaska.

4

THE heyday of the Ottomans and the Manchus was now approaching its finish. Their long hegemony over a quarter of the earth’s surface was ending. Weakened from within, neither was capable of maintaining itself against the mounting forces of assault from without. In eastern Europe and in eastern Asia, the ambitious states of the West were arraying themselves for the struggle to snatch up the pieces that would be left by the ultimate dismemberment of China and Turkey. And in both areas Britain and Russia were the great rivals in the conflict that was to follow.

For more than a century the Czars had directed their energies in a drive toward the Balkans and the Black Sea. Now their advances toward Constantinople were a threat to the British. Were they to secure access to the Mediterranean, England’s supremacy in this part of the world would be challenged. For almost forty years after Waterloo a series of parries and thrusts had occupied the statesmen of the two nations; and in 1854 the Crimean War had brought the issue into the open.

Russia’s defeat in this war led to a time of reckoning. The massive incompetence of the Czarist administration called for a succession of internal reforms, and military failure called for a reassessment of the strategic situation. On the first score the government was attracted by the liberal economic policies that had succeeded so remarkably in Britain. To some Russians in the court such monopolistic companies as the Russian-American were relics of the past to be eliminated as quickly as possible. And strategically Alaska was in an exposed position, difficult to defend. During the war English sea power had dominated the Pacific. In any future conflict the British Navy could hardly be prevented from taking Alaska at will. Thus, in the 1850s, the question was increasingly debated in St. Petersburg whether the American territory was worth keeping at all.

If it was to be held, it certainly needed strengthening; and the necessary resources could more profitably be expended elsewhere, argued Nikolai Muraviëv, governor general of eastern Siberia since 1847. Muraviëv had watched British expansion in southern China with envy, and had himself begun to encroach on Manchu territory with a series of bases in the Amur river valley. Why should his country’s men and materials be diverted to the worthless spaces of North America, from which came only miserable bundles of fur, when they could be used to exploit the immense wealth of Korea and Manchuria and ultimately of all northern China? Muraviëv’s arguments seemed unanswerable. At some time before 1860 the Czar decided Alaska might be sold to any power but England.

The events of the next five years made the Americans desirable purchasers from the Russian point of view. The Czar had no love for the western republic, nor any desire to strengthen or extend it. But Anglo-American tensions during the Civil War and the unsettled problems that continued to trouble the relations of Washington with London convinced him that the transfer of Alaska to the United States would weaken England or at least create an additional source of dissension. In 1865 the Russian government had signified its willingness to sell Alaska to the United States.

It was by no means certain, however, that the United States was willing to buy. Earlier suggestions looking toward the acquisition of this northernmost region of the continent had evoked no enthusiasm in Washington. Many Americans saw no necessity for further expansion while great areas of the country were still unsettled; and those who did thought that the proper direction of our growth was southeastward toward Cuba and the Caribbean. To almost everyone, Alaska seemed likely to be a useless encumbrance.

Only one statesman, nursing stale dreams as his career drew to a close, was convinced that Alaska was destined to be American.

William H. Seward had also been marked for assassination when Booth’s bullet put an end to Lincoln’s life; for the mad conspiracy had been directed at the Secretary of State as well as at the President. But Seward, wounded, had lived, while Lincoln died.

At the war’s end, Seward was almost sixty-five and knew his active political career had not much further to go. He had largely put aside his personal ambitions. The presidency, for which he felt he was far better qualified than Lincoln, was now beyond his grasp; new and younger politicians were crowding onto the scene and would give but small regard to his earlier achievements. In the conflict between President Johnson and the Radical Republicans, principle led him to side with the Chief Executive — and that had cost him considerable public and party popularity. He would serve out his term as Secretary of State until 1869 and then retire.

Yet Seward longed to leave behind him some enduring accomplishment that would fulfill the promise of his youthful career. As governor of New York for four years he had built up a following of admirers. In the Senate in the 1850s, he had been pre-eminently the spokesman for the moderate antislavery sentiment of the North. His doctrine of the higher law had set moral principle above the Constitution and had provided slogans for a whole generation, until the brighter figure of Lincoln had eclipsed him. Now Seward was most eager, before his term of public service closed, to redeem himself by furthering the national interest in some monumental fashion.

Back in the 1840s Seward and most other Americans had believed it was their country’s manifest destiny to occupy the whole continent. The advantages of their system of government and social order were so clear, they thought, that people everywhere would rush to adopt them once the opportunity was presented them. Indeed, it was only the obstruction of corrupt and undemocratic governments that prevented them from doing so. When the opportunity presented itself, the United States would brush aside those regimes, and the people would voluntarily adhere to the Union. In due course the whole continent would become the United States of America.

After 1846 the doctrine of “manifest destiny” seemed to Seward to have become entangled in the slaveholders’ conspiracy to extend the area of servitude southward. Now that that danger had been averted, it was once more possible to extend the boundaries of the country outward in the interests of human liberty. The power of Spain was deteriorating and would not persist for long in the Western Hemisphere. The French had withdrawn from Mexico. Only the British and the Russians remained.

The English would be a problem, the Secretary of State knew. There was no likelihood that they would voluntarily relinquish their hold on Canada or on Central America, and powerful forces in the United States were interested in maintaining the peace that had prevailed since the establishment of the Oregon boundary in 1846.

Yet Seward was convinced that the day would come when we would move north. In 1861 he had been willing to provoke war with England and Spain in the rash hope that the shock treatment of trouble abroad would draw the seceded states back into the Union and, perhaps, add Canada to it as well. After 1865, when if was no longer necessary to keep England neutral, the day of reckoning seemed closer than ever.

For Seward, the acquisition of Alaska would eliminate one more alien power from the continent, it would extend American holdings, and it would threaten Canada from the north. Alaska was worth buying because it would open the way to expansion over the whole continent.

When the Russian ambassador returned from a visit to St. Petersburg in the early spring of 1867, the Secretary of State leaped at his suggestion that a sale might be made. The terms were quickly agreed upon, and the next year the ratification of the purchase was pushed through an apathetic Senate and a dubious House. The utmost political pressure and personal cajolery were necessary to get Congress to agree to the consummation of “Seward’s folly.”

Seward himself retired, and the new territory attracted little public attention thereafter. Even later, when discoveries of gold and iron more than repaid the cost of $7,200,000, Alaska excited only momentary interest among Americans, and then receded from their consciousness, taken for granted.

Yet, had this opportunity been passed up, the Russians might never have been dislodged. By the end of the century the whole situation had changed. The discovery of gold and other mineral resources suddenly gave the territory a new and unexpected value. Furthermore, the Czar was now acquiring the means to defend it. For the construction of the Trans-Siberian Railroad, which was completed at the turn of the century, narrowed the distance between St. Petersburg and the Pacific, and allowed the Russians to establish naval bases at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, which soon became important centers of power in the area. Not many years after 1867, the Russians might have been far from willing to give up Alaska.

In that, event, the bases that today flank the northern ocean would not be American, pointing toward Asia, but Russian, pointing toward the United States. If our citizens, in the air age, still feel that distance from the potential enemy gives some security to their national borders, it is in no small measure due to Air. Seward’s bargain.