How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [129]
The Civil War slowed the frequency of these winks and nods but did not end them. Nor did the assassination of President Lincoln end Seward’s tenure as secretary. By 1867 he and Russian ambassador Eduard Stoeckl were exchanging offers and counteroffers. On the evening of March 29, Stoeckl called upon Seward at his home to inform him that his government had accepted the deal, and to ask for time the next day to begin drafting the actual treaty. Seward, wanting to keep the agreement under wraps, suggested they start now. The family’s dinner table was cleared, secretaries were summoned, and at four o’clock in the morning, a treaty was ready to take to the White House. President Andrew Johnson signed it the following day, sending word of his action to Congress.
The treaty now needed Senate ratification. That debate took place in executive session, away from public scrutiny. Nevertheless, the debate commenced immediately in the press. Most newspapers initially touted the purchase’s virtues in nearly identical language.4 Clearly, someone had prepared a public relations campaign timed to the release of the treaty. Given that the treaty had just been written the night before in Seward’s dining room, only Seward himself could have masterminded such a campaign.
The need for this public relations blitz quickly became evident. Opposition to the purchase commenced as soon as it was made public. On the East Coast, some papers such the New York Times supported the purchase while others such as the New York Tribune opposed it. Midwestern newspapers were likewise divided.5 West Coast newspapers, not surprisingly, vigorously endorsed it. And Southern newspapers—hardly fans of the man whose diplomacy had helped prevent European aid to the Confederacy—urged the Senate to vote no.
The Senate, as it turned out, was less divided. Emerging from private deliberations, it voted thirty-seven to two in favor of ratification. Constitutionally, once the Senate ratifies a treaty, that’s that. In this instance, however, the treaty required the United States to pony up $7,200,000, and that appropriation required approval by the House of Representatives. In effect, it too would have to ratify the treaty.
The House debate was public, and so heated one might think the purchase of Alaska entailed some master plan for the future. In fact, it did. The New York Herald wrote in March 1867 that the purchase of Alaska was “an important step toward the absorption of the whole continent by the United States.” Seward himself believed that, with the purchase of Alaska, the United States would inevitably come to acquire the land separating Alaska from the lower forty-eight states: the Canadian province of British Columbia. Those opposed to the purchase worried that the United States would expand too far—geographically and racially.6 Ultimately, however, over a year after the signing of the treaty, the House of Representatives sent to the Senate a bill containing the funds for the purchase of Alaska.
William Seward, meanwhile, had continued his efforts to expand America both westward and eastward. He sought to purchase the Dominican Republic and the Virgin Islands. He sought to gain a privileged American connection with Hawaii. And he acquired another barely habitable territory: a tiny group of islands in the Pacific, mid-distance between the American West Coast and Asia, and thus named Midway. The strategic importance Seward foresaw in this forlorn little atoll was borne out in World War II, when it became the scene of a critical battle between the United States and Japan.
NEBRASKA, SOUTH DAKOTA
STANDING BEAR V. CROOK
The Legal Boundary of Humanity
Webster describes a person as “a living soul; a self-conscious being: a moral agent; especially a living human being; a man, woman or child; an individual of the human race.” This is comprehensive enough, it would seem, to include even an Indian.
—JUDGE ELMER S. DUNDY, 18791
General