After having been wounded by John Wilkes Booth’s fellow conspirator Lewis
Powell at the same time that Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, William
Henry Seward recovered and remained in the cabinet of Lincoln’s successor
Andrew Johnson as secretary of state. A vigorous opponent of slavery – he
had originated the well-known phrases “there is a higher law than our
constitution” and “irrepressible conflict,” the last expressing the state
of the nation until it became all slave or all free – Seward nevertheless
backed Johnson’s conciliatory policy toward the South during
Reconstruction. Seward, a lawyer, had handled both the Trent Affair and
the Alabama Claims with great skill under Lincoln, but his most important
work in Johnson’s administration was the purchase of Alaska from Russia in
1867. Very few had the foresight to appreciate Seward’s $7,200,0000
acquisition at the time and because Alaska was purchased almost solely due
to his determination, although others had made overtures toward buying it
before the Civil War, it was widely called Seward’s folly or Seward’s
icebox. William Henry Seward died in 1872, aged seventy-one, but the
famous nicknames were used long after his death, even when fortunes were
being made in Alaskan gold and fur. Alaska, from the Aleut A-la-as-ka,
“the great country,” became the forty-ninth American state in 1959. The
largest, least populated state is of course worth thousands of times its
original purchase price of less than two cents an acre- the $900 million
bid for Alaskan oil leases in 1969 far exceeding it alone. The Seward
Peninsula in West Alaska on the Bering Strait also bears the statesman’s
name, and Bering Strait and Bering Sea honors Captain Vitus Bering, a Dane
who in exploring for Russia in 1741 is believed to have been the first
white man to visit Alaska. William Seward had proposed the purchase of the
Virgin Islands when Alaska was bought, but public opposition to his
“icebox wasteland” made this impossible and the Virgin Islands of the
United States were not acquired from Denmark until 1917 – for $25,000,000.