n million dollars, although Sumner
convinced those who took the trouble to read, that the financial bargain
was not a bad one. The chief factor in the purchase of Alaska was almost
pure sentiment. Throughout American history there has been a powerful
tradition of friendliness between Russia and the United States, yet
surely no two political systems have been in the past more diametrically
opposed. The chief ground for friendship has doubtless been the great
intervening distance which has reduced intercourse to a minimum. Some
slight basis for congeniality existed in the fact that the interests of
both countries favored a similar policy of freedom upon the high seas.
What chiefly influenced the public mind, however, was the attitude
which Russia had taken during the Civil War. When the Grand Duke Alexis
visited the United States in 1871, Oliver Wendell Holmes greeted him
with the lines:

Bleak are our coasts with the blasts of December,
Thrilling and warm are the hearts that remember
Who was our friend when the world was our foe.

This Russian friendship had presented itself dramatically to the public
at a time when American relations with Great Britain were strained, for
Russian fleets had in 1863 suddenly appeared in the harbors of New York
and San Francisco. These visits were actually made with a sole regard
for Russian interests and in anticipation of the outbreak of a general
European war, which the Czar then feared. The appearance of the fleets,
however, was for many years popularly supposed to signify sympathy with
the Union and a willingness to defend it from attack by Great Britain
and France. Many conceived the ingenuous idea that the purchase price
of Alaska was really the American half of a secret bargain of which the
fleets were the Russian part. Public opinion, therefore, regarded the
purchase of Alaska in the light of a favor to Russia and demanded that
the favor be granted.

Thus of all the schemes of expansion in the fifty years between the
Mexican and the Spanish wars, for the Gadsden Purchase of 1853 was
really only a rectification of boundary, this alone came to fruition.
Seward could well congratulate himself on his alertness in seizing an
opportunity and on his management of the delicate political aspects of
the purchase. Without his promptness the golden opportunity might have
passed and never recurred. Yet he could never have saved this fragment
of his policy had not the American