Today in History: Seward's Folly

On this day (March 30) in 1867, Secretary of State Seward bought Alaska from Russia for the United States. The U.S. paid roughly 2 cents per acre ($7.2 million). The purchase was generally popular in the U.S. but there were opponents who called it Seward’s Folly. Those in opposition tended to focus their complaints around the worry that a non-contiguous territory would become a colony, or that the money was wasted because manifest destiny would lead the U.S. to take the territory anyway.