The Man Who Bought Alaska Checking Some Claims

As occasionally happens, this post began with one destination in mind and ended up somewhere else.  I'll make this Part I and do a second post to cover my original intention - some historical references that give a little more perspective on our present day situation.

[Actually, it's ending up with yet a different ending.  I'm putting the sentences of the second revision in [brackets] so you'll know what was in the original post and the revised post.  The original post was really just going to be quotes putting today's politics into some context.  And that's still coming.]


I read Mike Dunham's The Man Who Bought Alaska on the plane down here.  It was a gift for a friend who couldn't find it in LA.  He also wanted The Man Who Sold Alaska but Title Wave didn't have it.

Alaskans probably can figure out that it's about William Seward, Lincoln's Secretary of State.  It's just over 100 pages and written at about a high school level (intended reader level, not writing level.)  So a lot of things were mentioned about Seward, but there wasn't much back up other than a bibliography in the back.

But I learned a lot in a short time about someone important to Alaska.  It also highlights Alaska's first governor - the military man first put in charge of the state after it was purchased from Russia.  His name was Jef Davis.

Some things I learned about Seward.  Again these are things that Dunham claims.

• As Governor of New York he started the practice of giving books to prisoners.
• As Secretary of State he initiated the transatlantic telegraph cable because he was frustrated by how long it took to communicate with Europe.*
• He initiated the cross continent railroad system.**  
• The plot to assassinate Lincoln include assassinating Vice President Johnson AND Secretary of State Seward.  And a knife wielding intruder, according to Dunhan, did gain access and did stab Seward several times.  Johnson's assassin, Dunham tells us, chickened out.  (A Smithsonian story confirms that Johnson and Seward were targets.  And also Grant.)

[The second revision comes because when I tried to find quotes to support my characterizations of what Dunham wrote, I couldn't.  I had marked page numbers for some quotes (and I have those), but I also thought these actions were also noteworthy.  I did find the assertion about the books to prisoners, and that doesn't seem totally unreasonable.  I was more concerned about the transatlantic telegraph wire and the transcontinental railroad.  The best I could find on a quick perusal (I gave the book to a friend and I didn't have much time to check carefully when we met again) were much more limited than I remember.  Like he played an important role in . . .   So, I'll keep this post in as a lesson on the need to actually check and document what you're asserting and point out that I couldn't do that here.]

*These seemed like outlandish claims.  When I googled who initiated the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable, I got the name Cyrus West Field.  When I added William Seward to the search terms I got a CIA Library document that said, in part:

"Seward had first discussed the new transatlantic cable with the parent company, the New York, Newfoundland, and London Telegraph Company, at a celebration in New York on 29 August 1866 honoring President Andrew Johnson. At the conclusion of the evening's festivities, one of the directors of the company, Mr. Wilson G. Hunt, asked Seward why the federal government did not use the new Atlantic cable. It was a question that would eventually lead to a $32,000 claim against the State Department. Seward told Hunt that the tariff was too costly and that 'the Government of the United States was not rich enough to use the telegraph.'"2

**About the Railroad, Wikipedia says:

In 1852, Judah was chief engineer for the newly formed Sacramento Valley Railroad, the first railroad built west of the Mississippi River.  .   .
In 1856, Judah wrote a 13,000-word proposal in support of a Pacific railroad and distributed it to Cabinet secretaries, congressmen and other influential people. In September 1859, Judah was chosen to be the accredited lobbyist for the Pacific Railroad Convention, which indeed approved his plan to survey, finance and engineer the road. Judah returned to Washington in December 1859. He had a lobbying office in the United States Capitol, received an audience with President James Buchanan, and represented the Convention before Congress.[30] . . .
In February 1860, Iowa Representative Samuel Curtis introduced a bill to fund the railroad. It passed the House but died when it could not be reconciled with the Senate version due to opposition from southern states who wanted a southern route near the 42nd parallel.[30] Curtis tried and failed again in 1861. After the southern states seceded from the Union, the House of Representatives approved the bill on May 6, 1862, and the Senate on June 20. Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act of 1862 into law on July 1."

There's no mention of Seward.  Now, Seward may have persuaded Lincoln to sign the bill, but Dunham's claim gave Seward a much greater responsibility for the creation of the Transcontinental Railroad.
This is a very different slant than what Dunham offered.  [And, it seems I can't actually find the words in Dunham's book that made believe he'd made such claims.  So when I wrote the title - Checking Some Claims - I meant I was going to check whether the claims were accurate.  But it turns out Checking Some Claims means checking whether he actually made such claims.  And I couldn't find that he did.]