On May 15 of that year, the United States Senate ratified a bilateral treaty that had been signed on March 30, and American sovereignty became legally effective across the territory on October 18.

[3] However, the principal reason for the sale was that the hard-to-defend colony would be easily conquered by British forces based in neighboring Canada in any future conflict, and Russia did not wish to see its archrival being next door just across the Bering Sea.

The Russian government discussed the proposal in 1857 and 1858[6] and offered to sell the territory to the United States, hoping that its presence in the region would offset the plans of Britain.

[7][8] Grand Duke Konstantin, a younger brother of the Tsar, began to press for the handover of Russian America to the United States in 1857.

[9] Supporters of Konstantin's proposal to immediately withdraw from North America included Admiral Yevfimy Putyatin and the Russian minister to the United States, Eduard de Stoeckl.

Communicating primarily with Assistant Secretary of State John Appleton and California Senator William M. Gwin, Stoeckl reported the interest expressed by the Americans in acquiring Russian America.

[9] Stoeckl reported a conversation in which he asked "in passing" what price the U.S. government might pay for the Russian colony and Senator Gwin replied that they "might go as far as $5,000,000", a figure Gorchakov found far too low.

[10] Following the Union victory in the Civil War in 1865, the Tsar instructed Stoeckl to re-enter into negotiations with William H. Seward in the beginning of March 1867.

President Andrew Johnson was busy with negotiations about Reconstruction, and Seward had alienated a number of Republicans, so both men believed that the purchase would help divert attention from domestic issues.

[1][13] The Russian name for the Alaska Peninsula was Alyaska ("Аляска") or Alyeska, from an Aleut word, alashka or alaesksu, meaning "great land"[14] or "mainland".

One was New Archangel (now named Sitka), established in 1804 to handle the valuable trade in the skins of sea otters; in 1867, it had 116 small log cabins and 968 residents.

[20] Many Americans believed in 1867 that the purchase process had been corrupt,[19] but W. H. Dall in 1872 wrote that "there can be no doubt that the feelings of a majority of the citizens of the United States are in favor of it.

It persists despite conclusive evidence to the contrary, and the efforts of the best historians to dispel it", likely in part because it fits American and Alaskan writers' view of the territory as distinct and filled with self-reliant pioneers.

Nonetheless, most newspaper editors argued that the U.S. would probably derive great economic benefits from the purchase, such as considerable mineral resources that previous geological explorations of the region suggested were available there;[23] friendship with Russia was important; and it would facilitate the acquisition of British Columbia.

[18] Historian Ellis Paxson Oberholtzer summarized the minority opinion of some American newspaper editors who opposed the purchase:[28] Already, so it was said, we were burdened with territory we had no population to fill.

After that American soldiers replaced the Russian ones at the gates of the fence surrounding the Kolosh [i.e. Tlingit] village.After the flag transition was completed, Captain of 2nd Rank Aleksei Alekseyevich Peshchurov said, "General Rousseau, by authority from His Majesty, the Emperor of Russia, I transfer to the United States the territory of Alaska."

The troops occupied the barracks; General Jefferson C. Davis established his residence in the governor's house, and most of the Russian citizens went home, leaving a few traders and priests who chose to remain.

Ahllund's story "corroborates other accounts of the transfer ceremony, and the dismay felt by many of the Russians and creoles, jobless and in want, at the rowdy troops and gun-toting civilians who looked on Sitka as merely one more western frontier settlement."

Ahllund gives a vivid account of what life was like for civilians in Sitka under US rule and helps to explain why hardly any Russian subject wanted to stay there.

Moreover, Ahllund's article is the only known description of the return voyage on the Winged Arrow, a ship that was specially purchased to transport the Russians back to their native country.

Ahllund mentions stops at the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands, Tahiti, Brazil, London, and finally Kronstadt, the port for St. Petersburg, where they arrived on August 28, 1869.

[18] The United States acquired an area over twice as large as Texas, but it was not until the great Klondike Gold Rush in 1896 that Alaska generally came to be seen as a valuable addition to U.S.

The company to which the administration of the fisheries was entrusted by a lease from the US government paid a rental of $50,000 per annum and in addition thereto $2.62+1⁄2 per skin for the total number taken.

[34] The purchase of Alaska has been referenced as a "bargain basement deal"[36] and as the principal positive accomplishment of the otherwise much-maligned presidency of Andrew Johnson.

[39] John M. Miller has taken the argument further by contending that US oil companies that developed Alaskan petroleum resources did not earn enough profits to compensate for the risks that they incurred.

[40] Other economists and scholars, including Scott Goldsmith and Terrence Cole, have criticized the metrics used to reach those conclusions by noting that most contiguous Western states would fail to meet the bar of "positive financial return" using the same criteria and by contending that looking at the increase in net national income, instead of only US Treasury revenue, would paint a much more accurate picture of the financial return of Alaska as an investment.