The Plan to Make Russia the 49th US State
In the 1860s, some Americans dreamed of adding Russia to the United States. Discover the forgotten proposal that almost changed world history.
In the years following the American Civil War, the United States found itself at a crossroads, eager to rebuild but also eager to expand. The western frontier, while vast and largely untamed, was not the only direction considered for growth. Few today know that, for a brief moment in the mid-19th century, there was a notion—shared by influential politicians—that Russia itself, or at least large swathes of its territory, could become part of the United States.
This extraordinary idea surfaced around the time the U.S. was negotiating to purchase Alaska from the Russian Empire. The Russian empire, financially strained after the Crimean War and finding it difficult to defend its distant North American territories, decided to sell Alaska. In 1867, the U.S. agreed, paying $7.2 million for the region in what became known as Seward’s Folly. Yet, this transaction was only part of a larger conversation among certain American circles about expanding U.S. influence far beyond Alaska itself.
William Henry Seward, Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and then Andrew Johnson, was famously bold about American expansion. While the official diplomacy aimed only for Alaska, records and writings from the era reveal that some American leaders speculated that this small foothold in the region could open doors for more territory—and perhaps more ambitious alliances with Russia itself.
In Congress and the press, a subset of visionaries and pundits floated the idea, half in seriousness, half in jest, that not only former Russian America but potentially Siberia—and even European Russia—could become part of an ever-larger union of states. The rationale was that the United States, having just survived a cataclysmic civil war, could offer stability and new markets, while Russia, laboring under autocratic rule and economic hardship, might benefit from the freedoms and prosperity supposedly guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Proponents of this outlandish vision pointed to real ties between the two countries. The Russian navy had visited New York and San Francisco during the Civil War, an act interpreted as a gesture of goodwill—or at least a warning to other world powers that Russia supported the Union cause. American newspapers of the time reported on these visits with bombastic speculation, suggesting that the two “greatest free and progressive nations in the world” could form a block stretching across the Pacific.
Privately, speculative politicians engaged in what was then called “Annexation Talk.” The idea never became a formal diplomatic negotiation, but it was discussed enough that British and French diplomats took note. Some Americans imagined a grand future in which Russians would one day vote in U.S. elections and Congress would legislate over the steppes as well as the plains. U.S. President Andrew Johnson, bracing against impeachment and anxious for a legacy, was reportedly receptive to wild, expansionist schemes. Meanwhile, Russian intellectuals living in exile in the U.S. took the talk seriously—some even drafted petitions hoping for American-style democracy to come to Russia via annexation.
Of course, this plan was wildly impractical. The Russian Empire was still a continental power with deep national pride. The cultural and linguistic chasm between Americans and Russians was huge. The logistics of extension of U.S. law, infrastructure, and authority over the vast expanse of Russia were insurmountable. Ultimately, Seward’s ambitions and his more fanciful supporters’ dreams stopped at Alaska’s 586,000 square miles.
Yet the idea left a trace. The Alaska purchase in 1867 did trigger a period of tense international relations. And in Russia, rumors of American designs on Siberia became part of popular folklore, coloring the way future generations viewed American motives in the Far East.
Today, the notion of the United States absorbing Russia seems absurd, a footnote in the age of Manifest Destiny and “American exceptionalism” run wild. But the fact that it was ever even a topic of serious discussion shows just how unpredictable and ambitious the politics of the Reconstruction era could be. The dream of the 49th state being not Hawaii or Alaska, but Russia itself, remains one of the most surprising and little-told stories in the history of American expansion.
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