When Secretary of State William Seward closed the deal to buy what was then known as “Russian America” from Czar Alexander in 1867, he knew he’d pulled off the real estate steal of the century. It was 586,000 square miles of virgin land rich in natural resources at the bargain price of $7.2 million, a mere 2 cents an acre.

Though widely mocked at the time as “Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s icebox,” and President Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden,” ratification of the treaty sailed through the Senate 37-2, thanks in great part to the oratorical skills of Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He had championed the acquisition in an epic stemwinder on the Senate floor, at one point arguing it would give the United States more control over the next “great theater of action.”