When US Secretary of State William Steward purchased Alaska from Russia, what was one reason for the purchase that concerned US relations with Canada, a reason that never came to be?

Zbeckabee

there was the matter of adjacent territories belonging to Britain (namely the Colony of British Columbia, which in 1871 became part of Canada). Were Alaska to be purchased, they would be nearly surrounded by the United States, they were asserted by the United States to be of little strategic value to Britain, and they also might someday be purchased. The purchase, editorialized the New York Herald, was a "hint" from the Tsar to England and France that they had "no business on this continent." "It was in short a flank movement" upon Canada, said the influential New York Tribune. "Soon the world would see in the northwest "a hostile cockney with a watchful Yankee on each side of him," and John Bull would be led to understand that his only course was a sale of his interests there to Brother Jonathan." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Purchase Jul 19 10, 8:52 AM

star_gazer

William Seward saw the main value in the Alaska purchase as making it easier to annex Western Canada, a long-held American objective. Anti-British feeling after the end of the US Civil War two years earlier, in which Britain had been sympathetic to the rebellious Confederacy, had begun to spur expansionist sentiment against Britain's presence in Canada. In fact, the Alaska purchase proved counter productive towards that goal. It pushed the western Canadian provinces even more strongly down the path of joining the Federation, which was to be established by the eastern provinces that year. Within four years, British Columbia, the most vulnerable colony, had actually become part of a Federal Canada. http://www.frommers.com/articles/6836.html Jul 19 10, 8:54 PM