The president saw a lightly populated territory owned by Denmark and thought it held a strategic opportunity for the United States. He also feared the island might become a target for hostile powers that were flexing their sea-faring muscles. The president’s response: He wanted to buy this Danish territory. When Denmark balked, there were implied threats that if a deal wasn’t agreed to, the United States might simply take the territory by force.
No, this is not about Donald Trump and Greenland, although it does deal with the last time the United States bought territory from another country. This is about Woodrow Wilson and his 1917 acquisition of the Virgin Islands.
The story of how the U.S. bought the Virgin Islands (well, our Virgin Islands, not to be confused with the nearby British Virgin Islands) may or may not hold lessons for today, but there are some curious parallels. There’s also an unexpected local angle, beyond Wilson’s birth in Staunton. The first governor he sent to run the new American territory lived in Virginia.
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We begin with one of the most overlooked figures in American history: William Seward. History often gets reduced to shorthand and the shorthand on Seward is not particularly kind. Even in his day, Seward was the butt of jokes: “Seward’s Folly” and “Seward’s Icebox” was how his acquisition of Alaska was ridiculed.
In fact, Seward was a visionary, sometimes to his own detriment.
As governor of New York in the 1830s and ’40s, Seward saw immigrants as a way to grow a bigger economy and did not particularly care where they came from. He embraced the growing (and controversial) immigration of Catholics from Ireland and elsewhere, which earned him the enmity of the nativists who later inflamed the Know Nothing movement.
Seward was also clear-eyed about the evil of slavery. When a ship sailing from Norfolk to New York was found to have an escaped slave on board, Virginia demanded not only his return but that of three free Black sailors who were alleged to have helped the enslaved laborer escape. Seward refused and the Virginia General Assembly voted to stop trading with New York. As a U.S. senator in the 1850s, Seward warned that civil war was coming and that the institution of slavery was doomed: “Whether that consummation shall be allowed to take effect, with needful and wise precautions against sudden change and disaster, or be hurried on by violence, is all that remains for you to decide.”
That kind of talk made him the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 1860, but also made him vulnerable to those who feared he might be too controversial. Chief Justice Roger Taney, author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, supposedly said that if Seward were elected, he’d refuse to administer the oath of office. Instead, Taney wound up administering it to Abraham Lincoln, who upset Seward at the Republican convention: the classic case of the frontrunner falling to an upstart with less political baggage.
Seward’s consolation prize: He became secretary of state, a Cabinet position whose importance dimmed in the midst of a civil war. Seward, though, was the kind of politician who could see beyond distant horizons, both of geography and time.The influential 19th century journalist Charles Dana once said: “Seward’s imagination was a trait that has rarely been noticed. It led him to the theoretical conclusion that the future capital of North America would be in the City of Mexico.” According to the historian Frederic Bancroft, Seward looked south and saw the day when “the Spanish-American republics” of Central America would someday become American states. He looked north to Canada and saw “you are building excellent states to be hereafter admitted to the American Union.” He looked west across the Pacific and saw that trade with Asia would be so large that “no mere human event of equal dignity and importance has ever occurred upon the earth.”
Not surprisingly, when Russia wanted to divest itself of Alaska but didn’t want it to fall into British hands, Seward snatched it up for the United States. That wasn’t all he wanted, though. He wanted the Virgin Islands, too. He and American naval leaders saw a strategic asset in the Caribbean: the harbor of St. Thomas. In 1867, the same year that the U.S. bought Alaska, Seward struck a deal with Denmark to buy the Virgin Islands. Denmark had lost interest in the islands after a slave revolt and needed the money.
Here’s where Trump might want to take note: Denmark let islanders vote on the deal. Not many were eligible to vote, but that was also par for the times. According to the U.S. Naval Institute, the islanders voted 1,244-22 in favor of joining the U.S. With their approval, the Danish parliament approved the sale and the King of Denmark issued a proclamation informing Virgin Islanders that the deal was done. Not so fast. The deal wasn’t done. The U.S. Senate had to approve the treaty. Senate Republicans were mad at President Andrew Johnson, part of the runup to his eventual impeachment. They were mad at Seward, too, for backing Johnson. The treaty never came up for a vote. The Virgin Islands stayed Danish.
The strategic importance of a Caribbean outpost didn’t go away, though. In fact, it became more significant, especially after rumors circulated that Denmark might give the islands to Germany in exchange for some territory that Germany had seized from Denmark in a recent war. The U.S. didn’t like any foreign powers mucking around in the Caribbean and certainly didn’t like the idea of Germany, a rising power, getting a foothold there. (Substitute “China” for “Germany” and “Arctic” for “Caribbean” and you’ll understand the whole Greenland thing.)
In 1900, the U.S and Denmark struck another deal. This time, the U.S. Senate approved the treaty (in 1902), but the Danish parliament did not. By now, many in Denmark felt that ownership of the islands helped make the tiny country seem like a big-league imperial player. The vote in the upper chamber tied, and died. In 1905, Massachusetts Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge tried to revive the idea of buying the Virgin Islands, and suggested the U.S. offer to buy Greenland, as well. That went nowhere.
World War I brought the issue up again. Denmark was trying to stay neutral but had no natural defenses against Germany. President Woodrow Wilson worried that Germany would overrun the country and then take possession of the Virgin Islands. Wilson didn’t want German submarines operating out of a Caribbean naval base. He directed Secretary of State Robert Lansing to try to buy the Virgin Islands. Denmark wasn’t interested. This time, Denmark had another objection: the poor civil rights record of the United States. Wilson was an unrepentant racist. His administration was rolling back what little civil rights progress had been made in the country. Why would Denmark sell islands, where about three-quarters of the residents were Black, to a country that practiced segregation?
Eventually, Denmark relented but still had reservations. It insisted that as part of any deal, the islanders would be able to vote on whether they wanted to become part of the United States and that if they voted yes they would get U.S. citizenship. Those provisions (plus some others that Denmark threw in) were a dealbreaker for the United States. According to an official history of the sale that the U.S. State Department published under the George W. Bush administration, “Lansing implied that if Denmark was unwilling to sell, the United States might occupy the islands to prevent their seizure by Germany.”
Denmark folded. It withdrew its conditions for the sale, except for one: Denmark’s citizens, but not those of the Virgin Islands, would vote on the sale. Two-thirds of them voted yes, and the U.S. shipped Denmark $25 million worth of gold coins. On March 31, 1917, the Danish flag came down and the U.S. flag went up.
Now we finally get to the Virginian who was the islands’ first U.S. governor.
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The U.S. saw the Virgin Islands in military terms; the civilian population was incidental. To govern this new military asset, Wilson sent an admiral — Rear Admiral James “J.H.” Oliver.
Oliver was born in Georgia and graduated from Washington & Lee University in 1872 before going to a naval career. (The website EduRank ranks Oliver as the school’s 100th most important graduate.) In 1893, Oliver married into the Carter family of Shirley Plantation fame in Charles City County, and considered that his home whenever he wasn’t at sea. In 1904, he was commanding a supply ship off the coast of New Jersey when his ship collided with a civilian vessel. Four people on that boat died. Oliver was stripped of his sword, a ceremonial rebuke, and hauled before a court-martial. He was eventually acquitted “with honor,” but by then Oliver was disgusted with the Navy. When officials returned his sword, he broke it and tossed the pieces into the ocean. Then he resigned.
Oliver briefly moved to Ohio to become a lighthouse inspector. President Theodore Roosevelt intervened; Oliver went back to the Navy and was promoted to commander. By 1916, he had made his way up to rear admiral. The next year, Wilson tapped Oliver to go to the Virgin Islands as governor. From across the years, Oliver seems to have been a decent governor. He brought in teachers from the mainland to improve the school system. He invited the Red Cross to set up operations. At the end of two years, he was awarded the Navy Cross. He went back to the mainland and served on the Naval Board of Strategy until his retirement in 1921.
When he died in 1928, the headline in The Washington Post read: “Admiral Oliver, Who Broke Sword and Resigned, Dies.”
A former president visits the New River Valley
A former president was in the New River Valley over the weekend. I have details on who and why in this week’s edition of West of the Capital, our weekly political newsletter that goes out Friday afternoons. You can sign up for that or any of our free newsletters below:
