The possibility of the United States acquiring Greenland has been kicking around Washington for so long that William Seward had the State Department commission a report on the topic (as well as the proposed acquisition of Iceland) in 1868, which was memorialized after Seward had acquired Alaska the previous year. Seward, whose acquisition of Alaska grew out of talks he sponsored with Tsarist Russia during the Civil War about running the first Trans-Pacific telegraph wire across the Bering Strait, was a visionary of American expansion who never abandoned that fixation even at the darkest hours of domestic division.

That 1868 report focuses on the material benefits of Greenland’s mineral wealth and fisheries; today, we are perhaps more concerned with control of the Arctic Sea. Regardless, one of the concluding passages from that report speaks to the people we were then:

In considering the future of Greenland, we cannot confine ourselves entirely to materialistic considerations. Nations have other resources besides those which figures can express to us by statistical tables. If a country has in it the means of developing man in any way, physically or mentally, it may be said to be rich to that extent…Even if we had no hope of finding there a place for settlement or new roads to profit, there are still strong reasons why civilization should strive to reach and explore them. They possess, as it were, the key to many problems of science, and the answer to many questions which are at present discussed by geographers. Certainly, new truths are as precious acquisitions as new mines or new fishing grounds, and a country which has supplied them has enriched the world as much as one which sends us the means of indulging our tastes or satisfying our appetites.