“Mr. Seward’s Real Estate Transactions”: Comic Imperialism in the Reconstruction Era

ABSTRACT Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Secretary of State William Henry Seward led US efforts to purchase several new and far-flung territories, including (successfully) Alaska and (unsuccessfully) multiple Caribbean islands. This article examines several strands of popularly circulating periodical humor that ridiculed the United States’ nascent attempts at imperial acquisition, including humor and satire in newspaper squibs by Mark Twain and others, jocular editorial commentary on Alaska, and political cartoons in humor magazines. All these comic critiques of US expansionism traffic in the negative emotions of cynicism and distrust as they redefine postbellum US foreign policy decisions as geopolitical manifestations of the unscrupulous greed and graft emblematic of the Gilded Age.