Signing of the Alaska Treaty by Emmanuel Leutze depicts Willam Seward in his office with Eduard de Stoeckl of Russia negotiating the purchase of the Alaskan Territory on on March 30, 1867 (Seward House Museum)

Although New York State’s William Seward may be best known for his work as President Abraham Lincoln’s Secretary of State during the War of the Rebellion, Seward was also a key visionary in expanding the Unites States and the American System to the Pacific, and beyond into Asia.

Born in Florida, New York in 1801 and later moving to Auburn to practice law, Seward was an ardent abolitionist. His critical work as war-time secretary of state ensured that hostile foreign powers like the British Empire could not successfully intervene on behalf of the Confederacy to destroy the Union. Seward’s team included Cassius Marcellus Clay who, as ambassador to Russia, played the key role in recruiting the circles around Czar Alexander II to ally with the American Union against the British-backed Confederacy.

But Seward’s ultimate passion was to ensure the expansion of the United States westward in order to the join the great civilizations of the East. His famous July 19, 1852 speech to the U.S. Senate on “Commerce in the Pacific Ocean” echoed the ideas of Gottfried Leibniz almost 150 years earlier:

Even the discovery of this continent and its islands, and the organization of society and government upon them, grand and important as these events have been, were but conditional, preliminary, and ancillary to the more sublime result, now in the act of consummation—the reunion of the two civilizations, which, having parted on the plains of Asia four thousand years ago, and having traveled ever afterwards in opposite directions around the world, now meet again on the coasts and islands of the Pacific Ocean. Certainly, no mere human event of equal dignity .and importance has ever occurred upon the earth. It will be followed by the equalization of the condition of society and the restoration of the unity of the human family. We see plainly enough why this event could not have come before, and why it has come now. A certain amount of human freedom, a certain amount of human intelligence, a certain extent of human control over the physical obstacles to such a reunion, were necessary. All the conditions have happened and concurred. Liberty has developed under improved forms of government, and science has subjected Nature in Western Europe and in America…

Who does not see, then, that every year hereafter, European commerce, European politics, European thoughts, and European activity, although actually gaining greater force—and European connections, although actually becoming more intimate—will nevertheless relatively sink in importance while the Pacific Ocean, its shores, its islands, and the vast regions beyond, will become the chief theater of events in the World’s great Hereafter. Who does not see that this movement must effect our own complete emancipation from what remains of European influence and prejudice, and in turn develop the American opinion and influence which shall remold constitutions, laws, and customs, in the land that is first greeted by the rising sun

It should come as no surprise that it was Seward who, much to the dismay of the British, secured the purchase of Alaska creating closer ties to Russia and blocking British hegemony in Western Canada. Postbellum patriots envisioned building a railroad from the U.S. side to the Bering Strait to link it up with rail connections on the Russian side. This, of course, is what LaRouche and his movement have been advocating for the past 30 years as part of an Eurasian Landbridge.

Map of Eurasian Landbridge proposal published in LaRouche's Executive Intelligence Review 1997 special report "The Eurasian Land-Bridge The 'New Silk Road'—locomotive for worldwide economic development"