Eduard de Stoeckl

Eduard de Stoeckl was born in Constantinople in 1804 to a family connected with diplomatic and interpreting work. Educated at Odessa’s Richelieu Lyceum, he served around the Ottoman Empire before joining the Washington mission in 1839. After years as a secretary, he took charge following Alexander Bodisco’s death in 1854 and received appointment as minister in 1857. ¹

One of his earliest major agreements concerned the rights of neutral shipping. In July 1854 Stoeckl and Secretary of State William L. Marcy signed a convention protecting belligerents’ goods aboard neutral ships, and neutral property aboard enemy ships, except for contraband. The agreement also invited other countries to adopt its principles. ²

During the American Civil War he conveyed Russia’s wish to preserve the Union. Gorchakov instructed him to use his Washington connections to encourage a settlement, and Seward acknowledged the message Stoeckl read to him and President Lincoln in 1861. Commercial questions persisted during the fighting: in December 1864 Stoeckl asked whether Russian manufacturers’ agents could cross Federal lines to buy Southern cotton and recover it through the prescribed government resale system. ^{3, 4, 5}

Stoeckl negotiated the Alaska purchase. He and Seward signed the cession treaty on March 30, 1867, setting a price of $7.2 million. The Senate approved it in April, and the territorial transfer followed in October. The Treasury’s payment, issued in August 1868, was made out to Stoeckl as Russia’s authorized representative. ^{6, 7}

The treaty dealt with more than boundaries and payment. It preserved private property and Orthodox church buildings, and allowed inhabitants to return to Russia or remain. Its promise of American citizenship rights expressly excluded the Native peoples it classified as uncivilized, leaving them subject to U.S. laws governing Indigenous communities. ⁶

He retired in 1869 and settled in Paris with his American wife, Eliza Howard. He died there in 1892. ¹