Washington says it will buy the Danish West Indies for $7 million
Two years after the Spanish-American War pulled American attention into the Caribbean, the U.S. Government announced on October 24, 1900, that it intended to purchase the Danish West Indies, the three islands of St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, for $7 million. Denmark had agreed to sell at a similar price once before, in 1867, for $7.5 million, but the U.S. Senate never voted on the treaty and it expired. This announcement reopened talks. They led to a signed treaty in 1902, which Denmark's own parliament rejected. The islands would not actually change hands for another seventeen years.
The 1900 announcement marked the moment control of these islands became part of American naval strategy in the Caribbean. Control of the sea lanes feeding a future canal across Panama made these three small islands worth pursuing twice more after 1867, and the pattern set here (public announcement, stalled treaty, eventual purchase) repeated itself in 1917 when the U.S. finally closed the deal for $25 million.
QWho led the 1848 uprising that ended slavery in the Danish West Indies?
A man known as John Gottlieb, called Moses Gottlieb or General Buddhoe by the enslaved population he led, organized the rebellion on St. Croix alongside Admiral Martin King. About 8,000 enslaved people gathered peaceably outside Fort Frederik to demand their freedom. Governor Peter von Scholten, facing the crowd and fearing bloodshed, announced immediate and total emancipation on July 3, 1848, rather than let the standoff turn violent. The move freed the colony's entire enslaved population in a single stroke, decades before the United States did the same. Buddhoe was later arrested and exiled by Danish authorities despite the peaceful nature of the protest he led, a detail that still shapes how St. Croix remembers emancipation day each year.
QWhat was the Fireburn, and who led it?
Thirty years after emancipation, laborers on St. Croix rose up again, this time over wages and working conditions rather than slavery itself. The Fireburn riot of October 1, 1878 became the largest labor revolt in Danish colonial history, led by Mary Leticia Thomas, remembered as Queen Mary of St. Croix, alongside three other women. The uprising burned plantation property across the island in protest of the harsh labor contracts that had replaced slavery in all but name. Queen Mary was one of the few women known to have led a major Caribbean labor revolt in the nineteenth century. Queen Mary's name is still invoked on St. Croix during Fireburn commemorations each October.
QHow religiously diverse were the islands the U.S. was trying to buy in 1900?
By 1900 roughly 30,000 people lived across St. Thomas, St. John, and St. Croix, and only about a quarter of them were Catholic. The majority belonged to Anglican, Moravian, or other Protestant congregations, a legacy of Danish colonial administration mixing with British and German missionary activity over the centuries. Moravian missionaries in particular had been active in the islands since the 1730s, building one of the oldest Protestant missions in the Caribbean. That religious mix meant Washington's negotiators were buying a population with deeper ties to Northern European Protestant churches than to the Catholic institutions common elsewhere in the Spanish and French Caribbean. The demographic breakdown rarely appears in accounts that focus only on the purchase price.
