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Elder of The New York Times, “waiting for the trapdoors to drop beneath
them.” A witness reported that, “as the last moment rapidly approached,
they each called out their name and shouted in their native language: ‘I’m
here! I’m here!’ ”
Lincoln’s treatment of defeated Indian rebels against the United
States stood in sharp contrast to his treatment of Confederate rebels. He
never ordered the executions of any Confederate officials or generals after
the Civil War, even though they killed more than 400,000 Union soldiers.
The only Confederate executed was the commander of Andersonville
Prison—and for what we would call war crimes, not rebellion.
Minnesota was a new frontier state in 1862, where white settlers were
pushing out the Dakota Indians—also called the Souix. A series of broken
peace treaties culminated in the failure of the United States that summer to
deliver promised food and supplies to the Indians, partial payment for their
giving up their lands to whites. One local trader, Andrew Myrick, said of
the Indians’ plight, “If they are hungry, let them eat grass.”
The Dakota leader Little Crow then led his “enraged and starving”
tribe in a series of attacks on frontier settlements. The “US-Dakota War”
didn’t last long: After six weeks, Henry Hastings Sibley, first governor of
Minnesota and a leader of the state militia, captured 2,000 Dakota, and a
military court sentenced 303 to death.
Lincoln, however, was “never an Indian hater,” Eric Foner writes in
his Pulitzer Prize–winning book The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and
American Slavery. He did not agree with General John Pope, sent to put
down a Sioux uprising in southern Minnesota, who said “It is my purpose
utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so.” Lincoln
“carefully reviewed the trial records,” Foner reports, and found a lack of
evidence at most of the tribunals. He commuted the sentences of 265 of
the Indians—a politically unpopular move. But, he said, “I could not
afford to hang men for votes.”
The 265 Dakota Indians whose lives Lincoln spared were either fully
pardoned or died in prison. Lincoln and Congress subsequently removed
the Sioux and Winnebago—who had nothing to do with the uprising—
from all of their lands in Minnesota.