161 years ago today, the largest mass execution in U.S. history took place, ordered by A. Lincoln

[WhiskeyGrinder]

There was no due process. No representation, no talk of broken treaties. It was the beginning of exile from the Minnesota area. Most of the bodies were dug up within a day of the hanging, to be used as cadavers, including one stolen by William Mayo, a name you might recognize.

https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/traumatic-true-history-full-list-dakota-38

On the day after Christmas in 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged under order of President Abraham Lincoln. The hangings and convictions of the Dakota 38 resulted from the aftermath of the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862 in southwest Minnesota.

In addition to the 38 men hanged the day after Christmas, there were terrible injustices committed against 265 others in the form of military convictions and inhuman injustices to more than 3,000 Dakota people who were held captive, then forced to march west out of Minnesota.

https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/aftermath/trials-hanging

As the men took their assigned places on the scaffold, they sang a Dakota song as white muslin coverings were pulled over their faces. Drumbeats signalled the start of the execution. The men grasped each others’ hands. With a single blow from an ax, the rope that held the platform was cut. Capt. William Duley, who had lost several members of his family in the attack on the Lake Shetek settlement, cut the rope. 

This all took place during the same week Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

[malaise]

1. Important OP

Get thee to the greatest page.

The coverups continue because the history is way more evil than people want to believe.

[FM123]

2. You can say that again!

History is way more evil than people want to believe.

[elias7]

5. Look up the US Dakota war

It was a massacre, with the Dakota targeting men, women and children. ¬The over 600 victims were the largest number killed in the nation in a war with the Indians. In response to this, 38 Dakota were hanged at Mankato on December 26, 1862, the largest number executed at one time in the nation.

Never as simple as telling one side of the story

[Celerity]

11. I looked it up and your numbers are off. Also, the native Americans attacked because they were being ethnically

cleansed/genocided by whites, removed from their lands they had lived on for thousands of years. On balance, what the whites did to native Americans, since first permanent arrival in North America and up until the present day (read up on life on reservation), constituted one of the biggest, and certainly largest (geographically especially) genocides in human history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War_of_1862

The Dakota War of 1862, also known as the Sioux Uprising, the Dakota Uprising, the Sioux Outbreak of 1862, the Dakota Conflict, or Little Crow's War, was an armed conflict between the United States and several eastern bands of Dakota collectively known as the Santee Sioux. It began on August 18, 1862, when the Dakota, who were facing starvation and displacement, attacked white settlements at the Lower Sioux Agency along the Minnesota River valley in southwest Minnesota. The war lasted for five weeks and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of settlers. In the aftermath, the Dakota people were exiled from their homelands, forcibly sent to reservations in the Dakotas and Nebraska, and the State of Minnesota confiscated and sold all their remaining land in the state. The war also ended with the largest mass execution in United States history with the hanging of 38 Dakota men.

All four bands of eastern Dakota had been pressured into ceding large tracts of land to the United States in a series of treaties and were reluctantly moved to a reservation strip twenty miles wide, centered on Minnesota River.  There, they were encouraged by U.S. Indian agents to become farmers rather than continue their hunting traditions. A crop failure in 1861, followed by a harsh winter along with poor hunting due to depletion of wild game, led to starvation and severe hardship for the eastern Dakota. In the summer of 1862, tensions between the eastern Dakota, the traders, and the Indian agents reached a breaking point.

On August 17, 1862, four young native men killed five white settlers in Acton, Minnesota. That night, a faction led by Chief Little Crow decided to attack the Lower Sioux Agency the next morning in an effort to drive all settlers out of the Minnesota River valley.  In the weeks that followed, Dakota men attacked and killed hundreds of settlers, causing thousands to flee the area, and took hundreds of "mixed-blood" and white hostages, almost all women and children. The demands of the Civil War slowed the U.S. government response, but on September 23, 1862, an army of volunteer infantry, artillery and citizen militia assembled by Governor Alexander Ramsey and led by Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley finally defeated Little Crow at the Battle of Wood Lake.

By the end of the war, 358 settlers had been killed, in addition to 77 soldiers and 36 volunteer militia and armed civilians. The total number of Dakota casualties is unknown. On September 26, 1862, 269 "mixed-blood" and white hostages were released to Sibley's troops at Camp Release. Approximately 2,000 Dakota surrendered or were taken into custody, including at least 1,658 non-combatants, as well as those who had opposed the war and helped to free the hostages.  Little Crow and a group of 150 to 250 followers fled to the northern plains of Dakota Territory and Canada. In less than six weeks, a military commission, composed of officers from the Minnesota volunteer Infantry, sentenced 303 Dakota men to death. President Abraham Lincoln reviewed the convictions and approved death sentences for 39 out of the 303.  On December 26, 1862, 38 were hanged in Mankato, Minnesota, with one getting a reprieve, in the largest one-day mass execution in American history. The United States Congress abolished the eastern Dakota and Ho-Chunk (Winnebago) reservations in Minnesota, and in May 1863, the eastern Dakota and Ho-chunk imprisoned at Fort Snelling were exiled from Minnesota to a reservation in present-day South Dakota. The Ho-Chunk were later moved to Nebraska near the Omaha people to form the Winnebago Reservation.

In 2012 and 2013, Governor Ramsey's call for the Dakota to "be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the State" was repudiated, and in 2019, an apology was issued to the Dakota people for "150 years of trauma inflicted on Native people at the hands of state government."

snip

[malaise]

13. You mean like the folks in

Ahem Palestine
Great post

[elias7]

22. No, just pointing out that things are not the black and white simplicity initially posted

Thanks for your appreciation of nuance and your assumption of where I stand on this.

[TeamProg]

38. So, yeah, one genocide for the 'good if the nation' deserves another.

That’s the drift I’m sensing.

[elleng]

14. 'Thank you' for informing us of this awful piece of U.S. history.

[niyad]

16. I was just reading the section on the war at the UMN Holocaust and Genocide

Studies (CLA College of Liberal Arts), and it is even more horrible than the wiki article (and thank you for posting that) portrays. My pos computer will not allow me to link, or copy and paste, or I would. One of the triggering factors in this horror was the US government's failure (Civil War being the excuse) to make the payments stipulated in treaties. The Dakota were starving. In the aftermath, over 1,600 people were held in an internment camp, where hundreds died of exposure and starvation.

[elias7]

21. Thanks for additional history, I had just copied and pasted from a quick search

Not apologizing for Lincoln or our colonization and expansion in America. Just pointing out that in a vacuum, it looked like Lincoln had dozens of rope hung because, evil, and I was just pointing out context, for which you provided a good bit more of history I was unaware of.

[Celerity]

27. fair enough

Happy Boxing Day

[LymphocyteLover]

39. still, there's no doubt that native Americans committed horrible acts of terrorism on white settlers

i.e. innocent civilians. Hence, the executions.... and it went back and forth such that no one's hands were clean.

[Celerity]

40. The whites invaded the natives' lands and committed monumental amounts of ethnic cleansing and genocide for

centuries.

They were ultimate aggressors and bad faith actors.

[LymphocyteLover]

42. that doesn't change the fact that native Americans terrorized white communities and committed horrible

acts of violence.

The parallels with the modern Hamas-Israel situation are amazingly similar.

[Celerity]

43. Native Americans were, on balance, decimated, genocided, and ethnically cleansed.

It is so telling to see you continue to try and make those MN attacks/deaths remotely equal to what happened overall via whataboutism games.

[niyad]

18. We actually did look it up, and it was even more horrible than

was indicated in the OP. Perhaps you could do the same, and learn the things we learned. Euro-centric tellings leave so many things out.

[multigraincracker]

3. History we never learned in school.

[sop]

17. The history most of us learned in school was far different.

It largely promoted nostalgia to white europeans hungry for a past that never existed, while hiding the past that actually did.

[LeftInTX]

25. True.

There was an earlier war that we learned about. It involved Michigan-Ohio territory I think.

But the later 19th Century wars were blurred with Manifest Destiny, transcontinental railroad, annexation of the western states etc. They were described mostly as skirmishes between Native-Americans and settlers. Small fights without a good or bad side.

Not much taught about atrocities by the US govt. We learned about Custer and how that battle sparked the beginning of the end.

However, US History in 11th grade covered Columbus all the way through the 1960s and the ongoing Vietnam War.

Lots of emphasis on the American Revolution, slavery, Kansas compromise, Civil War, Industrial Revolution, Labor Unions (yes, in Wisconsin, this was taught), WWI, the Great Depression, Huey Long, The New Deal, WWII, the Cold War, The Red Scare, McCarthy, ongoing Vietnam War, etc etc etc. Lots of stuff crammed into one year.

It was so much info. Native Americans were pretty much an after thought.

I still remember coming out of it thinking that McCarthyism had something to do with Senator Eugene McCarthy and I was really confused. I was like, "What??" Our teacher never told us that there were two senators with the name McCarthy. So, I thought it was Eugene. LOL...I think the only reason I got a B, instead of a C was because I did so much extra credit just to get my grade up.


I did not learn about the Mexican-American War until I moved to Texas.

[MichMan]

28. I recall in school that the WWII Japanese internment camps during the FDR presidency were barely mentioned in passing.

[LeftInTX]

32. Yes, that too. I don't remember learning about it. However, Auschwitz was required reading in our HS.

Wisconsin schools were mostly German/Polish/Irish/Scandinavian/Dutch/Czech etc.

There were Italian/Native American/ and Jewish minorities.

[erronis]

29. The spotlight of history. The further back in time the more light is needed.

Unless certain historians/bible-writers tend to accentuate/diminish certain events for their own purposes.

[AllaN01Bear]

4. thank you, and this is the information that the rs would just love to bury. ie coverup.

[Delphinus]

7. What

we don't know about our history would fill tomes.

[sarisataka]

8. We were taught this in 6th grade

Along with the Holocaust. Since then my family and I have visited Mankato and several important sites of the Dakota War

[Elessar Zappa]

9. Yeah, I remember learning about this in high school.

Terrible. Our history is very blemished, to say the least.

[Martin Eden]

10. 303 Dakota men were sentenced to death

Lincoln had the transcripts reviewed then forwarded a list of 39 for execution, prisoners who had been involved in more than just battles with soldiers; they massacred civilians. One of the 39 received a last minute reprieve.

This is not to say the prisoners had fair trials or treatment afterwards for those not executed, or that the war was not the result of grave injustice to the Dakota people.

It is to point out that A. Lincoln was not some kind of monster for his hand in this. Most presidents probably would have approved the execution of all 303. Lincoln had nothing to gain politically by his clemency, as much of the public was out for blood after the civilian massacres.

[ITAL]

23. I was gonna say this as well

I remember reading a biography on Lincoln where it discussed his review process and how he tried to commute all but who were considered the most likely to do it again. That isn't to give him a pass per se, but he wasn't just saying "kill all of'em" either.

[Butterflylady]

12. Thanks for the information.

I'm going to read up on this execution. Love, love to read about the history we didn't learn about in school.

The more I read the more I learn about the past evils this country has done.

Maybe the past is catching up with us now.

[Happy Hoosier]

15. I'm not sure "catching up" is the right phrase...

… but I do think that being honest about history requires a certain willingness to redress wrongs in a practical way. Lots of folks don’t want to do that.

I admire Lincoln, but it’s hard to find a politician from the 19th century that doesn’t have some pretty scary skeletons in the closet.

[people]

19. Or from the 20th and 21st centuries

[erronis]

30. And probably as many more centuries as we live.

There might be some value in a great human extinction event - including all those rich white people trying to survive in their bunkers.

[Puppyjive]

20. A Good Read

Unsettled Ground. The Whitman Massacre and its shifting legacy in the American West. By Cassandra Tate. What really happened. I grew up in the area.

[andym]

24. Lincoln's statements in ordering the executions (via Wikipedia): rapists first, then those who massacred civilians

Lincoln completed his review of the transcripts of the 303 trials with the help of two White House lawyers in under a month.[11]: 251  On December 11, 1862, he addressed the Senate regarding his final decision (as he had been requested to do by a resolution passed by that body on December 5, 1862):

"Anxious to not act with so much clemency as to encourage another outbreak on the one hand, nor with so much severity as to be real cruelty on the other, I caused a careful examination of the records of trials to be made, in view of first ordering the execution of such as had been proved guilty of violating females. Contrary to my expectations, only two of this class were found. I then directed a further examination, and a classification of all who were proven to have participated in massacres, as distinguished from participation in battles. This class numbered forty, and included the two convicted of female violation. One of the number is strongly recommended by the commission which tried them for commutation to ten years' imprisonment. I have ordered the other thirty-nine to be executed on Friday, the 19th instant."[84]

In the end, Lincoln commuted the death sentences of 264 prisoners and allowed the execution of 39 men. However, "[on] December 23, [Lincoln] suspended the execution of one of the condemned men [...] after [General] Sibley telegraphed that new information led him to doubt the prisoner's guilt."[80] Thus, the number of condemned men was reduced to the final 38.[citation needed]

Even partial clemency resulted in protests from Minnesota, which persisted until the Secretary of the Interior offered white Minnesotans "reasonable compensation for the depredations committed."[citation needed] Republicans did not fare as well in Minnesota in the 1864 election as they had before. Ramsey (by then a senator) informed Lincoln that more hangings would have resulted in a larger electoral majority. The President reportedly replied, "I could not afford to hang men for votes."[citation needed]

[Sneederbunk]

26. Read Over the Earth I Come by Duane Schultz

for the complete story.

[isitreal]

31. Next read about wounded knee

Read about wounded knee massacre and what lead up to it. During the story of the “American Oz” on the American experience What was going on in the area was covered. Frank Baum. Author of book “Wizard of Ozz” lived in Aberdeen SD at the time. Even thou I grew up there and knew that Frank lived there nothing was ever said about what he did there. Very interesting and then sad to learn the details of what lead up to that massacre. I knew about the massacre but not the what and why..

[Evolve Dammit]

33. It is important that ALL of history be taught, no matter how painful it might be. So maybe it may never happen again.

[COL Mustard]

34. Lincoln wasn't perfect

And I can’t excuse the juxtaposition of this with the Emancipation proclamation. I really can’t; it just shows that he was human, and fallible.

[gulliver]

35. Free school lunches. National Health Care. Reproductive Freedom. Voting rights.

...or yeah, we can ruminate. That always gets us somewhere.

[TexLaProgressive]

36. The extrajudicial execution of 300 Lakota Ghost Dancers

At Wounded Knee dwarfs the hanging in the OP.

[Bluethroughu]

37. Wow, history needs to be truth, and not just feel goods.

Just absolutely sad.

The reckoning we are experiencing with truth in history, will at some point bring us together not as white, black, brown, yellow or red; but as Americans, as humans, knowing better and doing better.

[bucolic_frolic]

41. Recommend, "Six Encounters with Lincoln" - Elizabeth Brown Pryor

Lincoln was a bit different than we were taught in school.