President Lincoln and the Sioux Indian uprising in Minnesota in 1862

[Gerald D. Swick]

The topic of Lincoln and the Sioux (Dakota) Uprising seems to attracting attention of late. The Winter 2014 issue of MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History (published last November—by my employer, for the record) ran "Lincoln's Choice" by Scott W. Berg about the president's decisions on the trials. The current Civil War Quarterly has an article (sorry, I don't recall the title), and Harper One / HarperCollins just released Lincoln's Bishop, by religious historian Gustav Niebuhr. I received a review copy of the latter, and I thought Niebuhr did very good job of presenting the atmosphere, both nationally and in Minnesota, during which Lincoln had to make his decisions. It focuses on the life of Henry Benjamin Whipple and includes his meeting with Lincoln and his letters to the president before and after that meeting. It's a pity that at the time of the White House meeting the prolific letter-writer Whipple had a badly infected hand, due to stabbing himself while treating whites wounded in the uprising, and so he didn't write any notes immediately following. He gave information in an autobiography years later, but I wish he had been able to immediately record his thoughts on the meeting with Lincoln. If you want to see my full review, I'll leave a link below.

Scott Berg's article in MHQ makes a point I've not seen elsewhere, that the Acts of War required the chief executive to review any death sentences made in the field by military courts. That diminishes the notion that Lincoln personally reviewed all the cases based on a personal sense of justice, but the fact that he made the politically unpopular decision to commute the death sentences in well over 80% of the cases, when Minnesota was filled with a lynch-mob mentality, speaks to both his compassion and his concern for the law.

Here's the link to the book review, if you want to check out Niebuhr's book. The book is a quick read but has a lot of interesting details.

http://www.armchairgeneral.com/lincolns-...review.htm