In San Francisco, Virus is Contained but Schools Are Still Closed

[David Lockmiller]

From: “Abraham Lincoln and the Dakota War in Academic and Popular Literature” by Larry D. Mansch

A military commission of five officers was established to summarily try the Indians who had participated in the uprising. Working at breakneck speed, in just five weeks the commission conducted 392 trials, sometimes as many as forty per day. A presumption of guilt applied at the trials; that is, it was assumed that each warrior had participated in the uprising and would be punished. No legal counsel was provided for the accused. While each defendant was allowed to make a statement on his own behalf, he was not permitted to call witnesses. Then prosecution witnesses were called—usually eyewitnesses who testified that they had seen the defendant fire a weapon, kill a settler, or commit an atrocity. One key witness, a mixed-blood man named Godfrey, testified against over fifty individuals.

A total of 303 Dakota men were found guilty and sentenced to hang. Public sentiment in Minnesota overwhelmingly approved the verdicts, and most residents demanded that the executions quickly take place.

Before the death sentences could be carried out, however, President Lincoln had to review the trial records, as mandated by federal law.

Because the vast majority of scholars, historians, and authors who have examined Lincoln’s presidency have focused on the Civil War, many have completely ignored the events in Minnesota or have, at best, given them only summary treatment. Stephen B. Oates’ brief treatment of the subject in his With Malice Toward None: A Life of Abraham Lincoln is typical. Oates writes only that “Lincoln had himself intervened in the Minnesota Indian War of 1862 and had prevented vengeful whites from executing a number of innocent Sioux.

There are, however, exceptions to these summary treatments, and a notable divergence in how different categories of authors have treated Lincoln’s role in the Dakota War. Writers of mainstream books and articles, on the whole, have approved of Lincoln’s actions. Law review article writers and authors offering Native perspectives have been much more likely to be critical.

David Donald’s seminal Lincoln, the 1996 Lincoln Prize winner, offers a brief but sympathetic view of Lincoln’s actions during the Dakota War. . . . Donald writes that Lincoln “refused to be stampeded” by those who called for vengeance against the Minnesota Indians.

The number of Lincoln Prize winners that do not include any mention of the Dakota War is surprising. The 2012 winner, Elizabeth D. Leonard’s Lincoln’s Forgotten Ally: Judge Advocate General Joseph Holt of Kentucky, provides a good example. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who won both the 2006 Lincoln Prize and the Pulitzer Prize for Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, does not mention the Minnesota episode. Other notable works that exclude the Dakota War include James McPherson’s Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief and Allen C. Guelzo’s Abraham Lincoln: Redeemer President.

A second category of books includes three that deal more specifically with Lincoln and Native Americans. The standard work in this category is David Nichols’ Lincoln and the Indians: Civil War Politics and Policies. It remains the only full-length book on the Lincoln Administration’s policies regarding Native Americans and is regularly cited by other writers. . . . [T]he third chapter, “Lincoln and the Sioux Execution: ‘I Could Not Afford to Hang Men for Votes,’” examines Lincoln’s review of the trials and his decision regarding the appropriate punishment.

In this third chapter Nichols, like Burlingame, focuses on the intense political pressure Lincoln faced to uphold the executions of all those Dakota found guilty. Nichols argues, however, that Indian missionary Stephen Riggs and Episcopal Bishop Henry Whipple influenced Lincoln to act with compassion rather than vengeance. Riggs, Nichols writes, was particularly persuasive in his pleas for flexibility and mercy. In reaching his final determination, Nichols describes Lincoln as “haunted,” “troubled,” “reluctant,” and finally “pragmatic.” He concludes that Lincoln’s actions, in balancing public sentiment against a sense of justice and equity, “were relatively humanitarian.”

While Nichols’ conclusion is almost entirely sympathetic to Lincoln, he does offer one refreshing perspective not found in other sources: while Lincoln did not satisfy the demands of outraged Minnesotans, he did not completely ignore them, either. Lincoln supported, and then signed, legislation that removed the Dakota from Minnesota, and approved the payment of $2 million in reparations to the uprising’s victims as “reasonable compensation for the depredations committed.”

In 2012, Minnesota native and historian Scott W. Berg published 38 Nooses: Lincoln, Little Crow, and the Beginning of the Frontier’s End. . . . The book sets forth the pressures Lincoln felt to uphold the convictions and approve the executions, but does not, however, shed new light on his struggle to reach a just decision. Berg concludes that Lincoln - ever the lawyer - acted in a cool and detached manner in sanctioning the thirty-eight executions. Berg’s Lincoln wisely distanced himself from emotion. He approved executions “where he felt reasonable moral standards had been violated and reasonable legal standards, according to the strictures of the day, upheld.” Berg downplays any empathy or compassion Lincoln may have felt; rather, he writes that “on the question of war and emancipation, Lincoln lost sleep, but not so on the many death sentences he commuted or confirmed.”

The most recent book devoted to the Dakota War is Gustav Niebuhr’s Lincoln’s Bishop: A President, a Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors. Niebuhr, a professor of journalism at Syracuse University who specializes in religious commentary, examines the life and work of Henry Whipple, Bishop of Minnesota’s Episcopal Church in the 1860s, who worked tirelessly to convince Lincoln – and Congress – that the Indian system was unfair and badly in need of reform. Niebuhr is sympathetic to Whipple’s task. He offers a unique, and welcome, perspective in regards to Whipple’s relentless lobbying efforts on behalf of the Minnesota Dakota, a people with whom he had spent three years evangelizing and converting to Christianity.

Along with Henry Riggs, Whipple met personally with Lincoln on several occasions and wrote a series of essays, published in Minnesota newspapers, urging fair treatment for the Dakota. In the end, Niebuhr convincingly argues that Whipple’s personal pleas to Lincoln to act out of compassion and mercy for an oppressed people had the desired effect. Niebuhr notes that Whipple was, like Lincoln, strongly pro-Union and anti-slavery. Perhaps more important, the bishop and the President shared a firm “appreciation of God’s sovereignty.” Mistreatment of Native Americans, Whipple argued, was akin to slavery, and as such was subject to God’s terrible judgment. In Niebuhr’s examination, Lincoln’s actions represent the combination of the godly and the good.

A third category that can be examined includes books and articles specifically devoted to the Dakota War. Four books fall into this category: Kenneth Carley’s The Sioux Uprising of 1862; Michael Clodfelter’s The Dakota War: The United States Army Versus the Sioux, 1862-1865; Hank Cox’s Lincoln and the Sioux Uprising of 1862; and Duane Schultz’s Over the Earth I Come: The Great Sioux Uprising of 1862.

Each book presents the dilemma Lincoln faced: should he yield to public and political pressure and uphold the executions of 300 Dakota, or should he follow his conscience and personal sense of justice? Each author concludes that Lincoln reached a fair compromise, and each expresses admiration that Lincoln managed to take time out from the overwhelming complexities of the Civil War to personally attend to the situation in Minnesota. None of these books are scholarly; that is, they are not thoroughly researched and utilize only a few basic sources.

Several mainstream articles address Lincoln’s actions in the Dakota War. Almost all portray Lincoln in a sensitive, almost heroic light, as a fair-minded man who saw through the politics and acted not with vengeance, but with compassion. Typical of this vanilla-flavored writing is Daniel W. Homstad’s “Lincoln’s Agonizing Decision,” published in the December 2001 issue of American History. More nuanced, but ultimately just as approving, is historian Ron Soodalter’s article “Lincoln and the Sioux,” which appeared in The New York Times in August 2012. Soodalter’s article explores no new ground, but places the Indian uprising in Minnesota squarely in a Civil War context. Soodalter writes that “given the mood of the country” in 1862, the wonder of the event is that Lincoln “took the time away from a war that was going badly – and threatened the very existence of our nation – to examine one at a time the cases of more than 300 Sioux, and to spare the lives of all but 38 of them.”