December 26 is the anniversary of the largest mass execution in American history. On that date in 1862, the U.S. government hanged 38 Santee Sioux for their participation in Minnesota’s Dakota War.
The war began in August 1862, when Santee Sioux warriors rose up against settlers in Minnesota. The Santee were driven to war after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, stopped providing the food promised to the Indians by treaty. Starving and unable to provide for themselves on the small reservation on which they had been corralled in 1851, young men attacked the settlers who had built homes on the land the Santee had ceded. By September, both Minnesota militia and U.S. Army regiments were engaged in a war with the Santee that would leave 600 settlers, between 100 and 300 Indians, and more than a hundred soldiers dead before the last of the Santee warriors surrendered to the military at the end of the month.
Over the course of five weeks in the fall of 1862, a military commission tried 393 Indians for their part in the conflict. Because these were military trials, the Indians did not have lawyers. Many of the prisoners did not speak English. Those who did understand the questions put to them did not understand the legal process that permitted them to avoid self-incrimination; they told the truth about their part in the fighting and thus cemented their convictions. Many of the trials took fewer than ten minutes before the judges reached a guilty verdict: in two days of trials, 82 men were tried. In early November, the commission convicted 303 Indians of murder or rape and sentenced them to death. Minnesota Governor Alexander Ramsey wrote to President Lincoln expressing his hope that “the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered.”
But while harsh sentences pleased the furious Minnesota settlers, they presented a delicate problem for President Lincoln. Personally, he was reluctant to use the government to execute men, and frequently commuted death sentences for soldiers convicted of anything other than rape or murder. He recoiled from the idea of executing several hundred men at once.
But there was a national, as well as a personal, issue at stake. If the United States executed captured Indian soldiers for killing in battle, why shouldn’t it do the same to captured Confederate soldiers, who were also attacking the government? While there were plenty of people who were willing to follow that logic, it presented a problem: if the Union government could do whatever it wanted to enemy combatants, what was to stop the Confederacy from doing whatever it wanted to captured Union soldiers? Ultimately, Lincoln’s decision about what to do with the Santee prisoners could determine the fate of the Union men who fell into enemy hands.
Lincoln negotiated the crisis by distinguishing between soldiers in battle and war criminals. First he demanded the Santee trial records and ordered the military judges to separate Indians who had fought in battles from those who had committed murder or rape against civilians. Then he reviewed the records and concluded that 265 of the Santee had been convicted only of going to war against the United States. Although these men had not been party to a formal declaration of war, the Lincoln administration decided they were nonetheless covered by the traditional rules of war that prohibited the execution of prisoners. President Lincoln commuted their sentences. The 38 Indians who had been convicted of murder or of rape against civilians, though, fell outside the traditional protections accorded to enemy combatants. Their sentences stood.
And on December 26, 1862, the U.S. Army hanged these 38 men in a group from a scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota in the largest mass execution in American history. It is worth noting, though, that even this extraordinary carnage was much smaller than many Americans wished. Two hundred and sixty-five men escaped the gallows when the Santee crisis forced President Lincoln to argue that prisoners of war must be treated according to law, and to establish a precedent for that principle.
Glad you’re calling attention to this little-known episode.
But many more died.
Read about how many died in prison and how many fsmily members died in a concentration type camp. The baby who was killed in its mothers arms by a rock thrown by a white woman. The indian families were marched for days in winter weather passing through towns where the white settlers harassed them. Most had not raised a hand against the whites.
The bands in the area, guilty or not, were stripped of all their land, all treaties recinded.
Today, their decendents are split up on several reservation in Minnisota, North and South Dakota.
They all remember this day.
Eight of my mothers family were imprisoned, not hung but eventually freed.
I think it’s fascinating how Lincoln used the hangings as a chance to set legal precedent for POWs. Although it’s also an example of the inequality of American violence. The Sand Creek Massacre, another Civil War clash with Indians, saw the slaughter and mutilation of about 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, mostly noncombatants who had been promised safe haven. Although the federal government investigated, they did not hang one of the perpetrators. Even with Lincoln, it seems that his views on Indians are one of the darker spots on his legacy. While he changed his views on African Americans, his views on Native peoples remained stagnant. In this case, for instance, I wonder how many of those 38 Indians were actually guilty of rape or murder, given the ridiculous nature of the proceedings.
Anyway, great article! I love anything that discusses Native Americans in the Civil War. It’s such a rich subject.
It is indeed a rich subject, and one that has received too little attention. I’m glad to see this. We also need to think more about how Lincoln and others of his time viewed race in broader terms–historians of the colonial era have brought together the subject of African Americans and Native Americans, but not enough have done so for the Civil War era.
Thank you for this great account of the Mankato mass execution of the Santee. I am teaching this the first week in January and will definitely have my AP students read this.
Interestingly, at the 1883 New Orleans Cotton Centennial Exhibition, the Minnesota exhibition has a huge sign reading Mankato. The promotional literature from the Upper Midwestern states all discussed their amicable relationships with Native Americans, probably to convince people it was a safe place to do business, regardless of the conflicts in the region. I am suspicious that the Mankato sign might be a subliminal message.
Ashley, I didn’t know this. Very cool. And yes, there is SO much more work to be done on Lincoln and Indians. On that whole era and Indians, for that matter. Americans were busy trying to work out the government’s relationship to the people who lived under its rule, and that meant everyone: Chinese, Pacific Islanders, Indians, Mexicans… as well as African Americans. And then there was the little problem of women! I think this era was the foundational moment of the modern nation.
Yes.Agreed.the foundation of modern amerika. Based on the fkundafion of the founding of amerika by wealthy white slave owners.
Good article. You should have included Lincoln’s retort to Minnesota Governor Ramsey, “I could not hang men for votes.”
FYI – For those interested in more info on this topic, I recommend W Dale Mason’s longer article on Lincoln’s Indian policy @ http://www.indigenouspolicy.org/index.php/ipj/article/view/71/39
Mason concludes: “President Lincoln broke no new ground in Indian policy or Indian-white relations. He continued the policy of all previous presidents of viewing Indians as wards of the government while at the same time negotiating with them as sovereigns. He made no revolutionary change in Indian-white relations as he did in black-white relations with the Emancipation Proclamation. While he called for reform of the Indian system in his last two Annual Messages to Congress, he provided no specifics and he continued the policy, already in place, of confining Indians to reservations after negotiating treaties. The greatest impact of federal policies on Indians during the Lincoln administration were policies that were not directed at Indians themselves. As discussed, these policies included homesteading and railroad construction. These along with Christianizing and civilizing Indians led to an assimilationist policy and an ever greater loss of Indian land. Finally, any evaluation of Lincoln’s Indian policy must be seen in the context of his larger goals of winning the Civil War and settling the west.”
I don’t claim to know history as well as some, but in recent years lived on a Native American Reservation in Idaho…where I witnessed the remains of a “Christian School for Indian Children”….a log cabin, basically, where after the school was finally closed, the bodies of Native children were found imbedded in the walls…and to this day the “whipping trees” weep like nothing I have ever witnessed. It was one of the saddest commentaries I have ever seen on how Natives were “Christianized and Civilized”. Absolutely disgusting, IMHO.
Should have hung the Confederates. We’d be better off.
Thank you for this most interesting article. Surely there are entire books to be written about American history, 1861-65, that cover subjects outside of the Civil War. Ambrose’s book on the trans-continental railroad is the only one I’ve read. As noted above, there are plenty of articles, but I’d love to see more extended treatments of these fascinating aspects of that time.