Click here for Heather Cox Richardson's daily article, today describing the rebellion of the Santee Sioux native tribe, and the December 26, 1862, hanging of 38 Santee men in the largest mass execution in American history.
The struggle did not involve all of the Santees, but rather those driven to war in August 1862 after the U.S. government, financially strapped by the Civil War, did not appropriate the money necessary to pay for the food promised to the Santees by treaty. Nine years before, in 1851, settlers had poured into the territory demanding land to farm, and the government had forced the Santees onto a reservation too small to feed their people. The government promised the Santees provisions to make up for the loss of their economic base not as a one-time payment but as a fifty-year contract. Then, when Minnesota became a state in 1858, its leaders took even more Santee land.
But by summer 1862, the Civil War had drained the Treasury, and so-called Indian appropriations fell behind.
Starving and unable to provide for themselves on the small reservation onto which they had been corralled, some Santees demanded the provisions for which they had exchanged their lands. At least one of the agents who had contracted to provide that food had some on hand but refused to hand it over until he had been paid. Furious, young Santee men considered their agreement broken and attacked the settlers who had built homes on the land the Santees had ceded.
On August 17, four young Santee men killed five settlers, and violence escalated. By September, both Minnesota militia and U.S. Army regiments were battling the Santees, and the struggles would leave more than 600 settlers, at least 100 to 300 Santees, and more than a hundred soldiers dead before the last of the Santee warriors surrendered to the military at the end of the month. Another 300 Santees—at least—would die from conditions of their imprisonment after the war or from exposure as they fled the state.
HCR further explains:
Over the course of five weeks in the fall of 1862, a military commission tried 393 Santees for their part in the conflict. The prisoners did not have lawyers, and many of them 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 one two-day span, 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 Abraham Lincoln, expressing his hope that “the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered.” But by law, the president had to sign off on executions, and Lincoln refused.
Repelled by the idea of mass executions, Lincoln examined the facts and found that 265 of the Santee were behaving as soldiers in battle, and refused to sign their death warrants, effectively pardoning them. But 38 had apparently committed murder or rape against civilians, and those men were hanged on December 26, 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota.
In the aftermath of the hangings, the Lincoln administration continued to develop the concept of war crimes. On April 24, 1863, the administration issued what became known as the Lieber Code after its author, legal philosopher Francis Lieber. It tried to establish rules for wartime, prohibiting the execution of prisoners of war, for example, and outlawing rape and torture. The Lieber Code helped to make up the international Hague Conventions of the turn of the century, which set out to establish rules of war.
On December 28, HCR posted another diary entry concerning the slaughter of about 250 men, women, and children of the Lacota, or Teton Sioux, tribe on December 29, 1890, on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota -- another massacre airbrushed from American history. Click here.
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