I ended the first entry in this series on the Mankato hangings with Colonel Sibley's decision to put members of the santee Sioux tribe on trial that they had surrendered to him. Although calling the process that took place in the last months of 1862 a trial would not be exact. University of Minnesota Law professor Carol Chomsky sums it up this way:“The trial against the Sioux was arbitrary in many respects. The evidence was insufficient, the court was not impartial, the accused were not allowed to be defended by a lawyer in a process whose procedures they did not know and which was conducted in a language they also did not know. More seriously, neither the authorities nor the appointed military commission recognized that they were in the aftermath of a war against a sovereign nation and that the men who had surrendered had a right to be tried in accordance with that status."
The court-martial was made up of five officers appointed by Colonel Sibley who did not even raise the question of whether the Indians had a right to legal defense (for them, the natives had no legal defense). legal rights). The Indians were tried one by one at a rate of 40 per day and at the end of the processes on November 5, 1862, 303 santee they had been sentenced to death and another 16 to prison terms.
Although convinced they were doing the right thing, neither Sibley nor his military commander, General John Pope, were willing to take responsibility for carrying out the execution of more than 300 Indians and they took the matter to President Lincoln. They thought the order would be upheld, but as Lincoln himself later explained to the Senate:“On the one hand he did not wish to act weakly in such a way as to foment new rebellions; but on the other hand he did not want to take a measure whose severity bordered on cruelty. That is why I ordered a careful examination of the trial records in order to apply the death penalty only to those convicted of rape.”
Lincoln's refusal to accept the execution of the 309 death row inmates outraged General Pope who declared that "the condemned should be executed without delay", since "humanity requires the immediate disposition of the case. For his part, the governor of Minnesota warned that if he was not authorized to carry out the sentences immediately, there was a risk that the colonists would take revenge on his account. To put more pressure, they had the prisoners transferred and the convoy passed through New Ulm, where an angry mob threw all kinds of objects and boiling water at the Indians, fifteen of whom were injured. On the other hand, the remaining 1,700 Santee tribesmen who had not fled and had not been convicted were transferred by Sibley to a concentration camp at Fort Snelling; his crime:being born Indians.
When, as a result of the review ordered by the president, it was found that only two Indians had committed rape and that, therefore, there would be two death sentences, Lincoln ordered that the maximum penalty also to those accused of participating in indiscriminate massacres of whites and not only in acts of war. With this new criterion, the number of prisoners to be executed increased to 39. The date of December 26 was set for the execution.
Of the 39 convicted, one received a last-minute pardon, so on the morning of December 26, 1862, there were 38 Sioux santee They were led to a quadrangular scaffold built especially for the occasion. As they made their way to the gallows, the condemned sang the Sioux death song. Each was placed in front of a gallows and a white hood was placed on them. A settler who had lost his family at the hands of the Indians was in charge of activating the hatch. The 38 bodies of the men executed in Mankato were buried in a mass grave, which was later desecrated by members of the medical faculty to obtain bodies for their studies
The execution of the santee it remains today the largest mass hanging in US history. Years later it was discovered that there had been several misidentifications of the participants in the revolt and that more than one innocent person had been executed. Lincoln's role in this episode remains controversial. For the renowned author Dee Brown, "had it not been for Lincoln's intercession, (those executed) there would have been 303." For the United Native American page:«The Great Emancipator ordered the largest mass execution in the history of America, in which the guilt of the men to be executed was more than doubtful. Whatever Lincoln's supporters say, what happened was nothing more than an assassination designed to seize the land of the Sioux Santee and appease their political cronies in Minnesota.”
Regarding the tribesmen who fled with Little Crow , after moving to Canada and unsuccessfully trying to get the British to provide them with weapons and supplies to fight the Americans, he and some of his faithful decided to return to Minnesota and continue fighting the whites. Little Crow he perished in a skirmish with a group of settlers. His head was preserved and was exhibited in the Minnesota capital, Saint Paul. Two other santee bosses who had remained in Canada were kidnapped there by Colonel Sibley's troops, illegally transferred to the United States, summarily tried and hanged.
The remaining prisoners (both those convicted in the Lincoln Review prison trials and those held without conviction at Fort Snelling) spent the next few years in different concentration camps in which most perished from unsanitary conditions before being settled on a reservation in South Dakota in 1866. Their first destination (Cow Creek along the Missouri River) was especially cruel:it is estimated that 3/4 of the santee installed there did not survive the first winter. During their stay at Cow Creek, the santee received a visit from a young member of the Lakota Sioux tribe , who upon hearing what happened with his brothers decided that he would dedicate his life to fighting the white man. His name was Tatanka Yotanka , whose translation into Spanish is Sitting Bull , and it would be destined to cause more than one upset to the Americans… but that's another story.
Fonts| Dee Brown:Bury my heart at Wounded Knee
The U.S.-Dakota War of 1862
United Native America