OPINION | COLUMNIST: Lincoln didn’t deserve Portland

Rioters in Portland, Ore., smashed windows and toppled statues on the eve of the federal holiday dedicated to Christopher Columbus. Supposedly, the riots were in celebration of the Indigenous peoples of North America, but color me skeptical.

Let’s suppose they really were who they purported to be and that their reason for dragging down a statue of Abraham Lincoln was, in fact, his role in the 1862 mass execution of Dakota Sioux tribesmen in Minnesota. Fair enough. Let’s have a look at this painful chapter of U.S. history.

In August 1862, starving Dakota families, whose annuity payments under a laxly enforced treaty had been delayed by the confusion of the Civil War, appealed to the owner of a reservation trading post for food on credit. The trader, Andrew Myrick, was reported to have answered, “Let them eat grass or their own dung.” The next day, an outraged young tribesman murdered a family of settlers.

Chief Little Crow reluctantly agreed to expand the assault into a general war on settlers along the Upper Minnesota River, though he predicted the ultimate result. “The white men are like the locusts,” he said. No matter how many the Sioux killed, “ten times ten will come to kill you.”

In the following weeks, as many as 800 settlers were killed in history’s largest uprising of Native Americans—including Myrick, whose corpse was recovered with grass stuffed into his mouth.

Some of the killings were even more brutal: A baby was nailed to a tree. Women and children hiding in a field of tall grass were burned alive. Panic was so widespread among the settlers that Lincoln dispatched one of his private secretaries, John Nicolay, to go by train to Minnesota and render a reliable report.

The timing could not have been worse for Lincoln. A springtime of Union successes had sagged into a summer of demoralizing failures culminating in a two-pronged invasion of the North by Confederate armies. Union troops were deserting by the thousands. Lincoln’s Cabinet appeared to be splintering. And Queen Victoria’s government was preparing to intervene in the war to force a conclusion that would permanently divide the United States.

Assured by his secretary of the need for more troops, Lincoln dispatched sufficient forces to Minnesota to bring the war to an end. Gen. John Pope telegraphed the president in October that he intended to hold prompt trials for hundreds of Dakota prisoners, and was “anxious to execute a number of them.”

The tribunals were an acknowledged sham: Pope wrote at the outset that he found it difficult to figure out which Dakota participated in the fighting and which ones actually tried to prevent it.

In early November, in the midst of a chastening off-year election, Pope forwarded a list of 303 prisoners he intended to hang. Instead, the harried president demanded that all the files be sent to him for review. Lincoln rightly suspected that the public’s desire for revenge had tainted justice.

Lincoln began a careful review of each case. Members of Congress arriving from Minnesota for the new session added their own warnings of mob violence if the Sioux were not sacrificed immediately.

Advised by a lawyer that he must personally decide each potential clemency, Lincoln tediously ground his way through 303 files—even as the Civil War dragged and pressure grew from opponents of his proposed Emancipation Proclamation.

The easy and popular thing to do was to give Minnesota’s citizenry the executions they demanded, but as Lincoln explained afterward, “I could not hang men for votes.”

Ultimately, the president teased from records of the sham tribunals sufficient grounds to spare the lives of roughly seven out of every eight condemned Dakota. The hanging of 38 prisoners later in December was the largest mass execution in U.S. history, but on the same day, 265 lives were saved solely by the conscience of one man.

Someday, Portland’s anonymous vandals may confront in their own lives unsought circumstances that require an agonizing decision. They might remember Lincoln—might even honor him—who served in most unwelcome circumstances and bore the weight of dreadful choices.

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