To correct the record and hopefully educate the vandals who damaged the Abraham Lincoln statue with irrelevant slogans and a half-understood misrepresentation of history, here’s a few facts about Lincoln’s statement and actions around authorizing execution of 38 Dakota men.
From an April 2021 issue of The New York Review: “The most common charge in the current attacks on Lincoln ... concerns his approval of the hanging of thirty-eight indigenous Americans after a bloody, protracted uprising in Minnesota in 1862 in protest against enormous land theft and corruption, which left four hundred white settlers dead. To Bennett, Lincoln’s “hard-hearted” authorization of “one of the largest mass executions in military history” bespoke his racism. Disregarded is the fact that the military commission in charge of the matter, looking to crush the Sioux, sentenced 303 men to death. Lincoln faced intense official as well as popular pressure to sign off on all of the sentences but, appalled by the vengeful proceedings, he instead chose, at a critical moment in the middle of the Civil War, to halt the executions and examine each case with extreme care. ...
