Re: Dispute #2: the Monolithic (less slaves) Unity of Antebellum America around Conquest

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Mark Lause:
> Abraham Lincoln and others saw U.S. Indian
> policy as a disgrace on many levels...and the first really militant
> white advocates of Indian rights came out of this movement--John Beeson,
> Thomas Henry Tibbles, etc.


 In 1851 the Santee Sioux Indians in Minnesota sold twenty-four million
acres of land to the federal government for $1.4 million. By August of 1862
thousands of white settlers continued to pour into the Indian lands even
though none of the money had been paid to the Santee Sioux. There was a
crop failure that year, and the Indians were starving. The Lincoln
administration refused to pay them the money they were owed, breaking yet
another Indian treaty, and the starving Sioux revolted.

 A short "war" ensued, with Lincoln putting one of his favorite generals,
General John Pope, in charge of federal forces in Minnesota. Pope announced
that "It is my purpose to utterly exterminate the Sioux . . . . They are to
be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom
treaties or compromise can be made." (Similar statements were being made at
the time by General William Tecumseh Sherman, who said that to all Southern
secessionists, "why, death is mercy").

 The Santee Sioux were overwhelmed by the federal army by October of 1862,
at which time General Pope held hundreds of Indian men, women, and children
who were considered to be prisoners of war. The men were all herded into
forts where military "trials" were held, each of which lasted about ten
minutes according to David A. Nichols in Lincoln and the Indians. They were
all found guilty of murder and sentenced to death even though the lack of
hard evidence was manifest and they were not given any semblance of a
proper defense. Most were condemned to death by virtue o the fact that they
were merely present during a battle, during a declared (by the Indians) war.

Minnesota political authorities wanted the federal army to immediately
execute all 303 of the condemned men. Lincoln, however, was concerned that
such a mass execution of so many men who had so obviously been railroaded
would be looked upon in a bad light by the European powers who, at the
time, were threatening to support the Confederate cause in the War for
Southern Independence. His compromise was to pare the list of condemned
down to 39, with a promise to the Minnesota political establishment that
the federal army would eventually kill or remove every last Indian from the
state. As a sweetener to the deal Lincoln also offered Minnesota $2 million
in federal funds.

On December 26, 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in
American history in which the guilt of the executed could not be positively
determined beyond reasonable doubt. (The cartel of "Lincoln scholars"
actually praises Lincoln for this act, claiming that it is yet another
example of his humanitarianism and his "culture of life." He may well have
killed 39 innocent people, they say, but it could have been much worse).

full: http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/11/15/20997_.html


Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org


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