Lincoln claimed he was powerless to stop the rampant mistreatment of Indians in his administration, despite his party’s dominance in Congress. Conservative Republican Congressman James R. Doolittle investigated the condition of the Indian tribes on his own, finding tales of corrupt Indian agents as well as vicious federal soldiers. The Santee Sioux at Crow Creek reported starving women and children who had been beaten for scavenging leftover heads and entrails of butchered cattle; the Winnebago of Dakota City talked of young and old alike dying from government-issue soups boiled from rotten beef liver.”
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Lincoln’s Final Solution of the Indian Question:
“The passage of the Homestead [Acts], the creation of the federal army, and the opening of the Pacific railroad were the decisive steps toward the final solution of the Indian question, made still more pressing than before by the discovery of mineral riches in the West.
Receiving the chiefs of five Indian nations in Washington on March 27, 1863, three months after the Emancipation Proclamation, he explained to them: “The pale-faced people are numerous and prosperous because they cultivate the earth, produce bread, and depend upon the products of the earth rather than wild game for a subsistence.”
What irony in the remarks of the Great White Father, of the good brother of the red and white family! In fact, several months earlier, [Northern] troops had destroyed the Indian cultures in Minnesota following a Sioux revolt. The Sioux had risen up against the corruption of the Indian system, which the Republican administration had inherited with no thought of changing.
Bankers, land speculators, agents of the railroads, Indian traders, liquor salesmen, and corrupt officials had divided the spoils and exploited the Indians with ferocity. Lincoln was powerless before the collusion of the administration and Congress with those committing fraud.
Once the revolt had been put down and the Sioux were imprisoned at Fort Lincoln, military authorities pronounced 303 death sentences, a number that the president….reduced to thirty-nine. Lincoln accepted the deportation of the Winnebagoes from Minnesota following the Sioux revolt (in which they had not participated) and signed the order putting 54,000 acres of stolen Winnebago land up for sale.
His armies campaigned in the Dakotas from 1863 to 1865, and he even asked the British for the right of pursuit when the Sioux sought refuge in Canada.
The charitable Lincoln became commander-in-chief of the army that distinguished itself at Sand Creek massacring women and children for the same reasons that, as a simple soldier, he had followed the Illinois militia as it marched toward Bad Axe. Americans’ hunger for land was insatiable, and the social order founded on private property in the soil was so incompatible with the collectivist civilization of the Indians that there was no common ground.
[Lincoln’s administration] crushed the Indians during the years of the civil war, with a conscience made even clearer and more triumphant because the principle of private property, founded on working the land, was sanctified by the struggle against slavery……In the same message in 1863, Lincoln mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead and congratulated himself on “extinguishing the possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land.”
(Lincoln, Land and Labor, 1809-60, Oscar Fraysse, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 180-181)
Bernhard Thuersam, Chairman
North Carolina War Between the States Sesquicentennial Commission
www.ncwbts150.com
"The Official Website of the North Carolina WBTS Sesquicentennial"
Lincoln’s Final Solution of the Indian Question:
“The passage of the Homestead [Acts], the creation of the federal army, and the opening of the Pacific railroad were the decisive steps toward the final solution of the Indian question, made still more pressing than before by the discovery of mineral riches in the West.
Receiving the chiefs of five Indian nations in Washington on March 27, 1863, three months after the Emancipation Proclamation, he explained to them: “The pale-faced people are numerous and prosperous because they cultivate the earth, produce bread, and depend upon the products of the earth rather than wild game for a subsistence.”
What irony in the remarks of the Great White Father, of the good brother of the red and white family! In fact, several months earlier, [Northern] troops had destroyed the Indian cultures in Minnesota following a Sioux revolt. The Sioux had risen up against the corruption of the Indian system, which the Republican administration had inherited with no thought of changing.
Bankers, land speculators, agents of the railroads, Indian traders, liquor salesmen, and corrupt officials had divided the spoils and exploited the Indians with ferocity. Lincoln was powerless before the collusion of the administration and Congress with those committing fraud.
Once the revolt had been put down and the Sioux were imprisoned at Fort Lincoln, military authorities pronounced 303 death sentences, a number that the president….reduced to thirty-nine. Lincoln accepted the deportation of the Winnebagoes from Minnesota following the Sioux revolt (in which they had not participated) and signed the order putting 54,000 acres of stolen Winnebago land up for sale.
His armies campaigned in the Dakotas from 1863 to 1865, and he even asked the British for the right of pursuit when the Sioux sought refuge in Canada.
The charitable Lincoln became commander-in-chief of the army that distinguished itself at Sand Creek massacring women and children for the same reasons that, as a simple soldier, he had followed the Illinois militia as it marched toward Bad Axe. Americans’ hunger for land was insatiable, and the social order founded on private property in the soil was so incompatible with the collectivist civilization of the Indians that there was no common ground.
[Lincoln’s administration] crushed the Indians during the years of the civil war, with a conscience made even clearer and more triumphant because the principle of private property, founded on working the land, was sanctified by the struggle against slavery……In the same message in 1863, Lincoln mentioned the Emancipation Proclamation and the Homestead and congratulated himself on “extinguishing the possessory rights of the Indians to large and valuable tracts of land.”
(Lincoln, Land and Labor, 1809-60, Oscar Fraysse, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 180-181)
Lincoln’s Final Solution of the Indian Question
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