Disturbing History - Abraham Lincoln and the Dakota Thirty-Eight

Episode Date: May 17, 2026

On the day after Christmas, 1862, 38 Dakota men were hanged from a single scaffold in Mankato, Minnesota. It remains the largest mass execution in American history. The man who signed the order was Abraham Lincoln. He signed it the same month he was finalizing the Emancipation Proclamation.This episode is the second in our presidential series, and it's about how mercy and brutality can run through the same hand on the same week. We go back to the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862, to the broken treaties and stolen annuity money that drove the Dakota to starvation, to the rushed military trials that followed, and to the decisions Lincoln made when 303 death sentences landed on his desk. He saved 265 lives. He sent 38 men to a gallows after trials that averaged less than 15 minutes each.He took a political hit for the men he saved. He moved on quickly from the men he didn't.We also follow what happened after, because the story doesn't end at the scaffold. Bodies dug up by physicians the same night they were buried, including by the father of the Mayo brothers. Dakota women, children, and elders held in a concentration camp at Fort Snelling.The exile to Crow Creek. The names buried in a sandbar, and then in the country's memory.This is an episode about moral compartmentalization, and about what gets lost when we decide a man is too sacred to look at honestly.Have a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner, of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes, the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. The morning is cold in Mancato. The sun comes up over the Minnesota River and lights a structure unlike any built in this country before or since. A square scaffold, 24 feet on each side, 14 feet high. Cross beams above, each side notched for 10 ropes. 38 nooses hang from the four sides of the square, evenly spaced, waiting. It's the day after Christmas, 1862. The crowd has been gathering since before dawn. Troops surround the platform in formation. Citizens press against the cordon.

Some have climbed onto rooftops for a better view. There are women in the crowd. There are children. Some of these people have traveled days to be here. The men who are about to die are Dakota. Most of them are in their 20s or 30s. Some are older. Some are younger.

They've been chained inside a building down the hill for weeks now. They've been singing their death song. Some have been baptized in the final days by missionaries. Some are praying in the old way. They know what's coming. They've been told. Then they come out of the building, in pairs, hands tied behind their backs. White muslin hoods cover their heads, drawn up but not yet pulled down.

White cotton robes cover their bodies. They walk in line, climbing the wooden steps to the platform. Some are singing. Witnesses will write about that singing for years after. afterward. A few of the men reach out and touch hands with each other on the scaffold. A few call to each other in Dakota. The interpreter, decades later, will say they were saying goodbye, and that some were calling out their own name so the others would know who was beside them. A single drum begins to beat, three rolls of the drum. The hangman is a man named William Dooley. Three of his children had been

killed at Lake Sheetek the previous August. His pregnant wife and two surviving children had been taken hostage and only recently freed. He has been chosen to cut the rope. A single axe blow drops the platform. Thirty-eight men fall through the air at the same moment. One of the rope snaps. The man falls to the ground, still alive. He's pulled back up. He's hanged a second time, until he too is dead. A surgeon walks the line checking the bodies. The crowd cheers. Some people are laughing. Some are quiet. A few will later say they wish they hadn't watched, but perhaps surprisingly to some. Most won't say that. The bodies hang for half an hour. Then they're cut down and carried, four at a time, to a long, shallow grave on a sandbar in the river, where they're laid in two

rows with their feet to the center. And in Washington, almost a thousand miles east, the president who signed the order for this is sitting at a desk. He's working on the Emancipation Proclamation, It will go into effect in six days. This is an episode about a man we've decided to make into something close to a saint. And about 38 men he hanged. And about the country that needed both things to happen at once. And then needed to forget that one of them ever did. This is the second episode in our presidential series.

We're looking at the men who've held the highest office in this country and at the stories about them that don't fit on the money or get carved into stone. Every one of those men did good with the power they had. Every one of those men also did something they hoped would stay in the dark. This is one of those stories. This is disturbing history. There's something we should talk about before we go any deeper. Abraham Lincoln is not just a president in American memory.

He's something closer to a religious figure. He has a temple in Washington, which is what the Lincoln Memorial really is when you stop and think about it. White Marble Columns A giant seated statue. His words carved into the walls. People go there and stand in silence the way people stand in silence in churches. They take their hats off. They cry sometimes.

The man is the closest thing the United States has to a secular Christ figure, and that comparison isn't original to me. Historians have been making it for more than 150 years. His face is on the penny. His face is on the $5 bill. He's carved into a mountain and sand. South Dakota, on the same ridge as Washington, Jefferson, and Roosevelt. His birthday used to be a national holiday before it got absorbed into President's Day. There are more biographies of Lincoln

than of almost any other figure in American history, and the count goes up every year. The Lincoln we know is the rail splitter, the lawyer from Illinois, the man with the tall stovepipe hat, and the mournful eyes and the long, sad face. He's the man who freed the slaves. He's the He's the man who saved the union. He's the man who was shot in the back of the head while watching a play, and who became a martyr at the moment of his greatest triumph. The story has a structure to it. It's almost too neat.

It feels less like history and more like scripture. And it's not that the story is wrong. It's that the story is incomplete. Because the man at the center of it was a politician in the middle of a civil war, and he was making decisions, and not all of those decisions were good ones. Not all of them have been remembered. Some of them were buried on purpose by people who needed Lincoln to mean something specific to the country. And one of those decisions made in late November and signed in early December of 1862

is the reason 38 men were hanging in a town in Minnesota on the day after Christmas. This episode isn't about tearing Lincoln down. I want to say that out loud at the start, because the moment you bring this story up, somebody usually says, oh, you're just trying to ruin a hero. That's not what this is. The point isn't that Lincoln was secretly a villain. The point is that he was a man, with limits.

Operating inside a country that had limits, and the worst impulses of that country didn't pause just because there was a war on. In some ways, they got worse. We have a habit in this country of taking our most complicated people and flattening them out. We turned Jefferson into a quote on a coffee mug. We turned King into a Sunday sermon.

We turn Lincoln into a saint, and when we do that, we lose something. We lose the ability to actually learn from them, because they're no longer real. They become a kind of mural we paint over the walls of our memory. Eventually the mural gets so thick you can't see what's underneath. What's underneath in this case is a question Lincoln was asked in the autumn of 1862. He was asked to review the cases of 303 Dakota men who had been sentenced to die. He was the only person in the country with the authority to stop those executions. He had to read the files.

He had to make the call. He made the call. He reduced the list. 303 became 39 and then 38 after a last minute reprieve. The 38 died on his order. That's the part of the story that doesn't fit on the penny. That's the part we haven't put on any wall. And before we can understand how he got to that decision, we have to go back.

We have to talk about the land and the treaties and the hunger. We have to talk about how this war started and why and what it looked like to the people living through it from every direction. So that's what we're going to do. The land we now call Minnesota didn't belong to the United States in 1850, not in any moral sense and not really in any practical one either. It belonged to the Dakota people who had lived there for centuries and to the Ojibwe and to a hand. full of other groups whose claims overlapped and shifted with the seasons. The Dakota themselves are sometimes called the Sioux, but Dakota is the word they use for themselves,

and we should use it too. The word Sue comes from an Ojibwe term that meant something like Little Snake. The French shortened it. It stuck. The Dakota never asked for it. There are four bands of Dakota and Minnesota in this period. The Medewa Canton, the Wapakut, the Wapiton, the Sassiton. Together they're sometimes called the Santee Dakota, the Eastern Dakota. They live along the rivers. They hunt. They fish. They grow corn. They harvest wild rice. They've been trading with European newcomers for almost 200 years

by the time the United States shows up in force. They know how this works. They know that paper changes hands, and that paper means something different to white men than it means to anyone else. In the summer of 1851, two treaties are negotiated, one at Traverse DeSoup on the Minnesota River in July, the other at Mendota, near Fort Snelling in August. The Dakota are gathered, the federal commissioners are there, the traders are there. The deal, as it's explained to the Dakota, goes like this. They will give up almost all their land, about 24 million acres,

almost all of southern and western Minnesota, plus a piece of what's now. Iowa and South Dakota. In exchange, they will get a strip of land along the upper Minnesota River, 10 miles wide on each side of the water, where they'll be allowed to live, and they will get money, lots of money, annuities, paid out year after year, decade after decade, in cash and in goods, food, clothing, tools, supplies, a guarantee on paper that they'll be taken care of in their new smaller home. That's the deal as it's explained. The deal as it actually works is different. After the chief signed the main treaty, they're walked over to another table. There's another paper waiting. This one is the trader's paper. It says that a portion of the annuity money, a very large

portion, will be paid directly to the white traders who claim the Dakota owe them money for goods bought on credit over the years. The Dakota don't know what the paper says. They don't read English. They've been told it's part of the same treaty. They sign it. They're not even sure what they've signed until later. The amount the traders claim is enormous. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. There's no way to verify any of it. The traders have ledgers, but the ledgers are theirs alone. The Dakota are charged for goods they don't remember buying. They're charged for goods other people bought. The chiefs who object are ignored. The paper has already been signed. By the time the dust settles, much of the money the Dakota were promised has been redirected before it ever reaches them.

The land is gone. The reservation strip is smaller than they were told. In the Senate, when it ratifies the treaties, strikes out the article that defines the boundaries of the reservation itself. The land that was supposed to be theirs becomes legally ambiguous overnight. Seven years later, in 1858, that ambiguity gets exploited. Little Crow and other Dakota leaders are summoned to watch. and pressured to sign yet another treaty. This one takes the entire north side of the river.

The reservation after 1858 is a single 10-mile strip on the south side of the Minnesota River, with white settlers crowding in along the borders. For 10 years, the Dakota tried to make this work. Some of them take up farming. The government opens two agencies, the Lower Sioux Agency and the Upper Sioux Agency, and these become the centers of administration, distribution,

and trade. The annuity payments come every summer. They're never as much as promised. The goods are often poor quality. The food is sometimes spoiled. The traders raise their prices in the weeks before the payment arrives, and most of the money goes right back to them as soon as it changes hands. The Dakota who give up the old ways and take up farming are called farmer Indians, and they're treated slightly better. The Dakota who refuse, who keep wearing the old clothes and hunting in the old places are called blanket Indians, and they're treated worse. Christianity is pushed on them. The missionaries are constant. Schools are open that teach Dakota children to be ashamed of being Dakota.

Then comes 1862. The summer is hard. The crops fail in some places. The hunting is poor. The annuity payment, which is supposed to come in late June, is delayed. The government in Washington is overwhelmed with the civil war. The Treasury is broke. The payment doesn't arrive in July. It doesn't arrive in early August, and the Dakota are starving. The food has been sitting in the warehouse at the Lower Sioux Agency the whole time. The agent, a man named Thomas Galbraith, refuses to release it without the cash. He says the goods and the cash have to be distributed together. That's the rule, and he won't break the rule. The Dakota stand outside the warehouse and watch the food rot. Their children are sick. They're

elders are dying. At a meeting on August 15th, the Dakota leaders go to the traders and ask them to release credit. They ask the traders to feed them on the promise that the annuity is coming. The traders refuse. One of them, a man named Andrew Myrick, says, and this is on the record, this is in accounts written down by witnesses at the time. He says, if they're hungry, let them eat grass. Three days later, Andrew Myrick will be found dead. His mouth will be stuffed full of grass. But before we get there, four young men from one of the Dakota bands are out hunting on August 17th. And what they do that day, in a moment of stupid and human and avoidable anger, we'll start a war. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages.

The four young men are hunting near Acton, Minnesota, and Meeker County. They're hungry. They've been out for a while. They're returning home empty-handed. They come across some chicken eggs in a fence line outside a settler's farm. One of them picks the eggs up. Another tells him to put them back, says they belong to the white man. There's some kind of argument. The story turns into a dare. The young men, agitated and shamed by the accusation of cowardice, decide to prove they aren't afraid of white men. They walk to the farm. The settlers are the Jones family and the Baker family. The young men ask for whiskey. They ask for food. A misunderstanding turns into a shoot, shooting match. Within minutes, five settlers are dead. Three men, a woman, and a 15-year-old girl.

The young men race back to their village. They tell their elders what they've done. This is the moment the war begins, and it begins the way wars often begin, which is to say, without a plan. The Dakota leaders gather that night. They know what's coming. Five settlers are dead. White retaliation will be massive, indiscriminate. and impossible to contain. The Dakota have two choices. They can hand over the four young men to white authorities and hope for mercy, which they know will not be granted.

Or they can strike first, drive the settlers out of the Minnesota River Valley, and try to take back what was lost in the treaties. They go to Little Crow. Little Crow, whose Dakota name is Tau Yada Duda, is a hereditary chief of the Mdewa Canton. He's middle-aged. He's been to Washington. He's met presidents.

He wears European clothes sometimes. He's been a peace chief, his entire adult life. He understands what the United States can do. He knows the odds. He tells them they can't win. He tells them the white men are as numerous as the locusts. He tells them they will kill some, and others will keep coming,

and others and others, and the Dakota will be destroyed. But they accuse him of cowardice. They tell him he's afraid. And Little Crow is a chief, and a chief who has called a coward in front of his men, man has no choice. He stands up. He says the words that have been remembered ever since. He says, Tal Yadudadudah is not a coward. He will die with you. The next morning, August 18, 1862, the war begins. The first target is the Lower Sioux Agency. The Dakota strike at dawn.

Traders, clerks, missionaries, farmers, government employees, all of them targets. Andrew Myrick, the trader who said let them eat grab. is shot trying to escape through a window. His body is found later, his mouth packed with grass. The message is unmistakable, and it travels. From the agency the war spreads in every direction. Small bands of Dakota warriors fan out across the Minnesota River Valley, attacking farms, settlements, supply trains, ferry crossings.

The settlers in the area are mostly German and Scandinavian immigrants. They've been on this land for a few years, some only a few months. They have no military training. They have farm guns. They have no warning. The killing is not uniform. Some Dakota warriors target only men.

Some target whole families. Some take women and children as captives. Sometimes for ransom, sometimes for adoption, sometimes for worse. Some Dakota refused to fight at all and instead spend the war hiding settlers in their lodges, smuggling them to safety,

walking them through the woods at night to forts and towns. The war is not one event. It's hundreds of events happening at the same time, with as many motivations as there are people involved. There are stories from that week that don't fit into any neat version of what happened. There's a Dakota man named John Otherday, married to a white woman who personally led 62 settlers across the prairie to safety, walking them through hostile country until they reached Fort Ridgely.

There's a Dakota family at the Upper Sioux Agency who hid six white children under blankets in their lodge while warriors searched the camp from house to house. There's a missionary named Samuel Hinman who fled with a column of women and children and made it to safety with the help of Dakota guides who knew where the war parties were and weren't. And there are stories that go the other way. Settler families slaughtered in their fields, in their kitchens, in the cellars where they tried to hide. children dragged from their beds, wives forced to watch their husbands die before they were taken or killed themselves. None of this is metaphor. It happened. Both kinds of stories happened, at the same time, on the same land,

and they are both part of the truth of what the war was. By the end of August, the Minnesota River Valley was empty of white settlers for 50 miles in every direction. The towns of New Ulm and St. Peter and Henderson swelled overnight with refugees. People slept in churches, in barns, in the open fields outside the towns. The roads east toward St. Paul were clogged with wagons. Cattle wandered loose on abandoned farms. Crops rotted in the fields. The federal government estimated that as many as 30,000 people fled their homes in southern Minnesota during the war. Many of them never went back.

the towns of New Ulm and Hutchinson are attacked. Fort Ridgely is besieged. Settlers flee in any direction they can. Some make it to St. Paul. Some make it to Iowa. Some never make it anywhere. And their bodies are found weeks later by soldiers walking through cornfields. By the time the war ends in late September, the number of settlers killed will be somewhere between 350 and 650, depending on which historian you trust. The lower figure comes from careful modern accounting. The higher figure was used at the time by newspapers and politicians and probably included civilians whose deaths had nothing to do with the war. Whichever number you use, it's a staggering loss in a sparsely populated frontier region, and it would shape Minnesota politics for generations. The Dakota dead, on the other

hand, are barely counted. We know warriors died in the fighting. We know civilian Dakota, including women and children, were killed by retreating settlers, by militia, by federal troops as the war turned. We have no reliable total. The number was never important enough for the recordkeepers to record. The military response comes quickly. Henry Hastings Sibley, a former fur trader and the first governor of Minnesota, is given command of a hastily organized military force. He marches up the Minnesota River, gathering volunteers, federal troops, and any able-bodied man with a rifle. The Dakota fight running engagements. The Battle of Birch Cooley is a disaster

for the federal forces, but by the Battle of Woodlake, on September 23rd, the tide has turned. The Dakota are out of ammunition. They're out of food. Many of them have already slipped away to the west into Dakota territory, where they'll spend the rest of their lives in exile.

The ones who stay, surrender. Many surrender at a place that becomes known as camp release, where the captives, mostly women and children, are handed back to Sibley's forces. Almost 2,000 Dakota people, warriors and non-combatants, men and women and children, are taken into federal custody. And now, the question becomes what to do with them. Sibley sets up a military commission.

Five officers will hear the cases. The commission begins meeting on September 28th, six days after the Battle of Wood Lake. It will meet for nearly six weeks. weeks until early November. In that time, it will try 392 Dakota men. It will sentence 303 of them to death. The math comes out to roughly 10 trials per day, with sentences of death in the vast majority of them. Some trials will last less than five minutes, the longest take an hour or two. On one day, the commission tries 42 men, 42 men in a single day, with five officers listening

and a single interpreter translating. The interpreters in most of these trials are men named Antoine Frenier and the Reverend Stephen Riggs. Both speak Dakota. Neither is a lawyer or a court interpreter in any meaningful professional sense. The accused men do not have defense counsel. The accused men in most cases do not understand the charges being read to them in English. The accused men in many cases do not even understand that they are on trial for their lives until the verdict is announced, and they're led from the room.

The evidence is mostly testimony from settlers and from Dakota informants who have agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency. Some of the testimony is detailed and direct. Some of it is hearsay. Some of it is identification based on a glimpse of a face in a moment of terror. A settler woman who was held captive testifies that she saw a particular man kill her husband. And that's enough. A teenage girl identifies a war.

who she says was present during an attack, and that's enough. The standard of proof is so loose it's almost a formality. The Commission has decided, before it begins, that any Dakota man who participated in any battle or attack is guilty of the same crime, whether or not he personally killed anyone. The Commission treats the war itself as the crime. To have been part of it, on the Dakota side, is to be guilty. This is not how military commissions are supposed to work.

Even by the standards of the time, even in the middle of a civil war, this is not how justice is supposed to be done. There's a man in Minnesota named Henry Whipple, the Episcopal Bishop of the state, who's been working with the Dakota for years. He understands what's happening. He starts writing letters. He starts traveling. He goes to Washington.

Whipple is not a sentimentalist. He's not a radical. He's a Republican, a Lincoln supporter, a man of the establishment. But he knows the Dakota. He has lived among them. He knows about the broken treaties and the stolen annuity money. He knows what happened at the warehouse with the food rotting inside it, and he writes a letter in September of 1862 that lays it out for the president of the United States.

In the letter, Whipple does not argue that the Dakota are innocent. He does not deny that crimes were committed. What he argues is that the United States created the conditions for those crimes by stealing the food, breaking the treaties, and allowing the traders to bleed the Dakota dry. He argues that if any other people and any other circumstance had been driven to starvation by the same combination of fraud and neglect, they would have done the same things, and the United States would have to look at its own hands as well as theirs. The letter reaches Lincoln.

Lincoln also meets with Whipple in person in Washington, accompanied by General Halleck. Whipple gives the president an account of what brought the Dakota to war. Lincoln later tells a friend. He came here the other day and talked with me about the rascality of this Indian business until I felt it down to my boots. That's the line he gave. It's a small line, but it tells you something. The bishop's letter and his visit did not just land on the president's desk.

They got in. But Whipple is one voice. The other voices in Minnesota are screaming. The settler population, including the survivors and the relatives of the dead, are demanding mass execution. Governor Alexander Ramsey in a speech in early September says, and I'm quoting, The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state. End quote. He doesn't soften it.

He doesn't take it back later. That is the official position of the state government. Sibley, who's running the commission, agrees. So do most of his officers. So do most of the newspapers in Minnesota. The St. Paul Pioneer runs editorials demanding that every Dakota man involved be hanged. The St. Paul Press calls for the entire Dakota nation to be removed from the state, by force, if necessary. The mood in Minnesota in the autumn of 1862 is not a mood of justice.

It's a mood of revenge. When the commission's list of 303 condemned men is finished, It's sent to Sibley. Sibley sends it to Major General John Pope, who commands the military district. Pope sends it to Washington. It lands on the president's desk. Lincoln is told that 303 Dakota men have been sentenced to death by military commission, and that the sentences need his approval before they can be carried out.

He's told that the executions are expected to take place as soon as possible. He's told that the people of Minnesota will not accept delay. He's told that if he doesn't approve, the executions, there will be vigilante violence, mass lynchings, attacks on the prisoners in their stockades, attacks on any Dakota person still living in the state. He's also told by Bishop Whipple, and by a few others, that the trials were not real trials, that the men have not been given a chance to defend themselves, that many of them are almost certainly innocent of any crime worse than having been on the wrong side of a war, that to execute 303 men without prime,

review would be a stain on the United States that would not wash out. He has to decide. He's in the middle of the worst war in American history. He's just announced the preliminary emancipation proclamation on September 22nd, less than two weeks before the Dakota trials even began. He's facing congressional elections that will, in November, deliver a serious blow to his party. He's getting pressure from his generals, from his cabinet, from the newspapers,

from the Minnesota Congressional Delegation, from the Governor of Minnesota, from the people of Minnesota, from Bishop Whipple, from missionaries, from his own conscience. The pile of demands is enormous and contradictory, and he sits down to read.

The trial records arrive in Washington. They're not summaries. They're the actual records, hundreds of pages, dozens of trials per stack. Lincoln assigns two of his clerks to go through them with him. A man named George Whiting and a man named Francis Ruggles.

They sit in the White House. They read. Lincoln gives them a standard. He tells them to separate the cases into two categories. In the first category, go the men who can be shown to have killed civilians or raped women. Those, he says, should die. In the second category, go the men whose only proven offense is having fought in battles against United States soldiers.

Those, he says, should live. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after. these messages. He's drawing a distinction that's basic to military law. Soldiers in a war kill other soldiers. That isn't murder. That isn't a hanging offense. Killing civilians, that's different. That's a crime. The clerks go through the files. They flag the cases that meet Lincoln's first criterion. The list of men who can be proven by the evidence in the record to have killed a civilian or to have committed a rape during the war comes out at 40. 40 out of 300.

3. Lincoln reviews the list. He signs an order for 39 of the 40 to be hanged. The 40th name is dropped. The reasons for that single deletion are not entirely clear in the surviving record. The order is dated December 6, 1862. It goes out to Sibley. Then, on December 25th, the day before the execution, two missionaries named Jane and John Williamson come forward with new evidence about a man on Lincoln's list named Tatamina, also called Round Wind. They have learned that Round Wind during the war had found a five-year-old white girl alone in an abandoned house, starving, and had taken her home and had her nursed back to health. Lincoln issues a last-minute reprieve.

Round Wind is removed from the list. The list is now 38. Lincoln writes the order. It's a strange document to read now. It's brief. It's a strange document to read now. It's brief. It's business-like. He directs that the men, listed by name, be hanged at Mancato on Friday, the 19th day of December. Sibley pushes the date back a week to December 26th for logistical reasons. The day after Christmas is the day it happens. Now, here's where it gets complicated, and here's where the moral architecture of this story becomes hard to look at directly. Lincoln saved 265 lives. That's a real number. 265 men who would have been hanged by the demand of the state of Minnesota were not

hanged because Lincoln read their files and concluded the evidence didn't support the charges. By every standard of what was about to happen in Mancato, Lincoln was the only person in the country who insisted on any standard at all. He pushed back against his own war department. He pushed back against the governor of Minnesota. He pushed back against a furious public. He took the political hit. the Republican Party would lose seats in Minnesota in the next election, partly because Lincoln didn't hang every man on the list. He knew that would happen, and he did it anyway.

That is one thing that is true about this story. There's a moment in the historical record worth pausing on. Two years later in 1864, after the Republican Party lost ground in Minnesota's elections, Alexander Ramsey, by then a United States senator from the state, came to Lincoln and told him plainly that if he had hanged all 300, Dacota men, the party would have done better at the polls. Lincoln answered him with a sentence that has been preserved in the historical record.

He said, I could not afford to hang men for votes. That's the line. Whether the words are exact or whether they've been polished by later memory, the substance is documented and the political behavior matches it. He took the hit. He lost the votes. He did not bend. But the line cuts both ways.

He could not afford to hang men for. for votes. He did, however, afford to hang 38 of them on the evidence the commission gave him. And that evidence was, by any honest reading of the record, not enough. Here's the other thing that is true. The 38 men who were hanged were not given any kind of due process that would be recognized as such today, or even in 1862. The trials that produced their convictions averaged less than 15 minutes each. The evidence against them was, in many cases, the testimony of a single witness, identifying them across a chaotic field of action, often months after the fact, often through an interpreter who was working with a team of clerks moving at speed. Lincoln read the records.

He didn't observe the trials. He had no way of knowing by looking at a paper transcript, whether the witness was reliable, whether the identification was solid, whether the man being described as the killer was actually the man being convicted. And the standard Lincoln applied, the distinction between soldier and murderer, between battle and atrocity, was a standard the United States did not apply to its own forces. When American soldiers killed Dakota civilians during the war, no one was tried. When American volunteer militias rode into Dakota villages and killed women and children, no one was tried. The military commission at Mancato applied one standard to one side and a different standard, which is no standard to the other. Lincoln didn't change that. He worked within it. He used it. He saved the men he could save. The men he couldn't save or didn't try to save. He sent to the gallows. Was he a hero in this story? Or was he a moral compromiser? The honest answer is both. He was both. The honest answer is that he prevented something even worse. And he also did something terrible. And those two things happened in the same act with the same pen on the same piece of paper.

He moved on from it quickly. He had a war to run. The Emancipation Proclamation was about to take effect. The Army of the Potomac was reorganizing. Vicksburg was coming. Gettysburg was coming. The Dakota file went into a drawer. The execution went forward.

The history was, for the most part, forgotten by everyone who didn't live in Minnesota. But the men on the list still had to be hanged. And in Mancato, in the cold, with a stockade full of prisoners, and a crowd of spectators on its way. That work still had to be done. The town of Mancato in December of 1862 has maybe 1,500 residents. It's a small frontier town.

The military has been holding the condemned men in a building down by the river since the trials ended. As the date of execution approaches, the population of Mancato more than doubles, maybe triples. People are coming in by wagon, by horseback, by foot, from all over to the people,

southern Minnesota, from northern Iowa, from Wisconsin. They want to see this. The newspapers help bring the crowd. The St. Paul Pioneer runs day-by-day updates as the execution approaches. The papers describe the scaffold as it's being built. They describe the ropes. They describe the procedure. They describe what the prisoners are eating, what they're singing, who's been baptized, who's refused. The level of detail is not accidental. The execution is being staged. The scaffold is built in the public square between Front Street and the Minnesota River. 24 feet on each side. 14 feet high.

Four cross beams above, forming a square frame. Each beam notched 10 times for the ropes. 40 ropes can hang from this structure. 38 will be used. The drop mechanism is a single supporting rope tied beneath the platform. When that rope is cut by axe, the platform falls beneath all 38 men at once. The Army engineers who designed it have tested it with sandbags. They want it to work the first time.

They do not want a botched execution in front of a crowd this size. The crowd on the morning of December 26th is estimated by the newspapers at around 4,000 people. Some reports go higher. The town's population, plus the visitors, plus the soldiers, packs the square and overflows onto every roof and balcony and second story window for blocks around. The army is set up a cordon to keep the crowd back from the platform itself. There's been a real fear that someone might try to rush the prisoners on the way to the scaffold, to lynch them before they can be hanged.

The army keeps that from happening. The morning is bitterly cold. The Minnesota River is frozen. The temperature is somewhere around freezing or below. There's snow on the ground. The night before, in the holding building, the prisoners are visited by missionaries. Father Augustin Ravu, a Catholic priest who has spent years among the Dakota, comes in with the names of those who wish to be baptized.

Some have asked for it. Some have refused. Reverend Riggs is there too with the Protestant prisoners. The men are given paper and pencil. They are told they may write letters. Some of them do. They write to their wives. They write to their fathers.

They write to children they will never see again. The interpreters decades later recalled some of what the men wrote. One man told his wife not to mourn him long and to take their son and find a place to live where the soldiers would not be looking for him. He told her his death was nothing. What mattered was that the boy live. He signed it with his name and asked that the letter be sent to her after he was dead. The letter was sent. The wife read it. The boy lived. The boy's descendants are alive today. Through the windows of the holding building, the prisoners could see the scaffold being finished by lamplight. They could hear the hammering.

The carpenters worked through the night to make sure the platform was ready by morning. The condemned men could hear the nails going in. They could hear the rope being tested. They had been told what tomorrow would look like, and they could hear it being prepared, board by board, hour by hour, in the dark. The prisoners come out of the holding building at around 10 o'clock the next morning. They walk in a line two by two. They wear the white robes and hoods.

Some have painted their faces. Some have feathers in their hair. Some are singing. The singing is the part everyone who is there later remembers. It's described in the journalism of the day, in the diaries of soldiers, in the accounts of missionaries. The men begin to sing as they leave the building, and the singing grows louder as they climb the steps of the scaffold.

They sing in Dakota. They sing what witnesses destroy. as death songs. The Reverend Riggs, the interpreter, will later write that some of them were singing a song that translates roughly as I am here, I am here, remember me. Some were calling out their own names so that the others around them would know who was beside them as they died. There's a story inside this story you need to know. One of the men climbing the steps of the scaffold should not be there. His name is Wakanpi Wastodampi. The Dakota words translate roughly as Good Star Nation. He's also called Chaska, which is a Dakota word given to a firstborn son.

He was charged with the killing of a settler named George Gleason during the war. The woman Gleason was traveling with, a doctor's wife named Sarah Wakefield, was taken captive that day, along with her two small children. She survived. The same man, this Chaska, the one climbing the steps, was the one who protected her in captivity. He kept her from being raped. He kept her children alive. He helped her get back to her people. She testified for him at his trial. She told the commission that without him, she'd be dead, and her children with her.

The commission convicted him anyway. Lincoln, reading the file, ordered him spared. There was another man among the condemned, also called Chaska, whose given name was different and whose offenses were documented. Somewhere in the chain of paperwork between Washington and Mancato, the two names were confused. The wrong man was led out of the building that morning. Sarah Wakefield was not in Mancato. She would learn within days what had happened. She spent the rest of her life trying to clear his name. She wrote a memoir about it. She wrote letters. The military commanders blamed each other.

Nobody was punished. The wrong chaska was buried in the sandbar with the others. Back to the scaffold. The men reached the platform. They line up under the ropes. The hoods are pulled down over their faces. The nooses are placed around their necks. A few of them reach out, blindly, and find the hands of the men beside them, and they hold on. William Dooley stands by the cutting rope with an axe.

Three drum beats are called for. The first drumbeat lands. Then the second. Then the third. Dooley swings the axe. The rope is cut. The platform drops. 38 men fall.

The fall is not far. The ropes have been calibrated for a quick break of the neck, but with 38 men dropping at once on a single mechanism, the calibration is imperfect. Some men die instantly. Some don't. A few of the bodies are seen to twitch and struggle for what witnesses describe as several minutes. One of the ropes breaks.

The man, named in the records as rattling runner, falls to the ground, alive. He's brought back up the steps. A new rope is placed around his neck, and he's hanged a second time. The crowd cheers. There are reports of applause. There are reports of laughter. There are reports of women crying,

of men taking off their hats, of a kind of grim satisfaction settling over the square as the bodies begin to steal. The army surgeons walk the line, checking pulses. The pronouncements take about half an hour. Then the bodies are cut down.

Wagons are brought up. The 38 bodies are loaded, four at a time. and driven down to the sandbar in the Minnesota River, where a long, shallow trench has been dug. The bodies are placed in two rows with their feet to the center. The trench is filled in. The wagons return to town.

The next day, the newspapers run their accounts. The St. Paul Pioneer describes the execution as having been carried out with order and dignity. Other papers describe it as a solemn occasion. The crowd is described as having behaved well. The procedure is described as having worked. There is no editorial questioning of the execution. There is in the local press,

almost no acknowledgement that anything has occurred, which might trouble the conscience of the country. The story is filed under the heading of Justice Dunn. In Washington, the president receives a telegram confirming that the order has been carried out. He files it. There's no record of his reaction. There's no diary entry. There's no letter.

Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. The Emancipation Proclamation takes effect six days later on January 1st, 1863. And the country, in its newspapers and in its political conversations, is focused on the slaves of the Confederacy and on the war that's now entering its third year. The 38 men in the Sandbar grave are not mentioned. Their names will not be widely known for more than a century. The story of what happens after the execution is, in some ways, more disturbing than the execution itself. It's certainly stranger.

The bodies in the sandbar grave do not stay in the sandbar grave. Within hours, possibly within minutes of the burial, local doctors and medical students arrive with shovels. The frontier is short of cadavers for medical study. The bodies of executed criminals have traditionally, in American medical history, been considered fair game for anatomical research. The doctors of Mancato and from towns nearby dig up the bodies in the night. The names of some of these doctors are known. One of them is Dr. William Worrell Mayo. That name might ring a bell. He's the father of the brothers who will, decades later, found the Mayo Clinic. He's a frontier physician in 1862, and he takes the body of one of the

executed men, the man called cut nose, and he takes it home, and he uses it to teach it anatomy to his sons. The skeleton remains in the Mayo family medical collection for years. Other doctors take other bodies. The bones of the executed Dakota become teaching tools and curiosities, kept in offices and homes and small medical museums across Minnesota and beyond for generations. This is not an exaggeration. The bones of the men hanged at Mancato, after the largest mass execution in American history, were dug up and dispersed across the country. as anatomical specimens within 24 hours of their burial. Some of those remains will not be repatriated to the Dakota people

until the 1990s. Some have never been returned. Meanwhile, the rest of the Dakota population, the people who were not executed, but who were not allowed to remain, are being processed. About 270 Dakota men, those whose death sentences were commuted by Lincoln,

are sent in April of 1863 to a federal prison at Camp McClellan in Davenport, Iowa. They will stay there for three years. More than 120 of them will die before they're released from disease and starvation and the cold. The conditions at Camp McClellan are documented by missionaries who visited the prison. The Dakota men are held in cramped quarters

with poor ventilation, inadequate food, and almost no medical care. Disease moves through the population in waves, smallpox, pneumonia, tuberculosis, The dead are buried in unmarked graves on the prison grounds. Many of those graves will be dug up by physicians and scientific collectors in the decades that follow. The Dakota who survive are baptized by missionaries in large numbers. Many take Christian names.

Whether or not the conversions are sincere is a question only they could answer. The prisoners learn to write in Dakota in prison, and many of their letters to missionaries and family members survive today. by the time the remaining 177 men are released in April of 1866. They are sent west to join their families, who have been moved to a new reservation along the Niobrara River in Nebraska. Many of the men do not recognize their own children. The Dakota women, children and elders, around 1,600 people,

are marched in late November of 1862, from the Lower Sioux Agency down to Fort Snelling, near St. Paul. The march takes about a week. They walk in winter. Along the way, white settlers attack the column. Stones are thrown. Some of the women and children are killed. The escorts, federal troops, do little to stop it.

At Fort Snelling, the Dakota are held in what amounts to a concentration camp through the winter and spring of 1863. The conditions are catastrophic. Cold, disease, hunger. Measles tears through the camp. Estimates of the death toll vary, but somewhere between 100,000. 330 and 300 Dakota die at Fort Snelling that winter, mostly children. In the spring of 1863, Congress passes the Dakota Removal Act. The Dakota people are formally expelled from the state of Minnesota.

The reservation lands they were guaranteed by the treaties of 1851 are simply canceled. The treaties are abrogated. The Dakota are loaded onto steamboats and ships south down the Mississippi. Then west up the Missouri, to a place called the Crow Creek Reservation. in what's now South Dakota. At Crow Creek, the conditions are worse than anyone imagined. The reservation is a stretch of dry, treeless plain along the Missouri River. The soil is alkaline.

The water is bad. The buffalo are gone. The rations promised by the government are inadequate when they arrive at all. The Dakota women boil flour and rotten beef into a thin soup to feed their children. Children die in waves. old people die. The dead are buried on a hill above the river. The hill in Dakota memory has a name that translates roughly to the place where we cried.

More Dakota die in the first year at Crow Creek than died at Fort Snelling. Some accounts put the death toll at Crow Creek at 300 or more within the first year alone. The Dakota who fled west during the war, who escaped before Sibley's forces arrived, are scattered across the northern plains. Many of them eventually settle at reservations in Nebraska, the Dakotas, and Canada. They become refugees. The Minnesota homeland is gone. Back in Minnesota, the war continues at low intensity for another two years. Federal forces under generals like Henry Sibley and Alfred Sully

conduct what are called punitive expeditions onto the plains, hunting Dakota who they suspect were involved in the 1862 fighting. They killed Dakota at the Battle of Whitestone Hill in 1863 and at the Battle of Kildare Mountain in 1864. Many of the people killed in these expeditions have no connection to the war at all. They're Lakota or Yanktoni or Dakota bands who lived hundreds of miles from the Minnesota River Valley. They're killed because they're native and because the United States military is in the habit of killing. Little Crow, the chief who led the war, escapes west with his son. He spends the winter of 1862 and 186.

1963 on the plains, then comes back to Minnesota in the summer of 1863, apparently to raid for horses. While he's picking berries with his son near Hutchinson, on July 3rd, he's shot and killed by a settler named Nathan Lamson, who didn't even know who he was. Lamson collects the bounty the state of Minnesota has placed on Dakota scalps. Little Crow's body is taken to Hutchinson, where it's mutilated and displayed. His skull and other body parts will remain in the collection of the Minnesota Historical Society until 1971, when they are finally returned to his family. These details are not peripheral. They are the story. The execution at Mancato was not the end. It was the beginning of a campaign that lasted for years, and that the United States government considered a success. By the late 1860s,

the Dakota presence in their homeland had been almost completely. completely erased. The land was settled by white farmers. The towns grew. The reservations in South Dakota and Nebraska absorbed what was left of the Dakota people. And the country, busy with reconstruction, busy with the Transcontinental Railroad, busy with the next war and the next, looked away. You can earn a college degree in American history without ever hearing the words Dakota War. You can read a dozen Lincoln biographies without seeing the word Mancato. You can spend your whole life in the United States, an educated and curious person, and you will probably never learn that 38 men were hanged in a public square on the day after Christmas in 1862,

on the order of the man whose face is on the penny. There are reasons for this. They're worth talking about. The first reason is geography. The Dakota War happened in Minnesota, far from the eastern population centers that wrote and printed the history of the Civil War. The Mancato execution was front-page news in St. Paul and Minneapolis. But in New York and Boston and Washington, it was a small story tucked behind dispatches from Antietam and Fredericksburg.

The country was bleeding from a war that was killing thousands of men a week. 38 executions in a frontier town, even if it was the largest mass execution in American history, did not register the way it would have in peacetime. The second reason is political. The Republican Party in the 1860s was building Lincoln into a mythological figure. After his assassination in 1865, that project went into overdrive. Lincoln was reframed as a Christ figure, a martyr, the Redeemer of the Union, the Great Emancipator. His decisions were retold as exercises in pure moral clarity.

The story of him hanging 38 Native men did not fit that frame. It didn't fit any frame that anyone wanted to use. so it was set aside. The third reason is racial. The history of the American West has, for most of this country's existence, treated native deaths as a kind of background noise. The wars against the Plains tribes, the campaigns against the Apache, the massacres at Sand Creek and Wounded Knee,

the trail of broken treaties and forced removals, all of this has, until very recently, been folded into a narrative of inevitable progress. The Indians faded away. They were destined to. The land was destined to belong to someone else. The deaths were unfortunate, but not in the moral accounting of the country, the same kind of deaths as other deaths.

To say it plainly, the country didn't keep track of native deaths the way it kept track of white deaths. And so the Dakota deaths, at Mancato, and at Fort Snelling, and at Crow Creek, and at all the places after, didn't become part of the central story. The fourth reason is harder. The fourth reason is that, We, as a country, have not figured out how to hold contradiction.

We want our heroes to be heroes all the way down. We want our villains to be villains all the way down. We don't know what to do with a man who freed four million enslaved people and also signed a death warrant for 38 men who, in most cases, weren't given a real trial. We don't know how to put both of those things in the same sentence without it feeling like a betrayal of one or the other. And so we usually don't. we picked the story that's easier to tell. We tell the one about emancipation,

and we leave the one about Mancato in a footnote, if we mention it at all. But the truth is that both of those things happened. Both of those things were done by the same man on the same desk in the same month. The Emancipation Proclamation and the Dakota Execution Order were signed within weeks of each other. The same hand wrote both. The same political calculus shaped both.

The same war was the kind of, for both. And if we want to actually understand Lincoln and not just venerate him, we have to be able to hold both of them at the same time without flinching. The Dakota people have not forgotten. Every December since 2005, riders on horseback set out from Lower Brule in South Dakota and ride for more than 300 miles in the cold, retracing the path of removal, arriving at Mancato on December 26th, the anniversary of the execution. They call the call it the Dakota 38 Plus 2 Memorial Ride. The plus two is for two Dakota leaders,

Shacopi and Medicine Bottle, who were captured in Canada, brought back and hanged at Fort Snelling in 1865. The riders gather at the site of the gallows. They pray. They remember. They have done this every year for more than two decades now, and they will keep doing it. If you've never heard of the Dakota 38,

the question I'd ask you to sit with is why. Why this story, more than other stories from the Civil War era, has been so thoroughly absent from the national conversation? Why so many people who can recite the dates of Bull Run and Vicksburg and Appomattox have never been asked to learn the name Mancato? Why the largest mass execution in American history is, for most Americans, an obscure fact at best. The absence is the point. The absence tells us what we've decided to remember. and what we've decided not to. I started this episode by saying it's about moral compartmentalization.

I want to come back to that. Compartmentalization is the thing the human mind does when it has to hold contradictory information without falling apart. You can love someone and resent them at the same time. You can believe in a cause and doubt it at the same time. You can do something good and something terrible in the same hour and not feel the contradiction. Not because you're a monster,

but because compartmentalization is the way most of us get through most days. It's a survival skill. It's also, sometimes, the thing that lets terrible decisions get made by people who are not, in their own minds, terrible. Lincoln in the autumn of 1862 was compartmentalizing. He had to. He was running a war that was killing more Americans than any war before or since. He was trying to hold the union together. He was trying to figure out how to end slavery without.

losing the border states. He was making a hundred decisions a day and each of them had moral weight and each of them affected lives he would never see. The Dakota cases were one stack of paper among many on his desk. He gave them more attention than most people in Washington did. He pushed back against the demand for mass execution. He saved 265 lives. He also signed the order for 38 men to be hanged after trials that by any honest accounting did not meet the the standard of justice. He moved on. He kept working. He had a war to win. If we want a Lincoln who is only the man on the penny, we have to leave the Dakota out. That's the deal. The myth requires the omission. And as long as we make that deal, we don't have to ask ourselves the harder questions.

Like what it means that a country can produce, in the same person, the author of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the man who signed off on the largest mass execution in its history. like what it means that mercy and brutality can run through the same hand on the same week. Like what it means about us, that we've chosen to remember one of those things and to forget the other. The 38 men have names. I'm not going to read all of them tonight. There are projects. There are books.

There are memorials where you can find every name. The Minnesota Historical Society has them. The Dakota people have never lost them. They knew the names the whole time. They were waiting for the rest of the rest of them. of the country to catch up. I think the reason this story matters in 2026 isn't that it changes our view of Lincoln. Lincoln is still Lincoln. He still did the things he did. He's still, on balance, one of the most consequential and probably one of the better presidents the country has ever had.

The reason this story matters is that it changes our view of ourselves. It changes our view of how memory works in a country like this one. It changes our view of which deaths we count, in which we don't, and of how easy it is, even now, to look right past a hanging of 38 people if the country has decided that the hanging doesn't matter to the story it wants to tell. There's a sandbar in the Minnesota River. The bodies aren't there anymore. The doctors took them. Some of them have been returned to the Dakota people. Some have not. The town of Mancato has put up a memorial called Reconciliation Park. There's a buffalo statue carved from limestone. and a long scroll inscribed with the names of the 38 executed.

The site of the gallows is now part of that park. The day after Christmas every year, the riders come in from South Dakota. They've been on the trail for two weeks. They're tired. They're cold. They gather at the monument. They pray. They sing.

And somewhere in that sound is the answer to a question this country has not yet figured out how to ask itself. Thanks for listening to Disturbing History. I'll see you next time. Thank you.