[For this year’s annual non-favorites series, I wanted to highlight moments when important and in many ways impressive Americans gave in to white supremacist prejudices, modeling the worst of our national community in the process. Got grievances of your own to air, about anything and everything? Share ‘em for a therapeutic crowd-sourced post, please!]
I said
much of what I’d want to say about this non-favorite moment in Chapter 3 of my
book Of
Thee I Sing, so will quote that section here:
“Such mythic patriotisms did not only target African
Americans, and indeed the Early Republic myths of expansion and Manifest
Destiny remained in force during the Civil War, as illustrated by another
horrific historical event: the December 26th,
1862 execution of 38 Dakota Sioux Native Americans in Mankota, Minnesota,
the largest
mass execution in American history. Throughout 1862 white settlers continued
to pour into Minnesota (which had become
a state in May 1858) and onto native lands, while the U.S. government
violated treaties with multiple tribes and left many such communities starving
after failing to deliver food in “payment” for that stolen land. In August, Dakota Sioux
Chief Little Crow led a six-week uprising against these invaders, a revolt
framed throughout the U.S. not as an echo of the American Revolution nor as an
oppressed people’s quest for liberty and justice, but as an illegal war against
the expanding nation. When the uprising was put down more than 300 Dakota men
were sentenced to death by Governor Henry
Hastings Sibley; while President Lincoln commuted a number of the
sentences, many of those men nonetheless remained imprisoned for life, and 38
others were executed on Lincoln’s orders. The Sioux and Winnebago nations were
subsequently removed from the state to distant reservations, once again on
Lincoln’s authority. The era’s mythic patriotisms did not just divide North
from South, but continued to divide the expanding United States into those
communities perceived as part of that idealized nation and those overtly and
violently excluded from it.
Lincoln’s
prominent role in both that horrific mass execution and the subsequent extension
of the Jacksonian Indian Removal policy reminds us that even Civil War era
celebratory patriotisms which embraced the United States in opposition to the
Confederacy could too easily be wedded to their own mythic patriotisms, with
the same potential to discriminate and exclude. That’s an important rejoinder
to any attempt to entirely distinguish the period’s Union and Confederate
celebratory patriotisms.”
Obviously
this horrific moment connects to deeper and broader (and far more longstanding
and ongoing) American issues and histories than just President Lincoln, and
Lincoln did commute a number of the death sentences. But to my mind neither of
those things absolves Lincoln of his role in America’s largest mass execution,
and one entirely linked to white supremacy (as it was to the subsequent removal
policy for which Lincoln likewise bears responsibility). Ain’t none of us
clean, to quote one
of my favorite lines from one of my favorite cultural works about American
history and white supremacy, and this non-favorite moment is a frustrating but important
reminder that that maxim applies to even our most best president.
Next
non-favorite tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do
you think? Other non-favorites (of any and all types) you’d share?
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