On this day in 1862, Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest ever mass execution in the country’s history, hanging 38 innocent Dakota men, after sham military trials. The ‘crime’ they were convicted of was resisting their own ethnic cleansing. 
After a series of treaties forced on the Dakota onto land far too small to support their traditional hunting economy & US compensation never arrived, Dakota were facing starvation in Minnesota’s long, freezing winter, so the Dakota were forced to fight a war of resistance.
The battle of resistance lasted just 2 weeks before the Dakota agreed to surrender. Col. Henry H. Sibley promised them that only those who engaged in attacks on settlers would be punished. Yet, Sibley imprisoned 2,000 Dakota, men, women, and children, nearly all were innocent.
The detained were subjected to a military trial, where more than 300 were sentenced to death. The trials were a sham. The Dakota didn’t even know what they were charged with and were convicted by openly racist judges.
Following the guilty verdict, a wagon pulled the prisoners through towns so the shackled Dakota could be pelted with bricks and other objects, seriously injuring some prisoners. A mob attacked other Dakota and one baby was snatched from its mother’s arms and beaten to death.
A massive scaffold had been built in Mankato, Minnesota to hold all the condemned. More than 4,000 people crowded the square where the hanging was done, cheering when the execution was done
One of the condemned, Hdainyanka (Rattling Runner) sent an angry letter to his father-in-law expressing being deceived into surrendering. “I have not killed, wounded or injured a white man or any white persons… and yet today I am set apart for execution.”
The 38 executed were those who voluntarily surrendered: “They had gone there because they wanted to end the war, and they protected the whites.” It is believed that at least two men were executed at the mass hanging due to confusion or mistaken identity.
After dangling from the scaffold for a half hour, the men’s bodies were cut down and hauled to a shallow mass grave on a sandbar near the Minnesota River. Before morning, most of the bodies had been dug up and taken by physicians for use as medical cadavers.
The hanging was the beginning of a new wave of immense suffering for the Dakota people. Thousands of those who surrendered to Sibley would be dead before the end of 1863. Thousands of others were exiled to the Dakotas, Montana or as far as Manitoba.
Before they were exiled, 1600 Dakota women, children and old men were held in a concentration camp on Pike Island, near Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Living conditions and sanitation were horrendous in the camp, and infectious disease struck, killing more than three hundred people.
In April 1863, U.S. Congress abolished the Dakota’s reservation in Minnesota, declared all previous treaties null and void, and begun to expel all Dakota people entirely from Minnesota. The state put out a bounty of $25 per scalp on any Dakota found within the state boundaries.
