Alexander Ramsey

"Our course then is plain. The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of Minnesota."

Alexander Ramsey to a special session of the Minnesota legislature, September 9, 1862

Alexander Ramsey was born September 8, 1815, at Hummelstown, Pennsylvania.

In 1849, Ramsey was appointed governor of Minnesota Territory by President Zachary Taylor. In this role, he also acted as the territory’s Indian superintendent. Aware that his political future depended on his ability to open lands west of the Mississippi River for white settlement, Ramsey teamed up with his friend Henry Sibley, a former fur trader who was also the territory's delegate to the U.S. Congress. Together with Luke Lea, U.S. Commissioner of Indian Affairs, they negotiated the treaties of 1851. Ramsey was investigated and acquitted by the U.S. Congress on allegations of fraud connected to the 1851 treaty negotiations.

During his political career, Ramsey held many offices in Minnesota and Washington, D.C.: territorial governor, mayor of St. Paul, state governor, U.S. senator, and Secretary of War under President Rutherford B. Hayes. He was also a shrewd businessman, and made a sizeable fortune in real estate. Ramsey was also the first president of the Minnesota Historical Society, a post he was holding when the U.S.-Dakota War broke out in 1862.

Theme:

1862

Topics:

U.S. Government

Cite

Admin. "Alexander Ramsey." https://www3.mnhs.org/usdakotawar/stories/history/alexander-ramsey

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Resources for Further Research

Websites

Governors of Minnesota. Minnesota Historical Society.

Primary

Alexander Ramsey and family personal papers and governor’s records, 1829-1965. Minnesota Historical Society Manuscript Collection.

Glossary Terms

Alexander Ramsey

Message of Governor Ramsey to the Legislature of Minnesota, delivered at the extra session, September 9, 1862

On September 9, 1862, Alexander Ramsey made an announcement to a special session of the Minnesota Legislature: “Our course then is plain. The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of Minnesota.”

In the week leading up to this special session, the barricaded towns of Hutchinson and Forest City had been attacked, Little Crow had led an attack at Acton Township, and Dakota forces had scored a victory at Birch Coulee. Ramsey’s demand was not part of his prepared manuscript. But it captured the attention of a fearful public and was included in every published version of his speech.

Ramsey began donating material to the Minnesota Historical Society in the 1860s. Two weeks after his death in 1903, the Minneapolis Journal reported that papers from Ramsey’s terms as governor were found “in a pile of rubbish about to be burned in the capitol furnace.” Among those salvaged papers, preserved today at MNHS, are telegrams and letters to and from Abraham Lincoln during the 1862 war