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"If we get through this war, and I live, this Indian system shall be reformed."
Abraham Lincoln to Bishop Henry Whipple, September 1862
Born in 1809, Abraham Lincoln was the 16th president of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He led the United States through the Civil War, preserving the Union while ending slavery and promoting economic and financial modernization. As president, he played a critical role during the U.S.-Dakota War and its aftermath.
Reared in a poor family on the western frontier, Lincoln was mostly self-educated. He became a country lawyer, a Whig Party leader, Illinois state legislator in the 1830s, and a one-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 1840s. After losing a Senate race to his arch-rival Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln, a moderate, secured the Republican Party nomination for president in 1860. His election led to seven southern states seceding from the Union and the formation of the Confederate States of America--and eventually to war.
With the Civil War monopolizing the government’s attention, any attempts at reforming the Indian system that Abraham Lincoln might have hoped for simply never materialized. Lincoln dealt directly with the situation in Minnesota after the U.S.-Dakota War, calling for a review of the trial transcripts of 303 Dakota men sentenced to death. Lincoln commuted the sentences of all but 39 of the convicted men.
If Lincoln had stepped in earlier to address his administration’s handling of Indian affairs, events in Minnesota might have taken a different course.
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Bibliography
Nichols, David A. Lincoln and the Indians:Civil War Policy and Politics. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1978
Whipple, Henry Benjamin. Lights and Shadows of a Long Episcopate. New York: Macmillan, 1902.
