Henry Whipple’s September had been dominated by two extraordinary events: his audience with Abraham Lincoln and his visit to the Antietam battlefield. Neither of these, however, had been the original purpose of his journey to the East, and at the beginning of October 1862 he finally arrived in New York City for the triannual meeting of the nation’s Episcopal bishops. As turbulent weather darkened the skies above Manhattan, the bishops gathered to discuss the subject of disunion within the church as well as the country. Complex and heartfelt questions of politics and preaching, of Christianity and country, were complicated by questions about the “most unhappy contest,” the bitter fruit of a nation, as Whipple was wont to say, “subdued by pride and vain boasting.”
The bursting metropolis that received him was not, like Washington, a bifurcated city, showing a Northern face to the world but pumping plenty of Southern blood through its veins. Rather, New York was a kaleidoscope: rich and poor, native and foreign, serious and frivolous, idealistic and conniving, peace-loving and warlike. Union and Confederate sympathies alike were expressed often and in public. Growing all the time, the city pushed northward to extend its arms around brand-new Central Park, where the luxurious estate villas of the early nineteenth century were being replaced by closely spaced brick and stone towers. The intersection called Five Points was a powder keg of conflict between Irish Catholic immigrants and American-born “natives,” a patch of ground that boasted a murder rate unheard of in the nation’s urban history before or since. Four thousand workers at the Navy Yard made and repaired the frigates necessary for the Union blockade of Southern ports, while the rest of the city’s manufacturing apparatus worked full tilt to supply clothes, arms, tents, wagons, and a thousand other items to the war effort. And all the while Boss Tweed continued to press every corner of municipal life inside a vise grip that was making “Tammany Hall”—named after a Lenape Indian chief—a synonym for corruption, graft, and backroom patronage.
Soldiers from all of New York and New England filled Rikers Island with the barks and snaps of innumerable training drills before they marched down Broadway in smart rows to board trains destined for distant battlefields. The Italianate brownstone of the Cooper Union’s Foundation Building, just east of Greenwich Village, was already a landmark thanks to Lincoln’s famous speech two years earlier, and nearby on Broadway Mathew Brady’s photography studio, in business for eighteen years already, displayed a simple placard out front advertising “The Dead at Antietam.” This gallery, the object of much critical appreciation and morbid curiosity, attracted thousands of visitors who came to see the most arresting images many of them would ever witness, human carcasses by the score, many photographed on the two days that Bishop Whipple had been at the battlefield.
The majority of the city’s working poor were Democratic and anti-Lincoln, opposed to his recent proclamation, skeptical of the war, and resistant to the president’s threats of conscription should the requisite number of volunteers fail to appear. Across the East River, a “meeting of the colored people of Brooklyn” was taking place to consider Lincoln’s oft-repeated proposal to settle contraband slaves in Panama, Honduras, or some other Central American locale, plans that had little appeal for the blacks of Brooklyn or of any other city in the country, whose “prevailing sentiment was against a forced emigration to any place.”
Amid this storm-swept sea of humanity, twenty Episcopal bishops and various laymen and clergy from across the Union gathered at Saint John’s Chapel, which faced a gated park in a neighborhood full of aristocratic mansions, midway between Broadway and the Hudson River. The convention of bishops officially opened on October 2, when “the Secretary called for delegates from Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee and Kansas, but from none of them was there any response.” The next two days were given over to debate of a resolution calling for prayer for the return of the Southern members, “petitioning the Almighty to change their minds and restore them to the truth,” a wrenching argument that became less polite when Francis Vinton, minister of New York’s Trinity Church, announced that “the South has ignored the Prayer-Book, has ignored the Church, and is in rebellion to the Church.” The resolution was eventually tabled by a large majority to avoid taking any “irritating action,” but it laid bare important divisions between the ostensibly apolitical High Church Episcopalians and the more socially engaged Low.
Whipple did not fall neatly into either category. His desire for sectional union between North and South at the expense of the cause of abolition might have been High Church, but his muddy boots and his clamor for reform of the Indian system were decidedly Low. This was the aspect of his character most visible on the afternoon of October 5, when he delivered a sermon at Saint Thomas Church, a quarter mile up the island at the corner of Broadway and Houston Street in Greenwich Village. Still nursing his stubborn hand infection, Whipple announced that he would not be speaking on a passage from Scripture but rather that “his entire theme” would be “the condition of the Missions of the Church in the Far West.” “The Far West” meant Minnesota, and “Missions” meant the Indian ministries, an undertaking, Whipple told his audience, that many of his parishioners and fellow clergy had urged him to avoid. For those assembled in the pews of Saint Thomas’s he emphasized the travels, thousands of miles already by his calculation, on foot, on horseback, and by canoe, that had led him to four conclusions: “First, the American Indian is more brave, more truthful and more virtuous than any other heathen on earth; second, that he is the only heathen who believes in God, who is not an idolator; third, that he retains the old patriarchal form of government that was known in the earliest days of the race; and fourth, that it was after he came in contact with white men, and those who had acted for our government, that he first became demoralized.”
Speaking to an Eastern audience that lacked immediate experience with the violence of frontier life, he laid out what he saw as the causes of the Dakota War: the treaty of 1858, which he credited partly to Little Crow’s influence, that had given away 800,000 acres without consulting most of the Indians affected; the siphoning of more than $100,000 worth of annuity gold over three years’ time; and most of all, he said, “the actual starving to death of the children of chiefs for absolute want, owing to this neglect; women destroyed by brutal violence, and cruel robberies committed by the whites.” These, he said, “had been the dreadful causes that had led to the recent outbreaks and massacres, unparalleled in Indian annals.”
The New York Times praised the sermon as “a valuable, eloquent and powerful discourse,” and Whipple was gratified by the reaction of his audience. These were the people he could count on to donate twenty dollars, fifty, a hundred to the relief of the displaced settlers and the work of his Indian missions. Whipple’s purposes on this trip, though, ran deeper. His text repeated claims and criticisms he’d made before, but in the brand-new context of a war on the frontier that was starting to gain space in Eastern newspapers, the sermon was also a rehearsal. Whipple had already made plans to deliver the same message to the people of Minnesota upon his return, and as much as he trusted in his powers of persuasion, he had no illusions about receiving a similarly enthusiastic response.
Since arriving in Minnesota in mid-September, John Pope had been agitating for the delivery of some five thousand former Union prisoners to the frontier so that they could be used to fight Indians, a plan the Richmond Dispatch considered to be a serious breach of the wartime protocols governing the actions of men released on parole. The New York Times responded to its Southern sister with a paraphrase of the editors’ argument—“If our Government should send paroled prisoners of war to fight against the Indians, it would be guilty of a ‘breach of faith’ toward the rebel Government”—and a heavy dose of sarcasm that nonetheless expressed an opinion that the people of Minnesota and some members of the executive branch were still taking very seriously.
Are the Indians of the West part and parcel of the rebel Confederacy? Have the rebel authorities taken these savages into their service? Are the acts of atrocious brutality, by which those savage raids upon Western towns have been marked—the massacre of helpless families, the tomahawking of women and children, the burning of houses, the wholesale butchery of the innocent and defenceless—are these acts done under the sanction of the Confederate Government? And does it intend to extend over them protection of its authority?
As the Episcopal bishops met in the East, out on the frontier General Sibley was writing to General Pope to inform him of the progress of the trials and to describe his own efforts to bring in more of the Dakota from upriver. At the beginning of October a large group of Mdewakantons and Wahpekutes that had broken off from Little Crow’s party sent a runner south to communicate their desire to surrender and join the friendly camp, to which Sibley replied that they must send “in advance two of their principal men with a white flag” and that he would “see that no innocent person is injured who comes to me without delay.” What the flag of truce and the word “innocent” meant at this moment in Sibley’s mind and the minds of the Dakota was to become a point of argument, confusion, and moral ambiguity thereafter, but Sibley had no time or desire for such deliberations.
“The greater part of the men are deeply implicated in the late outrages,” he wrote to Pope. Now that most of the breakaway parties from Little Crow’s procession had come into Camp Release and no longer needed luring with suggestions of clemency, Sibley added, the executions of all the condemned Dakota should be swift, orderly, and very public. He then escalated his rhetoric to a pitch it rarely reached otherwise. “I have given them no assurances except that such as were innocent and the women and children should be protected,” he wrote, “and I repeated to them what I had previously stated in my message to them, that if any more of their young men went off to war upon the whites I would fall upon their camp and cut them to pieces, without regard to age or sex.” The language, wildly uncharacteristic of Sibley, was surely a bluff, not entirely different from Little Crow’s repeated threats to kill all of his white captives. Fear was the coin of the day, spent by both sides. But it was also language that Pope and Ramsey, who so often spoke of “exterminating” the Dakota, viewed in an entirely approving light.
On October 4, the men, women, and children of eighty-six lodges returned from Little Crow’s train and other points to the west, bringing the number of Dakotas and mixed-bloods at Camp Release to around twelve hundred, perhaps a quarter of them men of fighting age. Soon afterwards Sibley ordered that those Dakotas yet unarrested be moved down to the banks of the Yellow Medicine River near the Upper Agency and tasked with digging potatoes and turnips under a small guard. Sibley also began to issue a steady stream of general orders prohibiting his men from entering the Indian camps or otherwise interacting with the Dakota. He knew that many of his soldiers, especially the newly recruited enlisted men, were as inflamed against the Dakota as the most aggrieved settler. All the while Sibley received a never-ending stream of instructions from Pope, who sat ensconced at the International Hotel in Saint Paul sending frantic, sometimes maddening dispatches that seemed to have nothing to do with Sibley’s reality.
For three weeks Pope had promised to send “all the men necessary” up the river valley, ordering in the meantime that Sibley should move the majority of his army out to the border of the Dakota Territory, “destroying crops and everything else belonging to the Dakota” in order to forestall the return of Little Crow with an imagined force of Plains Indians. This instruction, repeated ad nauseam, ignored the presence of hundreds, even thousands, of friendly Sisseton and Wahpeton Dakotas near the Minnesota border, as well as the approaching winter weather, the need to manage the ever-growing population at Camp Release and the Upper Agency, and the fact that Little Crow’s force was by now clearly bent only on escape, with no way to make designs on Minnesotans or their property at least until the following spring. Sibley had no plan to send his main force any farther to the west, knowing that his soldiers could go only a short distance before the winter snows began to fall and forced them back into the state.
In response after response to Pope, Sibley politely outlined hindrances that worked to “embarrass the command.” Even now, eight weeks after the war began, he could muster only a hundred or so mounted men, none with enough experience as cavalry to lead a cross-country expedition into hostile and unfamiliar territory. He had no ready supply of bread or meat for his soldiers and little hay for his animals. Coats and other clothing appropriate to the coming cold were in short supply, as were blankets and a sufficient quantity of bullets matched to the rifles carried by his men. Over and over Sibley expressed his concern that Pope’s orders to chase after the fleeing Dakota would only put the captives with Little Crow in greater danger and result in nothing but misery for his soldiers. As for himself, Sibley wanted out. He had accepted his command and laid aside his political and business affairs at the governor’s personal request, but he was feeling his age and did not believe that a more qualified federal officer could not be brought west to replace him. He had closed his first communication to Pope, in September, by writing, “I would not have been displeased to learn that you had selected as my successor in command some one of the gentlemen under your orders who has military qualifications, for to such I make little pretension,” and nothing had since changed his mind.
The temperamental difference between the two commanders was pronounced. Pope was aggressive, sloppy with facts, full of braggadocio, and prone to let the emotions of his day, or even his hour, play out in every written dispatch and personal exchange. Sibley’s approach to their correspondence was even-toned, patient, and forbearing, though his letters did become more insistent, sprinkled with a clenched-teeth exasperation that Pope must have noticed. Sibley was acting out of four decades’ familiarity with the Dakota and viewed the actions of Little Crow and the other hostile chiefs as, in part, a personal and professional betrayal. Pope knew nothing about the Dakota and imagined them as part of one savage curtain strung across the West, with none of Sibley’s understanding of cultural nuances, band and tribal differences, or individual histories.
Most of all, though, Pope was still acting out of the furious sense of injustice he had carried with him on the train to Minnesota. His letters teemed with impotent anger at finding himself in the hinterlands and out of federal favor, an anger that took the form of great proclamations of doom: the doom that had descended on whites and the doom he would visit on their Dakota malefactors. He sent his biggest and loudest bombshell of a letter, the most intemperate of an intemperate lot, on October 6, at the end of the first week of trials. Sibley, at this moment, was managing several exigencies: the progress of his military commission, the division of the Dakota into guilty and innocent, his own desire for firm retribution, and especially the logistical demands that went with the command of thousands of soldiers and the charge of thousands of Dakotas in circumstances that threatened every day to slip free of his control. In Saint Paul, where Sibley’s concerns—never mind those of the Dakota—were seen at a great distance, voices were speaking over Pope’s shoulder to disparage Sibley’s cautious progress and to express amazement about Sibley’s assurances of protection for innocent Dakotas.
Pope’s letter to Sibley of October 6 began with a broadside. “I have received no dispatches from you since the meeting of the commission for trying Indians,” Pope wrote, “but I consider it proper to inform you, that many persons from your camp have brought accounts very unsatisfactory of the proceedings, and which have excited the greatest indignation among the people here.”
Pope was hearing from unspecified informants that Sibley had offered a flag of truce, that the friendly Dakota had been moved to the Upper Agency, that many of these friendly Dakota were still armed, and that Sibley was not, in fact, showing any signs of dashing off after Little Crow with two thousand men. These “accounts” were on the mark. But Pope didn’t spend a moment wondering or inquiring why Sibley might have made these choices; rather, he told Sibley to announce a $500 reward for Little Crow, dead or alive, and added that any whites “shielding” the Dakota—whatever that word might mean—should be considered as treasonous individuals and “summarily executed.” “I think still that the Indians with you should be disarmed, and brought down here,” Pope wrote, “here” meaning Fort Snelling. “I will take care of them here for the winter, and put them beyond the possibility of doing mischief, execute at once any convicted of any sort of complicity in the late outrages.”
Why Sibley’s most recent messages, written on October 1, 3, and 5, hadn’t yet reached Pope is unknown, but that very day, perhaps only an hour or two after Pope handed his own letter to a courier, they arrived. Pope read them quickly, including Sibley’s uncharacteristic threat to “fall upon the [Dakota] camp and cut them to pieces, without regard to age or sex,” should any further attacks occur. Here, apparently, was the firm tone and draconian attitude Pope preferred. In any case, the next afternoon Pope overturned his instructions of the previous day, writing to Sibley with orders that trials should continue and that he should “disarm, and send down to Fort Snelling, all the Indians men women and children of the Sioux tribe, upon whom you can lay your hands” in preparation for sending all of the Dakota not slated for execution “beyond the limits of the state in the spring.” Three days later Pope completed his instructions to Sibley: “The whole of the Indians, men, women and children, should be brought as prisoners to the Lower Agency where the culprits must be executed in the presence of the whole tribe.”
So as to follow Pope’s orders to treat all the Dakotas “as prisoners,” then, Sibley directed his men to arrest more than 250 Dakota men at the Upper Agency who had not already been tried by the military commission, many of whom had been part of the friendly camp since the formation of the peace party. To separate these men from their families without causing a disturbance, Samuel J. Brown was sent into the Indian camp near the Upper Agency to tell an assembled crowd that the yearly annuity had finally come in and that the men were to gather in order to be “counted,” or registered for the payment. It is a comment on the different worldviews at play, the belief still held by the friendly Dakota that any whites in power might understand their grievances and believe them innocent, that the trickery worked at all.
The playacting began around noon, probably on October 11, when the Indian agent Thomas Galbraith and a captain from Sibley’s command positioned themselves at a table in front of the burned-out brick shell of the warehouse that had once housed John Wakefield’s office. Whole families of Dakotas approached the table and were tallied with prop pencils on prop tablets, after which a soldier motioned each group to go to the doorway at the other end of the warehouse. Brown described the process of selection and separation.
I would tell the men to step inside and allow the women and children to pass on to the camp, telling them, as I was instructed to do, that the men as heads of families must be counted separately, as it was thought the government would pay them extra. I would then take their guns, tomahawks, scalping knives, etc., and throw them into barrels, telling them they would be returned shortly.
Meanwhile, the arrests accelerated among the remaining Dakota near Camp Release, a succession of moments that were terrifying for his Dakota charges and troubling, if no more, to Sibley himself, who wrote to his wife that “the poor women’s wailings, when separated from their husbands, fathers, and sons are piteous indeed, and I dislike to go in person to their lodges, when I have orders for their removal.” He also noted that any qualms about the process were lessened by the discovery in some tents of dresses, wallets, jewelry, shoes, and other personal items from killed or captured whites. The makeshift log jail at Camp Release swelled to capacity and was placed under heavy guard as Sibley prepared to fulfill the second part of Pope’s orders and move all of the Dakota down to the Lower Agency, where the trials would continue and the executions begin.
Years later a sergeant named A. P. Connolly who had been stationed at Camp Release would write that “the orders were very strict about guarding the Indians, but on the sly many acts of cruelty were indulged in by the soldiers that would hardly be warranted, for we should not for a moment forget the fact that they were our prisoners and we were not savages and should not indulge in savage propensities.” And another officer, Thomas Watts, would tell a newspaper editor that some of the younger men had developed a plan to slaughter all of the Dakota under their watch: “At a given signal the guard surrounding the camp was to retire, then the battery was to shell the camp and the infantry was to do its work, and what was left, if any, the cavalry was to finish.” Sibley thought such threats serious enough that he gathered his troops and threatened courts-martial, following which his officers spoke to their respective companies. “It was promised that the Indians should be court marshaled immediately,” Watts wrote, “and that we should have the privilege of hanging the guilty ones.” Protecting the Dakota was, their commanders urged, a way of reserving the right to kill the Dakota themselves.
On October 12, one or two days after the mass arrests at the Upper Agency, the skies opened up, leaving the procession to travel over mile after mile of slick, rutted road. Early the following morning, the Renville Rangers, the partial company of white and mixed-blood soldiers raised by Thomas Galbraith, led the great convoy away from the Upper Agency. Infantry, wagons, oxcarts, cattle, cannon, and howitzers moved through the slop as a northern winter wind descended in all its fury. Some miles behind them followed Sibley with his men and his prisoners, two dozen of them, including Chaska, already condemned to death. All told, several hundred soldiers, nearly four hundred prisoners, and twelve hundred women, children, and elderly Dakota trudged in two miserable lines toward the Lower Agency, where the skeletal forms of more burned buildings still stood open to the early-winter air, and makeshift graves dotted the earth.