'38 Nooses' reveals another Lincoln moment in history

The last thing on Abraham Lincoln's mind in 1862, as his armies bore the bloody brunt of the Civil War, was the tension mounting in Minnesota and the Dakota Territory between white settlers, Native Americans and a distant government.

(If anything, Steven Spielberg's new film, Lincoln, shows us a president caught up several years later in the back-office turmoil of the war, balancing his determination to end slavery against the realpolitik required to do so.)

But as documented by Scott W. Berg's impressive new history, 38 Nooses, America's original victims of white oppression — the many Indian tribes who were being pushed, brutally and inexorably, from their lands to the margins of Manifest Destiny — would make a tragic claim on Lincoln's attention.

An uprising of Dakota warriors, impoverished by decades of broken treaties, spurred six weeks of fearful conflict along the Minnesota frontier in 1862, before federal troops overwhelmed them, a military commission sentenced 300 of them to die and Lincoln granted clemency to all but 38.

By now, the Dakota War may seem only a sideshow of the Lincoln legend, but at the time it embodied the cruel, complex collision of the Indian nation's vulnerability with white American might and materialism. Berg, who teaches literature and writing at George Mason University, crafts a heady narrative from his extensive research. He reminds us that by the end of the 19th century, "millions of words… would be devoted to the Dakota War and its aftermath," a legacy of hatred and revenge that left countless thousands dead.

Alongside his portrait of Lincoln, Berg makes vivid his other protagonists: Little Crow, the Dakota leader whose decades of dealings with Washington, D.C., and its "Great White Fathers" left him with no illusions about the dwindling hope of his people; Henry Benjamin Whipple, a Minnesota bishop who would plead the Indian cause to Lincoln; and Sarah Wakefield, a brave Minnesota settler captured by the Dakotas during the clash — and vilified for her empathy with her captors when the fighting ended.

Not surprisingly, it is Little Crow who, from the opening pages, stands tallest in the reader's mind. Though he cautioned his inflamed warriors not to risk the wrath of the white man, he embraced his fate. In the great speech attributed to him on the eve of the Dakota War, he mourned, "We are only little herds of buffaloes left scattered… the white men are like locusts when they fly so thick that the whole sky is a snowstorm." Yet he vowed, heroically describing himself in the third person, that Little Crow "is not a coward; he will die with you."

As for Lincoln's role, Berg is no apologist for the Great Emancipator's distance and distractedness, via his 1862 message to Congress, which noted "a spirit of insubordination" on the part of Indian tribes along the frontier. The recent Union losses at Antietam weighed far more heavily on Lincoln, but he retained at least a vague sense of some greater justice for the plight of the tribes.

"I submit for your especial consideration whether our Indian system shall not be remodeled," he wrote, adding that "many wise and good men" had convinced him that "this can be profitably done." Mixed as that message may be, Lincoln showed a characteristic mercy to the Dakotas.

It's fair to say that a lesser leader might well have signed off on far more than 38 nooses.