On the morning of December 26, 1862, 38 men were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, on a single gallows. It was the country's largest-ever simultaneous execution. The execution of these men, who were all Dakota Indians, marked the end of the first chapter of the most bloody American Indian war in history. It was a brief conflict, with real fighting lasting only six weeks, but it claimed more lives than any previous war throughout the American frontier period.
Colonel Henry Hastings Sibley, the officer in charge of US Army forces in the field, formed a military trial to prosecute Dakotas accused of various atrocities in the aftermath of the devastation. This hurried, the on-the-spot court held 392 trials and condemned 303 criminals to death As a result, 38 people were executed.
Convicting someone of a crime that never happened is perhaps the worst miscarriage of justice, much worse than an innocent person being wrongfully convicted of a crime. Several schools of thought believe that this is exactly what occurred to the Indians who were tried by Sibley's infamous military commission. One argument is that the violence that typified the Dakota War of 1862 was entirely justified because it was in keeping with the Dakota's historic, established combat practice. Even the purposeful, unrestrained slaughter of women and children, according to this view, was not a war crime and should not have been tried under European-American legitimate warfare codifications.
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