• BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    303 natives were convicted and sentenced to death following the Dakota War of 1862. Lincoln actually commuted the sentences of 264 of those natives, allowing the convictions to stand only for those he believed personally engaged in the murder of innocent women and children.

    Therefore, the last one is deliberately and intentionally misleading.

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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      34 minutes ago

      The Dakota War came out of a strategic starvation campaign imposed by the Union Army over Sioux Territory. The original tribes had been forced off the productive soil around the Minnesota River and displaced into barren wasteland. Subsequent crop failure and long winter made trading for foodstuffs from their home territories the only means of survival. And the settlers took maximum advantage, deliberately scamming and price gouging the Sioux for the remains of their family wealth. This, after a series of treaties had been casually violated from administration to administration.

      The war was quite literally a fight for survival by the Sioux. Lincoln’s largess in hanging only the young men directly involved in the raid did nothing to prevent the Sioux population from continuing its rapid decline, as the surviving elders were left to starve to death in the wilderness and the children were forced into Christian schools notorious for brutalizing and killing the kidnapped youths.

    • Randomgal@lemmy.ca
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      5 hours ago

      He didn’t kill ALL the innocent, whose land he stole and whose relatives he murdered. Only those that dated fight back.

      Yeah, sounds like Trump.