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To John Pope1Jump to section
St. Paul, Minnesota Washington, Nov. 10. 1862.
Your despatch giving the names of three hundred Indians condemned to death, is received. Please forward, as soon as possible, the full and complete record of these convictions. And if the record does not fully indicate the more guilty and influential, of the culprits, please have a careful statement made on these points and forwarded to me. Send all by mail. A. LINCOLN.
Annotation
[1] ALS, owned by Dale Carnegie, New York City. Pope's telegram of November 7, listing the names of Indians condemned by the military commission at the Lower Sioux Agency, was received at 7:40 P.M., November 8. Governor Alexander Ramsey telegraphed Lincoln on November 10, ``I hope the execution of every Sioux Indian condemned by the military court will be at once ordered. It would be wrong upon principle and policy to refuse this. Private revenge would on all this border take the place of official judgment on these Indians.'' (OR, I, XIII, 787). On November 11 Lincoln endorsed Ramsey's telegram ``Respectfully referred to Secretary of War.''
On November 11 Pope replied to Lincoln's message of November 10 as follows: ``Your dispatch of yesterday received. Will comply with your wishes immediately. I desire to represent . . . that the only distinction between the culprits is as to which of them murdered most people or violated most young girls. All of them are guilty of these things in more or less degree. The people . . . are exasperated . . . and if the guilty are not all executed I think it nearly impossible to prevent the indiscriminate massacre of all the Indians---old men, women, and children. . . .'' (Ibid.,788).
Succeeding telegrams from Pope on November 24 and Ramsey on November 28 (DLC-RTL) insisted on the necessity for speedy execution, but on November 28 in conference with Senator Morton S. Wilkinson and Representative Cyrus Aldrich, who pressed for immediate execution, Lincoln ``promised to . . . make a final determination upon it after completing his [Annual] Message.'' (New York Tribune, November 29, 1862). See further Lincoln to Joseph Holt, December 1, infra.