urther
orders, taking care that they neither escape nor are subjected
to any unlawful violence.

"ABRAHAM LINCOLN,
"_President of the United States._"

Colonel Sibley had been appointed, by President Lincoln, a brigadier
general, on the 29th of September, 1862, on account of his success at
the battle of Wood Lake, the announcement of his promotion being in a
telegram, as follows:

"Washington, D. C., Sept. 29, 1862.
"_Major General Pope, St. Paul, Minn._,

"Colonel Henry H. Sibley is made a brigadier general for his
judicious fight at Yellow Medicine. He should be kept in command
of that column, and every possible assistance sent to him.

"H. W. HALLECK,
"_General in Chief_."

His commission as brigadier general was not issued until March 26, 1864,
but, of course, this telegram amounted to an appointment to the
position, and if accepted, as it was, made him subject to the orders of
the president; so, notwithstanding his dispatch to me, stating that the
Indians, if convicted, would be forthwith executed, he could not very
well carry out such an extreme duty without first submitting it to the
federal authorities, of which he had become a part.

My view of the question has always been that, when the court martial was
organized, Colonel Sibley had no idea that more than twenty or
twenty-five of the Indians would be convicted, which is partly
inferrable from his dispatch to me, in which he said he had "apprehended
sixteen supposed to have been connected with the late outrages." But
when the matter assumed the proportions it did, and he found on his
hands some three hundred men to kill, he was glad to shift the
responsibility to higher authority. Any humane man would have been of
the same mind. I have my own views, also, of the reasons of the general
government in eliminating from the list of the condemned all but
thirty-nine. It was not because these thirty-nine were more guilty than
the rest, but because we were engaged in a great civil war, and the eyes
of the world were upon us. Had these three hundred men been executed,
the charge would have undoubtedly been made by the South, that the
North was murdering prisoners of war, and the authorities at Washington,
knowing full well that the other nations were not capable of making the
proper discrimination, and perhaps not anxious to do so if they were,
deemed it safer not to incur the odi