Niebuhr - Lincoln’s Bishop: A President, A Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors

All scripture quotations are from the Authorized (King James) Version.

LINCOLNS BISHOP: A President, a Priest, and the Fate of 300 Dakota Sioux Warriors. Copyright 2014 by Gustav Niebuhr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or here in after invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Niebuhr, Gustav.

Lincolns bishop : a president, a priest, and the fate of 300 Dakota Sioux warriors / Gustav Niebuhr.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-06-209768-2

EPub Edition April 2014 ISBN 9780062110992

1. Dakota IndiansWars, 18621865. 2. Dakota IndiansGovernment relationsHistory19th century. 3. Whipple, Henry Benjamin, 18221901. 4. Lincoln, Abraham, 18091865Relations with Dakota Indians. 5. Church work with IndiansEpiscopal ChurchHistory19th century. I. Title.

E83.86.N54 2014

14 15 16 17 18 RRD(H) 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To Margaret

Abraham Lincoln, 1865

{courtesy of the Universal History Archive/UIG/The Bridgeman Art Library}

Henry Benjamin Whipple, 1859

{courtesy of the Library of Congress, Brady-Hardy Photograph Collection}

Little Crow, 1862

{courtesy of the Library of Congress}

I FIRST HEARD ABOUT HENRY B. WHIPPLE WHEN I HAPPENED to be a few miles from his birthplace in Adams, New York, one early March day, cold even by northern New York standards. I had come up Interstate 81 to lecture at a community college in Watertown, the last city a driver sees before crossing the bridge over the Saint Lawrence River into Canada.

To orient me, my hosta newspaper editor deeply invested in his communityshared a handful of names of local, historic figures he admired. Whipple was near the top of his list. The name did not register with me, so he helpfully supplied an epitaph: He was the Episcopal bishop who went to see Lincoln to try to stop a mass hanging of the Sioux Indians. That sentence landed with an impact that made me want more information, and I sought it as soon as I got back to Syracuse University, where I teach. I pursued the bishop from there. I found that, yes, Whipple did go to see Lincoln about the Sioux (henceforth to be called by their own name, the Dakotas), but the visit took place in a much larger, more impressive context: years of Whipples advocacy, including several trips and letters to Washington in which the bishop demanded a sweeping reform of how the U.S. government treated Native Americans. Whipple acted as a one-man movement, seeking respect and protection for American Indians to replace the monstrous fraud and injustice to which he saw them subjected.

It took me little time to find in the story a contemporary resonance. I had recently had occasion to reread one of the most powerful Christian documents of my lifetime, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s Letter from a Birmingham Jail. It seemed to speak to Whipples best work, as a dedicated social reformer laboring on behalf of abused people amidst a time of great violence.

Kings essay, written principally to white moderates during the Civil Rights campaign in 1963, focuses on the paradox of religious figures and institutions that claim moral authority yet do little with it, despite being figuratively sunk to their breastbones in the poisonous waters of injustice. Kings prose bore heartbreaking witness. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the Souths beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?

Early Christians, he recalled, confronted head-on the Roman Empires social abuses. Their acts of dangerous defiance contrasted with the largely silent Southern church of his own time, one he said had a

Whipple does not bear comparison with King. Who does? But he possessed a motivation similar to the vision King commanded. He placed Christianity above race and ethnicityspecifically focusing on Native Americansat a time when few whites, clergy or otherwise, did likewise.

That an individual Christian might act as if the requirements of the faith trump racial and cultural divisions is a difficult task, but not an impossible one. Perhaps because something similar had happened within my own extended family, I felt all the more drawn to Whipple. In 1952, my uncle Lansing Hicks, a young Episcopal priest from North Carolina who had married my mothers middle sister, resigned in protest from his position as a professor of theology at a divinity school in Tennessee. It was the job he had always wanted. He had a toddler son, and his wife, my aunt Helen, was pregnant with their second child. But the schools trustees raised a serious moral obstacle when they declined to desegregate the school, which would have allowed African Americans to study there. Lansing, along with seven of his colleagues, rebuked the board, declaring its decision untenable in the light of Christian ethics. The trustees remained unmoved. My uncle gave up his dream job, resigning along with his seven colleagues.

In the mid-nineteenth century, journalist John OSullivan coined the phrase manifest destiny, shorthand for white Americans territorial ambitions and the related belief the Indians would vanish before them. As a newly consecrated bishop, Whipple moved to Minnesota in 1859, a year after its political leaders had adopted the idea of manifest destiny on an official state seal, showing a white farmer at his plow watching an Indian ride into the setting sun. Whipple arrived a missionary, eager to preach to Indians and whites alike, but he did not subscribe to a vision of Native American dispossession. That made him a countercultural figure.

A month after Whipple took up residence in the state, he began lobbying on the Indians behalf, and when he finally reached President Lincoln, he did so at what a less determined individual would have recognized was the worst time possible. In September 1862 the Dakota War spread death and terror across Minnesota, its principle victims white civilians; the states leaders demanded Native Americans be exterminated. That did not stop Whipple. He recognized that moral authority, when kept sheathed like a sword in its scabbard, eventually loses its purpose.