Beschreibung:

LINCOLN, ABRAHAM, President Manuscript document signed in full as President, countersigned by Joseph Wilson acting Commissioner of the General Land Office, Washington, D.C., 23 August 1864. 1 1/2 pages, large folio, 423 x 279 mm. (16 5/8 x 10 15/16 in.), written in a clear secretarial hand on lined paper, the text occupying pages 1 and 4 of a four-page sheet, minor wear at fold intersections neatly strengthened. "TO THE HIGHEST BIDDER AT PUBLIC OUTCRY": THE REMOVAL OF THE WINNEBAGO TRIBE One of a very few documents which directly connect the sixteenth President to the tragic and frequently brutal treatment of native Americans on the frontier. The document gives Presidential authorization for the sale at auction of the homes, farms and woodlands granted to the Winnebago tribe by treaties, which they had occupied peacefully since 1855. Those treaties were abrogated by Congress in February 1863 by laws initiated by local landowners and commercial interests in the aftermath of the Sioux tribes' depredations in Minnesota. The document is headed: "By the President of the United States," and, beneath, "For the Sale of Valuable Land in the Late Winnebago Indian Reservation." It continues: "In pursuance of law, I, Abraham Lincoln...do hereby declare and make known that public sales will be held...in the State of Minnesota...at the Land Office at St. Peter...for the disposal of the Public Lands comprised in the late reserve for the Winnebago Indians...situated in the following parts of townships...which will be sold at the appraised value of the land and the improvements thereon...." There follows a description of the location of the tracts, (comprising some 55,000 acres) which had been, until May 1863, the Winnebago tribe's reservation, and other information regarding the public sale of these lands. The place and date of the document, and the signatures of President Lincoln and Wilson, follow. At the bottom of the first page, continuing onto the second, is a supplementary notice headed, "Notice to Actual, bona fide Settlers," which details the provisions of the Congressional Act of 21 February 1863 concerning the procedure for obtaining these lands by "pre-emption...previous to their exposure to sale to the highest bidder at public outcry." The Winnebagos had been removed from ancestral lands in Iowa to lands at Long Prairie, Minnesota, in 1848, then, by the 1855 treaty, to the Blue Earth River lands in south central Minnesota (southwest of Minneapolis-St. Paul, near present-day Mankato). Here they cleared lands, planted crops and established farms. In August 1862, though, the Sioux tribes settled nearby mounted savage attacks against local white settlements. As Lincoln explained in his annual address to Congress of 1 December 1862: the Sioux "attacked the settlements in their vicinity with extreme ferocity, killing indiscriminately, men, women, and children. This attack was wholly unexpected...The State of Minnesota has suffered great injury...The people of that State manifest much anxiety for the removal of the tribes beyond the limits of the State as a guarantee against future hostilities...." (Basler, 5:525-526.) Some 300 Indians, all Sioux, were captured by the U.S. Army and, before a military tribunal, sentenced to hang. Lincoln's well-known Presidential order to Governor Sibley of 6 December 1862, pardoned all but 39 whose direct involvement in the massacre could be proven (Basler 5:542-543). But on 16th December, Representative William Windom and Senator Morton Wilkinson, both of Minnesota, introduced legislation in Congress abrogating the previous treaties and prescribing the forced removal of the peaceful Winnebagos as well as the warlike Sioux. The Winnebago removal act passed on February 21, 1863; the Sioux removal act a few days later. Both tribes, it was decreed, would be transported by river steamers from Fort Snelling (present-day Minneapolis) and resettled on unoccupied (and inhospitable) lands near Fort Randall