According to military practice at the time, all two thousand should have been released. Describing this in his book Heartbeat of Wounded Knee, David Treuer calls this the actions of a sovereign nation rising up against foreign invaders. It was a military action with a military result. But Lincoln ultimately approved thirty-nine executions in the largest mass hanging in US history. The rest of the surviving Dakota were evicted from the state of Minnesota and sent to reservations in Nebraska and the Dakotas. Confederate soldiers, who also took up arms against the United States of America, were
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