Critics often cite Lincoln’s approval of the executions of 38 Dakota men accused of participating in a violent uprising it remains to this day the largest mass execution in United States history. Writing for Washington Monthly in 2013, Sherry Salway Black (Oglala Lakota) suggested that the “majority of his policies proved to be detrimental” to Indigenous Americans, resulting in significant loss of land and life. Lincoln’s treatment of Native Americans, meanwhile, is a complex issue. On January 1, 1863, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared enslaved people in areas under Confederate control to be “forever free.” Two years later he used all of the political capital he could muster to push the 13th Amendment through Congress, permanently abolishing slavery in the United States. Such a statement would have perplexed most Americans who lived through the Civil War. Last month, the San Francisco Unified School District voted to rename Abraham Lincoln High School because of the former president’s policies toward Native Americans and African Americans.Īs Jeremiah Jeffries, chairman of the renaming committee and a first grade teacher, argued, “Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building.” Famed illustrator Thomas Nast designed this celebration of emancipation, with Abraham Lincoln inset at the bottom, in 1865

Rex hamilton as abraham lincoln