The Fort Snelling internment camp housed ~1,700 Dakota non-combatants through the brutal Minnesota winter of 1862-63. Conditions were catastrophic: the camp was overcrowded, disease rampant, and mobs of settlers attacked the camp repeatedly. An estimated 130 Dakota died during the winter. In spring 1863 the survivors were forcibly shipped on steamboats to the Crow Creek reservation in Dakota Territory, where conditions were even worse. The Fort Snelling camp was the first step in the collective punishment of all Dakota for the war, including those who had aided white captives.
The American Civil War (1861–1865) was the deadliest conflict in American history, killing an estimated 620,000 to 750,000 soldiers and an unknown number of civilians. The Confederate States of America, formed by eleven seceding Southern states, faced the Union in four years of warfare across 23 states and territories. Major engagements included First and Second Bull Run, Antietam (the bloodiest single day in American history, September 17, 1862), Chancellorsville, Gettysburg (July 1–3, 1863), Vicksburg (surrendered July 4, 1863), and Sherman's March through Georgia and the Carolinas (1864–1865). President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, transforming the war's stated purpose to include the abolition of slavery and enabling the enlistment of approximately 180,000 Black men in the United States Colored Troops. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House on April 9, 1865. The war resolved the question of secession and ended American slavery, though Reconstruction would face sustained resistance in its attempt to secure civil rights for formerly enslaved people.
~130 Dakota died from disease, exposure, and mob violence
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