The action of the military commission met with general approval throughout the state. Citizens of St. Paul in public meeting demanded that the government authorities, as the chosen instruments of divine vengeance, should so execute their duty that the friends and relatives of the victims should not be compelled to take vengeance into their own hands. General Pope advised President Lincoln that unless all the executions were made, an indiscriminate massacre of all the Indian prisoners, innocent and guilty, would take place. Governor Ramsey also expressed the same opinion to the President. The Minnesota delegation in Congress, Senator Rice not signing, protested against the convicts being considered prisoners of war, and declared that the outraged citizens of Minnesota would dispose of the wretches without law, if they should not be executed according to law. On the other hand, there went to the President appeals and protests against a horrible wholesale execution, from members of the Friends Society and various humanitarian organizations. So far as known there was but one public man in Minnesota whose judgment was not subjugated by the passion of the hour. He was Henry Benjamin Whipple, bishop of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who three years before the Sioux outbreak had come to the state. Immediately after his arrival his attention was called to the red men of his diocese, and it was not long before he had fathomed the iniquities of the traditional Indian system. In March, 1862, he addressed an open letter to President Lincoln, summarizing those iniquities, and insisting on giving the Indian a government of law, administered by agents chosen for fitness and not for political service. A calm and clear statement of the policy and the train of events which had led to the outbreak of the Sioux, published in the St. Paul newspapers, brought about the bishop a whirlwind of denunciation which would have taken an ordinary man off his feet. Bishop Whipple never budged an inch. His personal representations to the President no doubt had their effect in the action which followed. On the day when General Pope was hopefully awaiting the President’s permission to execute the whole batch of the condemned, he received a telegraphic order from Lincoln to send him the record of the trials. This the President put into the hands of two men on whom he relied. They reported that forty of the convicts only had committed murders of unarmed citizens. Of this number, two only were guilty of outrages on women. On December 6, 1862, President Lincoln wrote out and signed with his own hand his order for the execution of thirty-eight, directing the remainder to be safely held, subject to further orders. One of the forty had been allowed a commutation to ten years’ imprisonment, another a reprieve. The condemned were separated from their comrades and closely confined in irons in a log building on the main street of Mankato. All but two were baptized, thirty-two by the Catholic father Ravoux. On December 26, 1862, the execution took place in presence of a great crowd. Some years after, the Rev. Mr. Riggs publicly stated that mistakes were made in the separation of the condemned from the body of convicts, ‘but not intentionally.’ The bodies were buried, but not to stay underground. Many, if not all, were distributed among members of the medical profession, to be used in the cause of science. The excitement of the people soon abated, and the opinion at length prevailed that the crimes of the Indians had been sufficiently atoned. Some of the survivors might have preferred the fate of those who suffered at Mankato.