Northern Slave, Black Dakota

The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey

Born into slavery in free territory, Joseph Godfrey died widely reviled for his controversial role in the U.S.-Dakota War of 1862. Separated from his mother at age five when his enslaver sold her, Godfrey sought refuge in his teens among the Dakota people he had befriended as a child. Godfrey married a Dakota woman and was living with his family on the Lower Sioux Reservation in 1862, when the U.S.-Dakota War broke out. Pressured to join Dakota warriors in the war's opening days, when the six-week conflict ended, he became the first of hundreds of men tried by a military court created by Commander Henry Sibley. Sibley, who was one of Godfrey's former enslavers, approved death sentences for Godfrey and 302 other Dakota soldiers.

In this riveting biography, Walt Bachman untangles the thorny questions that haunt Godfrey's story: How was he enslaved in a free state? Did he murder the frontier settlers for which the Dakota dubbed him Otakle ("Many Kills")? Did he turn traitor to save his own life? Did Godfrey's testimony send thirty-eight Dakota men, including his father-in-law, to the gallows? In this carefully researched book, Bachman argues that the 1862 war trials, which ended with the largest mass execution in U.S. history, were both more just and more unfair than we have ever understood.

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