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. The announcement that the War Department would withdraw some of the Minnesota regiments after the close of Sibley’s campaign met with such loud and repeated protests that the order, if issued, was revoked. The three companies of the Fifth, however, joined their regiment in the South at the close of the year, and the Third followed in January, 1863. The remaining infantry regiments, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth, and the regiment of twelve companies of Mounted Rangers raised in the fall of 1862, were so disposed as to form a sure cordon of defense against possible raids by hostile Indians on the settlements.