Description:

Harrison, (President) Benjamin

Benjamin Harrison Signed Letter Demanding a Copy of the Dawes Bill, Re: Division and Distribution of Indian Land

 

Single page letter signed on United States Senate letterhead, Indpls Ind, 4.75" x 8." Dated "July 6, 1885," and signed by Benjamin Harrison as "Benj Harrison." Verso of top edge with mounting remnants, with faint bleed through to recto along top.

 

Letter penned requesting to be sent "at once a copy of Senate Bill #1755 - the Dawes (illegible) Bill - and also the report made on the bill by the Committee."

 

During the 1850s, the United States federal government's attempt to exert control over the Native Americans expanded. Numerous new European immigrants were settling on the eastern border of the Indian territories, where most of the Native American tribes were situated. Conflicts between the groups increased as they competed for resources and operated according to different cultural systems. Many European Americans did not believe that members of the two racial societies could coexist within the same communities. The Commissioner of Indian Affairs proposed establishing "colonies" or "reservations" that would be exclusively for the natives, similar to those which some native tribes had created for themselves in the east. It was a form of removal whereby the US government would uproot the natives from their current locations to areas in the region beyond the Mississippi River; this would enable settlement by European Americans in the Southeast in turn opening up new placement for the new white settlers and at the same time protecting them from the corrupt "evil" ways of the subordinate natives.

 

The new policy intended to concentrate Native Americans in areas away from encroaching settlers, but it caused considerable suffering and many deaths. During the nineteenth century, Native American tribes resisted the imposition of the reservation system and engaged with the United States Army in what were called the Indian Wars in the West for decades.

 

The Indians' failure to adopt the "Euroamerican" lifestyle, which was the social norm in the United States at the time, was seen as both unacceptable and uncivilized. And by the end of the 1880s, a general consensus seems to have been reached among many US stakeholders that the assimilation of Native Americans into American culture was top priority; it was the time for them to leave behind their tribal landholding, reservations, traditions and ultimately their Indian identities.

 

The Harrison signed letter offered here noted the Senate Bill that led up to the Dawes Allotment Act. The Dawes Act was ultimately signed into law by President Grover Cleveland on February 8, 1887, authorizing the President of the United States to survey American Indian tribal land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. Those who accepted allotments and lived separately from the tribe would be granted United States citizenship. The Dawes Act had a negative effect on American Indians, as it ended their communal holding of property (with crop land often being privately owned by families or clans), by which they had ensured that everyone had a home and a place in the tribe. The act "was the culmination of American attempts to destroy tribes and their governments and to open Indian lands to settlement by non-Indians and to development by railroads.


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