Abstract
To understand Henry Dawes’ ideas and projects—for example his General Allotment Act—, we have to understand his upbringing and his professional and political experiences. Values like integrity, perseverance and stewardship are explicable from a puritan and disciplined background centered on duty and morality before self-interest. But for Dawes as for most of his colleagues, the individual’s nature and rights are foundational to America’s essence and finality. We think that these ideas and values, which are inherent to the nation’s philosophical roots, explain Dawes’ thinking about the Natives. In this chapter, we want to illuminate such a “liberal” posture by studying Dawes’ upbringing and career, but mostly by replacing him and his ideas in their historical context, which is highly liberal, individualistic and competitive. Territorial expansion, economic opportunism and free trade do not give much place to the Indian’s communalist way of life and to the tribes’ inherent and treaty rights. Tribal institutions—their mere existence—and traditional resources are considered restraints to the citizen’s prosperity. The Native American’s situation deteriorates in front of a policy founded on an axiology and agenda centered on an opportunism whose goal is to realize what is considered a “national destiny.”
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Notes
- 1.
See generally Nicklason, The Early Career.
- 2.
Ibid., pp. 77, 85–86 and 114.
- 3.
Arcanti, “To Secure the Party,” p. 43.
- 4.
Nicklason, The Early Career, pp. 51–52, 115, 132 and 362.
- 5.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” p. 35, and idem, The Early Career, pp. 308–324.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 113.
- 7.
Ibid., p. 361.
- 8.
Henry L. Dawes, The Mode of Procedure in Cases of Contested Elections: A Paper Read at the General Meeting of the American Social Science Association at New York, October 26, 1869 (New York, Nation Press, 1869), pp. 1–12. Dawes thus depicts through his posture what has been said of the American system. The scope of the choice or vote of each citizen needs to be maximized. This political individualism, characterized as “civilized,” is differentiated from a collectivism linked with “savagery.” The political and legal apparatus has the mandate to protect private possession, which can be as much a parcel of land as an idea or a vote. Seymour Martin Lipset, North American Cultures: Values and Institutions in Canada and the United States (Orono, Borderlands, 1990), pp. 11–22; Greenwald, Reconfiguring the Reservation, p. 20; Otis, The Dawes Act, p. 9 and 13.
- 9.
Dawes quoted in “Senate Debate on Bill to Provide Lands in Severalty (1881),” in Washburn (ed.), The American Indian, vol. III, p. 1786.
- 10.
Henry L. Dawes, The Indian Territory (Charlottesville, University of Virginia Library, 1995), p. 2564 (original publication: New York, Independent Publications, 1900).
- 11.
Ibid., p. 2654.
- 12.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” p. 37; Carter, The Dawes Commission, p. 30.
- 13.
Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 115.
- 14.
Otis, The Dawes Act, p. 153.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 66; Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 362; on Dawes’ fight against Ulysses S. Grant’s taxation policies, thus defending principles before party, see ibid., pp. 392–405. See the opposite view on Dawes in Hoxie, A Final Promise, p. 29.
- 16.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” pp. 35–37.
- 17.
It stirs up the anger of Abraham Lincoln, who tries to keep the war effort united. Ibid., p. 41.
- 18.
Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 113. The influence of his mother for passing principle before interest has been noted. Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” pp. 35–39.
- 19.
Dawes before and after the war will be ready to sacrifice the vote of Blacks to assure the loyalty of the South and the unity of the Nation, because he conceives that only such a context in the long run can protect and promote fundamental rights. After the war, he will accept the southern exclusion of the Union on the question of the black vote only as a temporary measure. Ibid., p. 40; Arcanti, “To Secure the Party,” p. 37 and 43. Dawes will also fight Andrew Johnson for his post-war veto on Black civil rights legislation. Here he conceives that keeping true to republican majority is essential for national unity. Ibid., p. 43.
- 20.
Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 299.
- 21.
Consult Report of the Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes in the Indian Territory. October 3, 1898, in Washburn (ed.), The American Indian, vol. I, p. 689; Leonard A. Carlson, Indians, Bureaucrats, and Land. The Dawes Act and the Decline of Indian Farming (Westport, Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 21; Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” pp. 38–40; Otis, The Dawes Act, p. 152.
- 22.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” pp. 35–41.
- 23.
A notable individual would be Helen Hunt Jackson, an activist defending Native rights in a liberal and individualist sense. She conceives that culturally, for his own good, the Indian per se has to disappear. Helen Hunt Jackson, Un siècle de déshonneur (Paris, Éditions 10/18, 1972). A notable group would be the Boston Indian Citizenship Committee. Valerie Sherer Mathes, “The Boston Indian Citizenship Committee, and the Poncas,” Massachusetts Historical Society, vol. 14 (2012), pp. 119–148.
- 24.
Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 362 and 372.
- 25.
Élise Marienstras, Wounded Knee ou l’Amérique en fin de siècle (Paris, Éditions Complexes, 1992), p. 25; Otis, The Dawes Act, pp. 33–35 and 72–109.
- 26.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” p. 42.
- 27.
Nicklason, The Early Career, pp. 368–369; for the constitutional text, see Robert Maynard Hutchins (ed.), Great Books of the Western World, no 43: American State Papers, The Federalist and J. S. Mill (Toronto, William Benton, Publisher, 1952), p. 13, art. 1, Sect. 8.
- 28.
Nicklason, “The Shaping of Values,” p. 42.
- 29.
Hart, “The Dawes Act and the Permanency,” pp. 38–45; Nicklason, The Early Career, p. 370; Otis, The Dawes Act, p. 154.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 19 and 40–55; Marienstras, Wounded Knee, pp. 26–27 and 86; David M. Wrobel, “Manifest Destiny and American Exceptionalism,” in Lagayette (ed.), La «Destinée Manifeste» , p. 152.
- 31.
Morgan, “Self-Government and the Constitution,” p. 47.
- 32.
Locke, Two Treatises, T. I, Section 92. Italic characters ours.
- 33.
As in late nineteenth-century Canada. Fierlbeck, Political Thought in Canada, p. 65 and 90.
- 34.
Congressional Record, 47th Congress, 1st session (House, March 22, 1882), vol. 13, part 3, pp. 2182–2183.
- 35.
Generally for these developments, Marienstras, Wounded Knee, and Sidney L. Harring, Crow Dog’s Case. American Indian Sovereignty, Tribal Law, and United States Law in the Nineteenth Century (New York, Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 53, 100, 129, 140–144 and 203–204.
- 36.
John Pine and Gloria Sesso, “Federal Indian Policy in the Gilded Age,” OAH Magazine of History, vol. 9, no. 3, National History Standards (Spring 1995), p. 53.
- 37.
See the opposite in Jason E. Pierce, “INDIANS NOT IMMIGRANTS: Charles Fletcher Lummis, Frank Bird Linderman, and the Complexities of Race and Ethnicity in America,” in Making the White Man’s West. Whiteness and the Creation of the American West (Boulder, University Press of Colorado, 2016), pp. 95–116.
- 38.
Native (Seminole) adaptation to modernity is shown in Brent R. Weisman, “Chipco’s House and the Role of the Individual in Shaping Seminole Indian Cultural Responses to the Modern World,” Historical Archaeology, vol. 46, no. 1 (2012), pp. 161–171.
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Bergeron, D. (2020). General Thought and Context. In: Philosophy and Allotment : John Locke's influence on Henry L. Dawes. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38174-5_2
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