Research Paper On The Dawes Act

The Dawes Act was a document that authorized the President of the United States to assess American Indian land and divide it into allotments for individual Indians. Those who agreed to allotments would then be granted United States citizenship. During this time in the mid 1800s the United States and its citizens had their hearts set on Westward expansion. Americans were strongly encouraged by the belief of the “Manifest Destiny”, a widely held belief that settlers were destined by God to expand throughout the continent. Though this expansion proved to be essential in the construction of today’s United States of America, the forceful removal of these Native people became a major issue. The Dawes Act forced many government officials to take separate sides on the plan to invade American Indian lands. Therefore, the United
The American settlers had already shown the Native Americans that they were committed to brutal killings in order to gain this precious landmass that lay across North America. To avoid any further bloodshed, the United States government had no other choice than to come up with a compromise with the Indians by sharing the land to avoid yet another conflict between the two. The Dawes Act offered each side a nonviolent solution to provide Indians with enough land to prosper and also enough land for Americans to settle. It was Senator Richard Coke who said, “This bill simply recognizes the logic of events, which shows that it is impossible to preserve peace between Indians and the whites”. Here, Coke is saying that Americans set out intentionally to take land from the Indians and offer it only to the white settlers of America, in order to prevent the extinction of Indians. Without allotment, the white advantage of weapons and knowledge would have led to the Genocide of the Native Americans. With allotment, Indians and whites were each given enough land to bring tranquility to the