The General Allotment Act instituted a federal policy of alloting land to individual Native Americans. The act weakened the allegiance of American Indians to their tribes and ultimately resulted in the dissolution of some tribal nations and the assimilation of some Indians into mainstream American society.
When the General Allotment Act became law on February 8, 1887, proponents hailed it as the Indian Emancipation Act and Secretary of the Interior L. Q. C. Lamar called it “the most important measure of legislation ever enacted in this country affecting our Indian affairs.” The law dealt primarily with Native American ownership of land. It authorized the president of the United States, through the Office of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, to allot the lands on reservations to individual Native Americans, so that they would hold the land in severalty instead of the tribe’s owning the land communally. Each head of a household would receive a quarter-section of land (160 acres), single persons over eighteen years of age and orphans would receive eighty acres, and other persons would receive forty acres. In 1891, an amendment to the law equalized the allotments to provide eighty acres for each individual, regardless of age or family status.
Under the law, the U.S. government would hold these land allotments in trust for twenty-five years, during which time a Native American could not sell or otherwise dispose of his or her land. At the end of that period, he or she would receive full title to it. After dividing reservation land into allotments, the federal government could sell the surplus land (often a considerable portion of the reservation) to willing purchasers, most of whom would be Euro-Americans. The money from such sales would go to a fund to benefit Native American education.
The General Allotment Act also provided for Native American citizenship
American Indian Reservations in 1883
Two groups of Euro-Americans especially welcomed the General Allotment Act. Land-hungry settlers who had long cast covetous eyes on the reservation lands—which, to Euro-American thinking, were going to waste because of the lack of productive agricultural practices by Native Americans, whom they considered to be hunters and gatherers—were now able to acquire the lands left over from the allotment process. No doubt, the less scrupulous among the settlers also looked forward to the day when individual Native Americans would receive full title to their land and be able to sell, lease, or otherwise dispose of it. Then pressure, legitimate or not, would likely induce the new owners to part with the acreage.
A second group of Euro-Americans, however, was more influential in securing passage of the General Allotment Act. These were the humanitarian reformers of the day, who considered private ownership of land in severalty, U.S. citizenship
Federal politicians had long considered private ownership of land essential to the civilizing process. Thomas Jefferson and the like-minded policymakers of his time had strongly advocated it, and in 1838 the commissioner of Indian Affairs gave voice to a widespread view when he said, “Unless some system is marked out by which there shall be a separate allotment of land to each individual . . . you will look in vain for any general casting off of savagism. Common property and civilization cannot co-exist.”
It was not until the post-Civil War years, when increasing Euro-American pressures on the Native Americans created crisis after crisis, that humanitarians and philanthropists began a concerted drive for “Indian reform.” Land in severalty would be the most important factor in breaking up tribalism. The reform groups that were organized—the Board of Indian Commissioners
Only a few Euro-American voices cried out against the proposal. Congressman Russell Errett
“February 8, 1887,” one optimistic spokesman of the Board of Indian Commissioners commented, “may be called the Indian emancipation day.” Although much sincere Christian goodwill motivated passage of the General Allotment Act, it turned out to be a disaster for Native Americans. The sponsors of the General Allotment Act had assumed an unrealistically romantic view of the Native American. People who had had firsthand experience with tribal peoples attempted to prove to the reformers that the “noble savage” had never existed. In 1891, Congress allowed Native Americans to lease their allotments if they were not able to farm for themselves.
Native American response to allotment has largely gone unrecorded. The Cherokee, Creek, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole, Sac, Fox, and a few other tribes in Indian Territory, as well as the Seneca in New York, contended that they already mostly owned land individually and won exclusion from the act’s operation. By 1906, however, Congress extended allotment to them as well. Most of the complaints came after the act’s passage, when Native Americans lost land and found farming difficult under its provisions.
The allotments and the leasing moved faster and with less careful discrimination than Dawes and other promoters had intended. Instead of being a measure that turned Native Americans into self-supporting farmers, the act, through the rapid alienation of the Native Americans’ lands, meant the loss of the land base on which the tribal peoples’ hope for future prosperity depended. Tribal peoples held claim to about 150 million acres of land in 1887. The General Allotment Act eventually diverted two-thirds of that acreage out of Native American ownership, down to about forty-eight million acres by 1934. Not until that year, with the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act (the Wheeler-Howard Act, also known as the “Indian New Deal”), did the federal government repeal the General Allotment Act and encourage communal forms of ownership again, but by that time much of the former reservation land was gone as surplus sales, leases, or sales by the individual allottees.
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Coleman, Michael C. “Problematic Panacea: Presbyterian Missionaries and the Allotment of Indian Lands in the Late Nineteenth Century.” Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 2 (1985): 143-159. Shows that the Presbyterians were not united about allotment of tribal lands. -
Gibson, Arrell Morgan. “The Centennial Legacy of the General Allotment Act.” Chronicles of Oklahoma 65, no. 3 (1987): 228-251. Examines the long-range effects of the General Allotment Act on Native Americans. -
Greenwald, Emily. Reconfiguring the Reservation: The Nez Perces, Jicarilla Apaches, and the Dawes Act. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. Detailed study of the passage of the General Allotment Act and of its influence on two specific Native American tribes. -
Hoxie, Frederick E. A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984. Examines the story of the General Allotment Act in the context of larger assimilationist programs toward Native Americans. -
Mintz, Steven, ed. Native American Voices. St. James, N.Y.: Brandywine Press, 1995. Contains part of the General Allotment Act and a complaint by a Cherokee farmer in 1906. -
Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Americanizing the American Indians: Writings of the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880-1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973. Section 2 provides a representative sampling of primary source writings about the General Allotment Act. -
Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Assault on Indian Tribalism: The General Allotment Law (Dawes Act) of 1887. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1975. A concise summary of the attitudes that produced the act and its repercussions for Native Americans; contains the full text of the original law.
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