The tidewater planters and rich merchants on the East Coast, who sought peace with the Indians, were losing to the democracy of the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians. The Federalists, who had wanted peace on the frontier, failed to win the frontiersmen’s votes and hence sputtered out as a political party, effectively removing Northwest Ordinance sentiments as a force in making Indian policy. Their influence persisted, however, on the U.S. Supreme Court, where one of their principal leaders, John Marshall, sat as chief justice. Marshall interpreted constitutional law as consistent with the promises of the Northwest Ordinance that called for a benign form of tribal pluralism. In 1831, the Marshall Court listened to a complaint from the Council of the Cherokees against the Georgia Guard, which had carried out provisions of a series of harsh state laws against the Cherokees. The guard had terrorized them, put them in chains, tied them to trees, and thrown them into jails. The Cherokee nations sought to qualify as a “foreign state” in order to appeal to the Court’s jurisdiction. When, in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831), the court refused jurisdiction, Marshall asserted in benevolent paternalistic obiter dicta that the Indian nation is “a distinct political society … capable of managing its own affairs and governing itself.” Such societies are “domestic dependent nations,” whose “relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”
The repressive laws against the Cherokees were tested again the following year, when representatives of the American Board of Missionaries on Cherokee land, who refused to take an oath of allegiance to the state, were arrested by the Georgia Guard, convicted, and sent to prison. This time Marshall, writing for the Court, did assume jurisdiction, and in Worcester v. Georgia (1832) established that the Cherokee nation “is a distinct community occupying its own territory, with boundaries accurately described, and which the citizens of Georgia have no right to enter, but with the assent of the Cherokees themselves, or in conformity with treaties and with acts of Congress.”9
Marshall’s pronouncements clearly had not reflected the election returns. On the frontier, the policies of removal and extinction—the predatory version of tribal pluralism—were far more popular than his legalisms. Jackson had led the campaign for the Congressional Removal Act of 1830, which authorized expelling eastern tribes from their lands in exchange for guaranteed land west of the Mississippi River. A few of the Cherokee nation leaders, acting without the approval of the tribal government, sought to avoid open conflict by agreeing to a treaty that ceded their eastern homeland in exchange for western land. The rest—about three-quarters—of the Cherokees refused to leave and were forced to take a long march to what is now northeastern Oklahoma, when about four thousand died on “the trail of tears.”
Between 1810 and 1821, more than a half million Euro-American settlers poured into Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana; almost a half million others moved into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Many were squatters, “pre-emptors,” who found land, farmed it, and claimed it as their own. In 1841, Congress legalized this widespread practice through the Pre-emption Act. One hundred thousand Indians, removed from the East before the Civil War, obliged western tribes to give up hunting grounds to make room for them and eventually for more whites.
One Norwegian settler wrote home in 1835 about his success in planting “Indian corn” in New York State. But he could purchase public land in Illinois at $1.25 an acre, and planned to move there. In the U.S., “whether native born or foreign, a man is free to do with it [land] what he pleases.” He urged a friend to emigrate: “Even if many more come, there will still be room for all.”10 The frontier to him was a symbol of the American founding myth of asylum and freedom. But to the Sauk-Fox leader Black Hawk, settlers were liars and cheats. “We told them to let us alone; but they followed on and beset our paths, and they coiled themselves among us like the snake.”11
Millions of acres were granted to whites through the Homestead Act of 1862 and, indirectly, through land grants to the railroads after the Civil War. In the Northwest, the Oregon Donation Act encouraged raids on Indian lands. In Texas, savage wars were fought by Comanches against the Texas Rangers and the American cavalry; in Colorado, Indians fought for their ground against gold prospectors; in Kansas and Nebraska, they gave up most of their land through treaties.
Confined by treaty and harassment to reservations after the Civil War, many tribes swept across the plains and waged war so effectively against the U.S. Army that General William T. Sherman, the Civil War hero, said fifty Indians could hold off three thousand soldiers. On the plains, white hunters’ relentless slaughter of the buffalo to feed laborers on the railroads and to get hides to sell defeated the Indians. Between the end of the Civil War and 1885, when the buffalo became nearly extinct, the Indians in North America, whose population may have been as high as twelve to fifteen million north of the Rio Grande in 1491, were reduced to fewer than 250,000, and to 210,000 by the 1920 census.
Driven back to reservations, decimated by war, disease, and consequent social disorganization, the Indians were unable to prevent the declaration by Congress, in 1871, that “hereafter, no Indian nation or tribe within the territory of the United States shall be acknowledged or recognized as an independent nation, tribe or power with whom the United States may contract by treaty.” Tribal pluralism based on mutual respect, envisioned by the Northwest Ordinance, had long since been abandoned and predatory tribal pluralism was no longer needed, although several Indian massacres lay ahead. Some whites sympathetic to the Indians’ plight concluded that the “Indian problem” could only be solved if Indians left the reservations altogether and deserted tribal life. Schools were established for Indian children (the most famous, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania) and were deliberately located far from Indian communities to separate Indian children from their parents’ way of life.12
The goals of assimilation and rejection of tribal pluralism led to the breakup of the reservations through allotment of plots of land to individual Indian families. The General Allotment Act of 1887, or the Dawes Act (named after Senator Henry Dawes of Massachusetts, chairman of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee), gave the president authority not only to distribute a reservation among Indian families but also to permit white settlers to take over unallotted surplus land. Although some tribes—including the five tribes in the so-called “Indian Territory” of Oklahoma, earlier removed from the East, and the Osage—were exempted at first because of their strong resistance to the allotment scheme, most Indians on reservations were subject to allotment, and after passage of the Curtis Act in 1898 virtually all Indians, including the five tribes not on reservations, became eligible for allotments of public land.
Advertising himself as a friend of Indians, President Theodore Roosevelt wrote to Chief No Shirt that if Indians would only work hard and earn their living they could become rich and successful just like whites.13 But most Indians were unpersuaded. They preferred to keep tribal identities. The old Potawatami Chief Simon Pokagon pulled a red, white, and blue rope to ring a new Liberty Bell at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, but most rejected white overtures.14 Even though they were now few in number, psychologically demoralized, and physically weak, they resisted assimilation just as they had fought against removal and conquest. But, unable to function effectively as individual landowners on the terms set by the highly individualistic, competitive market society, most sold the land allotted to them or lost it through foreclosure. In forty-five years land still in Indian ownership was reduced by more than half. Instead of becoming independent farmers, large numbers of Indians became landless and penniless on the most arid land of the West.
The climax of the campaign to assimilate by separating them from their trust relationship with the federal government came in 1924 when Congress granted citizenship to all Indians (more than half already had citizenship), partly in recognition of their services in the armed forces in the war. But the policy of assimilation was pronounced a failure in a 1928 study of the Institute of Government Research (Brookings Institution). A report, known after the project’s director, Lewis Merriam, as the Merriam Report, opposed forced assimilation. After the 1932 election its recommendations found a sympathetic hearing in the Roosevelt administration, particularly from the commissioner of Indian affairs, John Collier, a white man who had worked for the Indian cause for many years and whose proposals for recognizing anew the right of Indian tribes to be distinct functioning