Indian Land Quotes
Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 had invested in land that had formerly belonged to the Iroquois Indians who had sided with the British in the Revolution and been driven up to Canada. They had paid very little and wanted to sell it at large profits. However, there was little gold and silver left in the colonies after the war and there was great reluctance in the rest of the world to lend gold and silver backed money to a new country that did not have a rule of law and courts to collect debts. For example, Madison and Monroe had formed a partnership and bought former Iroquois land near Rome, New York. There was idealism to be sure but there was also self-interest functioning in the secret Constitutional Convention.
Despite Jefferson’s reasonable intentions towards the Indians, all the boundaries never did get fixed and existing agreements and treaties were abrogated usually by whites acting illegally but then were supported by their state government and if serious hostilities broke out, the Federal government usually entered the fray to defend the whites regardless of whether or not they abrogated the treaties. Some Indian nations complicated the situation by having a tradition of raiding neighbors and stealing horses or other goods. Whites, insisting on then rather severe “English type” law enforcement often inadvertently, started an Indian war with the Federal soldiers almost always defeating the Indians leading to yet another treaty by which the Indians were pushed from their land, Further, many whites “bought” lands from Indians in good faith while the Indians did not own the lands, thought that they were selling hunting rights as they had no tradition of property ownership. The consequence was tragic history which Jefferson and his successors failed to manage well.
By 1887 the government behavior towards Indians had come far from the Andrew Jackson days of Indian Removal and the government and reformers were trying to do better with Indian policy. This law was very well intended, and yet angered some Indians and tribes Where there was good agricultural or grazing land, the law required that the land be divided amongst the individual Indians who would thereafter own the deed and control the land. The problem had been that there was no concept of individual land ownership in most tribes. There were no deeds and whites would buy land unknowingly (and sometime knowingly who claimed to (or did) speak for the tribe. With this law, farm and grazing land would pass to the ownership of individual Indians. There are over 500 different Indian tribes—nations in America and they are very diverse. This law was good for some tribes and negative for others. With no communal say in the use of the land, the reservation was like a white farming community where the individual was dominant and not the town, group or culture. It minimized the dependency that Indians had on each other and the group. Within individual tribes there were often those Indians who preferred collective ownership and those who preferred individual ownership as provided in this legislation.
