The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865-1896 (Oxford History of the United States)

by Richard White

In 1887, over the objections of Bland and many Indians, Congress passed the General Allotment Act that allowed distribution of tribal lands in severalty, with the exception of Indian Territory and Iroquois country, without Indian consent. Reformers proclaimed the act the equivalent of the Magna Carta, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation all rolled into one. It recognized, they said, Indian manhood. Secretary of the Interior L. Q. C. Lamar, an ex-Confederate from Mississippi, presented the law as the only escape available to Indians “from the dire alternative of impending extirpation.” In a century of disasters for Indian peoples, the General Allotment Act ranked among the greatest. In 1881 Indians held 155 million acres of land; by 1890 the total had fallen to 104 million. By 1900, when Merrill E. Gates praised the act at the Lake Mohonk Conference as “a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up the tribal mass,” the total was down to 77 million.43