Immigrant and Ethnic History Compare

Immigrant and Ethnic History

Compare the Land-Allotment Strategy used with the Choctaw's with the Treaty Strategy that was applied to the Cherokee. What are the key differences between both approaches to Indian lands? Do they share any similarities? What were the outcomes of each strategy

Land allotment was significant when it came to the Indians and what the settlers would offer to them. The Choctaws were given a land allotment strategy, while the Cherokee Indians were offered a treaty strategy. Both of these strategies had both pros and cons, and therefore both must be addressed here, to see where their similarities and differences lie, and to examine the outcomes of both of the strategies. It is also important to understand some of the interaction that the settlers had with the Indians as well.

The French were voyageurs, missionaries, and trappers who had great respect for Indian culture for the most part and did not try too hard to change the Indians over to the French way of thinking. They did convert some Indians to Christianity, but that was not their primary goal. The main goal of the French settlers was simply colonization. They intermarried with the Indians and thus expanded their population faster than they could have if they had only kept to themselves. This intermarriage helped to build good relations with the Indians and this could have partially accounted for the good settlement experiences that most French people had (VandeCreek, 2000).

The British colonists were not as friendly with the Indians as the French, and spent most of their time on expansion and exploration activities. Colonization was a large goal with the British as well as the French, and they were more likely to use force against the Indians to gain land than to try to come to some agreement. To them, the Indians were savages that needed to be driven out. Many explorers were interested in gold and precious metals in the new world, but the British were hungry for land and eventually took over many of the areas they had previously given to the Indians as preserves. The British were also intent on converting people to their religion, since they left England to escape the persecution of what they felt was the 'wrong' religion. As can be seen, the French and the British had very different dealings with the Indians that they encountered, and this also affected the way that the Indians responded to settlers overall in the future.

Eventually, however, the Indians found themselves pushed out of much of the land that they had previously enjoyed. The land allotment that was utilized with the Choctaws was designed to give them a specific amount of land, but there was little to no negotiation regarding what the Choctaws would get and whether they could get more land, or whether there were other things that they could give in order to acquire more property or other agreements with the settlers. In other words, the Indians were told what they would be given, and that was the end of it. As a result of this, they were forced out of much of the land that they had previously enjoyed, and the land that they did receive was not really enough. They had governments, but they were not really as autonomous as they needed to be, and they were still under the control of the federal government, which kept the Choctaws from actually having the freedom that they had in the past and were used to.

Where the treaty and the Cherokee Indians were concerned, the deal was somewhat better. A treaty implies that there is an agreement where both parties get something, and there was more negotiation available to the Cherokee Indians than there was to the Choctaw Indians, although neither agreement was all that fair when the big picture is examined. The Cherokee Indians, however, were afforded some protection from the government under the provisions of the treaty. In addition to the protection, though, the Indians lost some of what they were used to having, such as the right to trade with whomever they chose. The government established basic jurisdiction over the Indians and were able to regulate them more closely than the Indians likely wanted, but the freedom that they were given on the land that they did have and the hunting rights that they were offered by the government were important to them. Even though they gave up certain things, they were also given much through the treaty. However, the government of the United States ultimately received the better deal where the treaty was concerned.

While many people still blame the settlers for what happened to the Indians, the Indians did cause problems as well. The Indians could provide the settlers with things to trade and a barter system could be established, which might help the settlers not to work quite as hard as before. Some Indians were hostile, however, depending on which tribe they belonged to. Many Indians killed white settlers instead of seeing what kind of agreements they could come to. They did not want the settlers to take any more of their land.

American Indians hold to many of the traditions that they had in ancient times, and some of these traditions have not changed much for those that see them as important and valuable. There are many people of American Indian descent that live what would be considered by Western, Caucasian society to be 'normal' lives, but there are also many that still remain on reservations and stick to the old ways of doing things. Unfortunately, many of these individuals do not have much money, and the suicide rate for American Indians living on reservations is rather higher than the average. There are also problems with alcohol, teen pregnancies, and other issues that plague this society. The American Indians that live in this way keep to themselves and their culture, and they may spend their whole lives on the reservation. By doing this, they limit themselves to the doctors that are available there and do not always get the best or most advanced treatment that Western medicine would be able to offer them.

All of these concerns are important for the Indians, and they are also important as an understanding of what has gone before where history and settlement is concerned. If it were not for the settlement of the Americas by the colonists and the changes that they enacted in the Indian way of life, things would be very different for the Indians today. However, there is no real way to say whether this is essentially good or bad overall. Too much has happened over a long period of history to be able to determine whether the Indians throughout the rest of history have received more help or more hindrance from what took place long ago.

One of the largest 'problems' that the Indians experienced, however, was the Louisiana Purchase and the subsequent Westward expansion that took place afterward, largely started by Lewis and Clark. Many Indians who did not want to give up their lands fought for them, but in the end the white settlers were stronger. They also had better weapons. The Indians were forced to retreat even farther, and Lewis and Clark were sorry that they had encouraged the westward expansion so much, since it resulted in a great hardship for the Indians who rightfully should have owned that land.

Lewis and Clark's expedition sent the whole country on a quest for exploration. It was not long before waterways were created stretching from east to west, and a train route was established following the trail that Lewis and Clark made when they headed off on their exploration. Thomas Jefferson's estimate that it would take 100 generations before the entire area had been explored and populated was far from the truth. In reality, it happened in less than five generations, and none of this helped the Indians.

Possession of land is a recurring theme throughout the nineteenth century. Discuss how the differing relationships to the land typically experienced by European immigrants and their descendents, native Americans, African slaves, post-bellum African-Americans, and Mexicans contributed to the relative successes of these different ethnic groups.

When the Emancipation Proclamation came about in 1863, it freed all blacks in the rebel states. The slaves in the southern states still worked for their masters for several more months, because the north and the south were fighting and the south considered itself a separate area, not subject to the laws made by the northern President. Also, the southern people were very much against freeing the slaves. If that happened, they would have to pay people to work on their plantations instead of just having the free labor the blacks provided to them for food and a place to sleep. All United States slaves, wherever they were, were set free after the civil war. Because of this, the southern blacks found the same problems that the northern blacks had encountered. There were a lot of white people around, and many of them were angry that the blacks had been freed. Some of them were actually hostile toward the blacks and their newfound freedom, so the blacks learned quickly that they had to be careful. They needed to settle a little bit away from the hostile whites and do their best not to make waves or cause trouble, in the hopes that they might one day be accepted (Reconstruction, 2002).

During the first few years after the Emancipation Proclamation and the subsequent freedom of all blacks in the United States, many blacks began working very hard to educate themselves. In there minds, education meant the ability to negotiate with whites over land, earn a fair wage to pay for it, and take care of their families. Black families were often large, so many of the members could work to help support the whole family. Blacks had to have somewhere to live, so they started founding small towns. One such place was Nicodemus, which was in Kansas. In 1880, there were about 500 black settlers living there, but poor soil conditions and the inability to grow good crops had allowed the population to decline to about 200 by 1910 (Reconstruction, 2002).

Despite the problems with Nicodemus, blacks did not give up. The northern urban areas such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh began to become more populated with blacks, as did Kansas and the desert southwest. The northern large towns are still heavily populated by blacks today. The black population was spreading out, but they had some difficultly getting much land. After all, they had been slaves. They did not have a lot of money to purchase land, and many of them were easily taken in by bad deals since many of them didn't have the education to compete with the average white man.

Many blacks moved away from their former white masters, but some blacks, who had gotten on fairly well with their masters before they were freed, went back to work for those same masters, only this time it was for wages. This is how many blacks were able to buy land and have somewhere for they and their family to live. Sometimes these white masters -- now bosses -- would give the black man some of their land and let them build something on it. This was another way that black men acquired land after the Emancipation Proclamation and their freedom.

Some blacks also got land through land grants that the government gave them so that they could build churches and other places, since they were not allowed to share any of those facilities with whites. Just because they were now free did not mean that they were anything close to being equal. Many whites still showed them thinly-veiled hostility, and other expressed downright hatred of blacks and the fact that they could not acquire land and live next to white men as if there was some measure of equality between the two. Many white men of that time period thought that blacks were not far removed from animals, and they never would have considered for a moment that there could be any kind of equality between the two groups, no matter what the Emancipation Proclamation said (Williams, 2002).

It took a long time before schools were built on black land for the education of black children. Many blacks worked as farmers, sharecroppers, and domestic servants, and most could not read or write. Because opposition to black freedom was so strong, especially in the south, many white people wanted to keep blacks as far down the ladder as possible. By making it a crime to educate them, the white majority effectively stopped the blacks from gaining any further ground after they were freed. This was not to last, though, as blacks schools were eventually built and more blacks were educated.

In 1865, the Freedmens' Bureau was opened and helped blacks acquire the land that they had been promised by the government when they were freed as well as other lands so that they could grow crops, raise animals, and generally have some place to live and some means to support themselves and their growing families. Just a year after they opened, in 1866, the Freedmens' Bureau opened up over 45 million acres in the southern states of Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and Alabama to blacks who wanted to own some land. Many took advantage of this option, and they created the first wave of black land ownership in the United States (Black, 2002).

By the year 1890, there were 120, 738 black farms in the United States (Black, 2002). Unfortunately, there should have been many more. Much of the land that the government was supposed to give the black people never came to pass when President Andrew Johnson reversed some of the policies set forth in the Emancipation Proclamation. Instead of getting the land that they should have been given as payment for all that they had to endure, they were forced to work to try to buy land of their own. The problem with that was that their wages were so low that many could still not buy any land of their own. Many of the freed slaves died virtually in slavery. While they might have been technically free, they still didn't own anything of their own and they weren't able to make enough money to get anything more than what they already had. Many blacks were discouraged by this, but they kept working anyway, in the hopes that things would get better. It took a much longer time than it should have, but things did get eventually get better for blacks all across the United States.

For a while, one of the main problems the black people had was not hard work or little land, but the hostility of the white people around them. This hostility continued for a long time, and some white people still have it today. it's not entirely gone from this country yet, but it was far worse in the early days of freedom (Black, 2002). In the year 1900, 214 lynchings of black people were reported (Black, 2002). That figure doesn't tell the whole tale, most likely, because there were probably many more lynchings that weren't reported. There was the rise of the most famous anti-black group, the Ku Klux Klan. Other laws were also enacted when Rutherford B. Hayes was elected president. He changed some of the laws in the Emancipation Proclamation and made sure that blacks were restricted in what they could do. Hayes enacted the 'Jim Crow' laws that said blacks could not sit on the same railroad cars as whites. If it would have been a case of 'separate but equal' it might not have been so bad, but it was a case of 'separate but unequal.' Blacks were given the worst conditions anywhere they went, and were rarely treated with any kind of class or dignity by whites.

However, despite white opposition, blacks continued to gain land and spread out in the face of the cruelty of white people.

As the United States industrialized, the demands for labor shifted increasingly from farms and plantations to factories. Explain the factors, in addition to racism, that contributed to the relative greater successes of European immigrant groups, and especially their descendents, in gaining greater wealth and status than indigenous peoples and immigrants from outside Europe. Were there exceptions among European ethnic groups and if so, how can you explain that?

Early in the 19th century, a period of rapid industrialization and a strong need for a very large pool of cheap labor was important to the United States economy (Carroll, 1998). Using various individuals who would attack labor unions was still legal and there were many examples of violence on the corporate level (Carroll, 1998). Later in the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, mostly the need to modernize the current economy was seen by political protest, and many of the political leaders of that time were forced into outlawing many of the worst abuses (Carroll, 1998). These included child labor, and were also tied to various types of protections related not only to workers, but also to consumers, minorities, women, and the environment (Carroll, 1998).

However, many of these changes that were made increased the general cost of doing business and the corporations that had to include those costs begin to put pressure on the politicians (Carroll, 1998). Many countries adopted policies that were more business-friendly and resulting from this the staffing and regulatory spending have not been able to keep up with the overall expansion of the economy (Carroll, 1998). It is difficult to say exactly how much corporate crime costs every year but it is not surprising to find that many judge the costs to be enormous (Carroll, 1998).

Before 1880, settlement was mostly in the east, and the people did not spread out too far from where their ships had landed (Zinn, 1980). This formed the core of the nation and was seen as an offshoot of the notions of sovereignty and liberty that were available in France and England at that time. When people started moving out onto the frontier they found a vast area of resources, largely untapped, at their disposal. The pattern of settlement at that time was very broken and disorganized, as people simply moved where they wanted to. There was no longer a defining line that indicated where the frontier was by 1890. When people moved out onto the frontier all of the resources that they found were theirs for the asking, and they came cheaply. This provided the settlers with a way to improve their lot in life, but labor conditions were harsh and the only things that the families had to rely on were each other and their religious beliefs.

Democracy and opportunity were available to all men, since all had started out in the new world basically as equals. The northernmost states were more settled and more democratic than the southernmost states, where not as many people had ventured to yet. A profoundly democratic environment prevailed throughout most of the settlements, however, and most of the people were enjoying being free of the constraints that England and France put upon them. After all, many of them came to the new world looking for freedom of religion and life in general. They wanted to make sure that they found what they were looking for and did not allow the Americas to become another version of England or France.