CIVIL WAR SLAVERY LINCOLN ABOLITIONIST SENATOR STATESMAN MA AUTOGRAPH SIGNED VF!

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INVREF#5-21
HENRY LAURENS DAWES
(1816 - 1903)
POWERFUL CIVIL WAR SLAVERY ABOLITIONIST
&
CIVIL WAR CONGRESSMAN, US SENATOR & STATESMAN FROM MASSACHUSETTS.
Dawes was a strong Defender of President Abraham Lincoln! Dawes took a prominent part in the anti-slavery and reconstruction measures during and after the Civil War. Later in his political career, he was Chairman of the commission created to administer the tribal affairs of the Five Civilized Tribes of Indians in the Indian Territory from 1893-1903.
HERE'S DAWES’ SIGNATURE REMOVED FROM A 19
th
CENTURY CONGRESSIONAL FREE FRANK COVER, and SIGNED:
“H. L. Dawes, Mass.”
The document has been inlaid to another sheet, measures 6” x 9” and is in VERY FINE CONDITION.
A FINE PIECE OF CIVIL WAR ERA COMMONWEALTH OF MASSACHUSETTS POLITICAL HISTORY TO ADD TO YOUR AUTOGRAPH, MANUSCRIPT & EPHEMERA COLLECTION!
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF THE HONORABLE Mr. DAWES
Dawes, Henry Laurens
(30 Oct. 1816-5 Feb. 1903), congressman and senator, was born in Cummington, Hampshire County, Massachusetts, the son of Mitchell Dawes and Mercy Burgess, farmers. He attended local schools and received private instruction before entering Yale College, from which he graduated in 1839. Dawes taught school for a few months and then wrote articles for the Greenfield Gazette and Courier, the North Adams Transcript, and the Pittsfield Eagle. While studying in the law school at Albany, New York, in 1840, he addressed crowds in support of William Henry Harrison for the presidency. After completing his law education in the office of Wells and Davis in Greenfield, Dawes was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1842. He began his practice in North Adams but soon relocated to Pittsfield. He also secured a faculty position at Ashfield Academy in Massachusetts, where he met Electa Allen Sanderson, daughter of the headmaster. They married in 1844 and raised three children.
Dawes's political career began in 1848 with his election to the lower house of the Massachusetts state legislature, where he served in 1848, 1849, and 1852. He was elected to one term in the state senate in 1850 and was a member of the state constitutional convention of 1853. For the next four years he held the position of U.S. district attorney for the western region of Massachusetts. During this time, Dawes helped organize the new Republican party in his state.
In 1857 Dawes was elected as a Republican to the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served until 1875. Recognized as a legislator of great ability, he earned a solid reputation for his parliamentary managerial style in committee hearings and for his skillful debating on the floor of the House. A strong defender of President Abraham Lincoln and the North at the time of the Civil War, he frequently visited Union troops in camps and hospitals. Dawes grew steadily in influence and power during his long tenure in office. He succeeded to the chairmanship of the Committee on Appropriations in 1869 and the Committee on Ways and Means in 1871, the two most important House committees. This combination endowed him with considerable power over legislation of all kinds, permitting him to curtail lavish government expenditures. He was also chairman of the Committee on Elections from 1861 to 1869.
During the turbulent post-Civil War period, Dawes was increasingly in the national spotlight. On the day following Lincoln's death, he conferred with the new president, Andrew Johnson, and pledged his support. He cautioned Republicans to follow the path of moderation and prudence. A party stalwart, Dawes wanted to preserve a solid Republican organization, believing that a strong nation depended upon Republican predominance. When Johnson vetoed the Freedmen's Bureau Bill in 1866, Dawes deplored the consequences of the veto on the Republican party. On 22 February he wrote to his wife that Congress was furious: "Madness rules the house and there is no reason at either end of the Avenue. The great fruits of war are to be lost or postponed for a generation." A month later, on 31 March, a disgusted Dawes reiterated his thoughts in another letter to his wife: "They [Radicals] can cry and howl and . . . alarm the country at the terrible crisis the President has involved us in, and he is fool enough, or wicked enough . . . to furnish them with material fuel for the flame, depriving every friend he has of the least ground upon which to stand and defend him."
Johnson's actions relating to Reconstruction measures pained Dawes considerably by 1866. Cognizant that a political alliance with Johnson was out of the question, Dawes refused to compromise his principles. Although he detested the extreme tactics of Radical Republicans, Dawes demanded stronger guarantees of southern loyalty and obedience than did the president, whom he claimed lacked statesmanship. Dawes reluctantly severed his ties with the beleaguered chief executive.
Dawes's break with Johnson constituted but one phase in a House career that was noteworthy in several respects. A strong supporter of maintaining protective tariff schedules, especially for the textile industry, Dawes was viewed as the champion of New England manufacturers. Along with Representative John A. Bingham of Ohio, he sponsored the wool and woolen tariff of 1868. In addition to his protectionist stand, Dawes defended the National College for Deaf Mutes and the enlargement of the Hospital for the Insane in the nation's capital. Adopting the suggestion of Cleveland Abbe, a noted meteorologist, Dawes in 1869 endorsed the plan for the issuance of daily weather bulletins from all sections of the country, which led to the creation of the National Weather Service. Some contemporaries even referred to Dawes as the "father" of this weather bureau. In 1869 he sought the Speakership of the House of Representatives, but after lengthy consultations, he withdrew in favor of Representative James G. Blaine of Maine.
After eighteen years in the House, Dawes was elected in 1875 to the U.S. Senate, where he served continuously until his retirement in 1893. In his role as a senator from Massachusetts, Dawes, holding the seat once occupied by Charles Sumner, continued his support of tariff protection. A member of the Committee on Buildings and Grounds, he proposed legislation to complete the Washington Monument, which, owing to an absence of funds, had been left unfinished since before the Civil War. The structure was finally dedicated in 1885. As chairman of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, Dawes secured money for educational facilities on reservations and brought Native Americans under federal criminal laws.
Dawes is best remembered as the author of the Indian Emancipation Act of 1887, usually called the Dawes General Allotment (Severalty) Act. This measure was designed to assimilate Native Americans into the mainstream of American life and into the American political and economic systems. Reformers contended that reservations fostered indolence and perpetuated tribal customs that hindered assimilation with society. The Dawes Act provided for the dissolution of Native-American tribes as legal entities and the division of tribal lands among individual members and empowered the president to allot these lands within the reservations, contingent on tribal agreements. The government retained a probationary 25-year trust patent, designed to guard against the sale of the holdings to unscrupulous speculators, after which the individual would have full ownership and title to the land with a conferral of U.S. citizenship. The act provided 160 acres to each head of a family, 80 acres to each adult single person, and smaller amounts of land to others who would leave the reservation. President Grover Cleveland, whose encouragement helped to assure passage of the measure, signed and praised the Dawes Act.
Although the Dawes Act was an attempt to resolve the complex problems surrounding the status of Native-American tribes and lands and in its day was often compared to the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence, the measure was ultimately a failure, both in its endeavor to impose a different culture on Native Americans and in the multitude of legalities the law generated over the years. Although showing good intentions, the Dawes Act failed to free Native Americans from governmental dependency. It left millions of acres of land to the government for white settlement. Native American degradation continued; promises of a better education and life rang hollow. The butchery at the battle of Wounded Knee in 1890 demonstrated how meaningless were these intentions, which deprived Native Americans of their property and compelled them to farm on worthless land rather than hunt. Dawes had hoped that assistance would come from churches and philanthropic societies in a common effort with the government to improve the lives of Native Americans. Lacking such aid and with the nation determined to resist special concessions to Native Americans, the failure of the Dawes Act was not surprising. It was finally replaced by the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 during the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Troubled by hearing problems, Dawes retired from the Senate in 1893. With his simple tastes, dignified manners, and personal integrity, he endeared himself to friends and adversaries in Washington and Massachusetts. Senator George F. Hoar, a Massachusetts Republican, recorded in his autobiography that Dawes had proven himself capable of handling the duties and burdens of the offices entrusted to him by the people.
After his retirement from political life, Dawes lived uneventfully at his home in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, with his daughter. His mind was alert, and he maintained his interest in public affairs, remaining until the end a friend of Native Americans. From 1893 to 1903 he headed the Commission of the Five Civilized Tribes (Dawes commission) to negotiate for the voluntary abandonment of tribal relations from a group that had been exempted from the 1887 act. In this connection, he visited Indian Territory in 1895. Seven years later, President Theodore Roosevelt called upon the veteran statesman when he visited Pittsfield. Known as the "Sage of Pittsfield," Dawes died in his home city.
Dawes achieved national recognition as a politician during Reconstruction and the Gilded Age. Although not an eloquent orator, he quickly mastered issues and worked tirelessly in the committee room for the legislation he supported.
Bibliography
The Henry L. Dawes Papers, including an incomplete biography by his daughter, are in the Manuscripts Division of the Library of Congress. A few letters are in the Massachusetts Historical Society in Boston, the Massachusetts State Library in Boston, and the New-York Historical Society in New York. The Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City has papers relating to the Dawes commission, and the Dawes Family Papers in the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., contain valuable letters relating to personal and public affairs, congressional events, and legislation. Dawes published The New Dogma of the South (1860). The major study of Dawes is Fred H. Nicklason, "The Early Career of Henry L. Dawes, 1816-1871" (Ph.D. diss., Yale Univ., 1967). An excellent article is Steven J. Arcanti, "To Secure the Party: Henry L. Dawes and the Politics of Reconstruction," Historical Journal of Western Massachusetts 5 (1977): 33-45. George F. Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years (2 vols., 1903), contains material on Dawes's years in Congress. His endeavors on behalf of Native Americans are recounted in Anna L. Dawes, The Indian as a Citizen (1917); Charles C. Painter, The Dawes Land in Severalty Bill and Indian Emancipation (1887); and Loring Benson Priest, Uncle Sam's Stepchildren: The Reformation of United States Indian Policy, 1865-1887 (1942). An obituary is in the Boston Evening Transcript, 5 Feb. 1903. [
Source:
American National Biography]
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