Private Property and citizenship: Emancipation, Homestead, and Dawes

Friday's con-versation about ideals of American life at the turn into the twentieth century yielded some insights for me beyond my delight in the vigor of the conversation.  These derive from the chronological coincidence of the Homestead Act and the Emancipation Proclamation as well as from the later (1887) Dawes Act.

1. Freeing slaves and offering free land: two expansions of citizenship.
2. Free land was offered to freed slaves who have not been counted as citizen previously, to immigrants asserting their intention to become citizens, and to native-born citizens willing to move west and do the work, but not to citizens who served in the Confederacy's military forces.
3. Also note that this was offered to adult men and unmarried adult women, the former who could vote and the later could not.
4. Also excluded the Chinese who were not allowed into the nation and thus could neither get 160 acres or become citizens.
5. The Dawes Act offered Native Americans (not immigrants precisely, but still aliens of a sort) a traded: take up the notion of private ownership of property and gain citizenship.  

So we have the familiar notion that land ownership is the foundation of the independence necessary for exercising the responsibilities of citizenship to vote.  However these were mixed with notions of loyalty to the nation (which the Confederates had violated), and with notions about gender roles that allowed un-married women to own land and pay taxes, but not to vote, and with notions about racial identity that anticipated that African-Americans and Native Americans could become loyal, responsible citizens, but Chinese could not. 

I'm still thinking about the interaction of these several assumptions even as I have just read a rather intriguing essay about Dakota and Norwegian female land ownership near Devil's Lake, North Dakota. The author points out the oddity that recent immigrants, many of whom barely spoke English, were expected to somehow contribute to the government's project of bring the Sioux into American culture. (Karen V. Hanson, "Land Taking at Spirit Lake: The Competing and Converging Logics of Norwegian and Dakota Women, 1900-1930."  Norwegian American Women: Migration, Communities, and Identities.)