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During the presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes (spanning 1877–81), Dawes was a prominent member of congressional "Half-Breeds" within the Republican Party allied with Hayes' support for civil service reform.^[4] Along with fellow Massachusetts senatorial Half-Breed George F. Hoar and Rep. John Davis Long, he became one of the faction's leading strategists.^[5]

During the 1880 United States presidential election, the agreed strategy planned was to prevent either former president Ulysses S. Grant, the leader of "Stalwarts," nor Blaine faction leader James G. Blaine of Maine, from obtaining the nomination at the Republican National Convention.^[5] Instead, the Half-Breeds would push to nominate faction member George F. Edmunds, a senator from Vermont.

However, Sen. Hoar admonished Half-Breed supporters that Republican delegates should not make their preferences clearly visible to others.^[5] Although the Massachusetts delegation did support Edmunds, the Vermont Half-Breed failed to garner enough support, and the faction ultimately formed an alliance with Blaine supporters in successfully nominating James A. Garfield of Ohio.

When President Garfield took office, Blaine was made United States Secretary of State for the administration. The Maine Republican's credentials as a Half-Breed were spotty due to his history of antipathy towards civil service reform, though nonetheless were welcomed by Hoar and Dawes as a member of the faction.^[5] However, Edmunds, who Half-Breeds supported in 1880, broke from Dawes and Hoar in refusing to accept Blaine as a genuine convert.^[5] Indeed, the Vermont senator refused to support Blaine when the latter was nominated by the Republican National Convention in the 1884 presidential election.

Like all early Half-Breeds who were relatively prominent during the Hayes presidency, Dawes supported civil service reform. During the presidency of James A. Garfield, he wrote two letters at separate occasions in July 1881 on the matter.^[6][7]

The Dawes Act was intended to assimilate Indians by encouraging them to undertake subsistence farming, then widespread in American society. Enacted in 1887, it was amended in 1891, again in 1898 by the Curtis Act, and again in 1906 by the Burke Act.

The Dawes Commission, set up under an Indian Office appropriation bill in 1893, was created not to administer the Act but to attempt to persuade the tribes excluded from the Act by treaties to agree to the allotment plan. After gaining agreement from representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes in Indian Territory, the commission appointed registrars to register members on rolls prior to allotment of lands. Many tribes have since based membership and citizen qualifications on descent from persons listed as Indians on the Dawes Rolls. (Also listed were freedmen of each tribe, and intermarried whites.)

On leaving the Senate in 1893, Dawes became chairman of the commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, also known as the Dawes Commission, and served for ten years. He negotiated with the tribes for the extinction of the communal title to their land and for the dissolution of the tribal governments. The goal was to make tribal members a constituent part of the United States.^[1] In the process Native American tribes lost about 90 million acres (360,000 km²) of treaty land, or about two thirds of their 1887 land base, over the life of the Dawes Act. About 90,000 Indians were made landless. The Act forced Native people onto small tracts of land, distant from their kin relations. The allotment policy depleted the land base and ended hunting as a means of subsistence, creating a crisis for many tribes.

The Coolidge administration studied the effects of the Dawes Act and the current conditions for Indians in what is known as the Meriam Report, completed in 1928. It found that the Dawes Act had been used illegally to deprive Native Americans of their land rights.