Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act

An act of 1863 that extended military-style education to land-grant colleges. It required the schools to provide male students with basic military instruction, but the schools could remain essentially civilian institutions.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

After decades of agitation by agricultural societies, farm journals, and other advocates of vocational training for farmers and mechanics, Senator Justin S. Morrill of Vermont introduced into Congress a bill for the establishment of agricultural and mechanical arts colleges in every state. The measure passed Congress in 1858, but President James Buchanan vetoed it. The Morrill Act, signed by President Abraham Lincoln in 1862, offered states thirty thousand acres of land for each sitting federal representative and senator as an endowment for the proposed schools. Some states, most notably Wisconsin, elected to give the land to existing institutions; others used it to establish new agricultural and technical colleges.

Bibliography

Cross, Coy F. Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999.

Simon, John Y. "The Politics of the Morrill Act," Agricultural History 37 (1963): 103–111.

Williams, Roger L. The Origins of Federal Support for Higher Education: George W. Atherton and the Land-Grant College Movement. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.

During the Civil War, the Thirty-Seventh Congress was responsible for a striking amount of landmark legislation. The Homestead Act, the Enrollment Act, and the Internal Revenue Act were passed in a matter of months. Equally important, this energetic Congress also passed the Morrill Land Grant Act (MLGA). The MLGA transformed higher education and was responsible for the establishment of numerous colleges across the country. In this legislation, championed in the Congress by Justin Smith Morrill, the federal government took, for the first time, a leadership role in higher education in the United States.

Morrill, a representative from Vermont, was the most important proponent providing federal assistance for state colleges in Congress before the Civil War. Morrill, the son of a blacksmith, was unable to attend college because his father could not afford the tuition for all of his sons. Leaving school at fifteen, Morrill became a prosperous owner of a general store. He became active in public life and was elected in 1855 as a Whig to the House of Representatives before becoming a leader of the new Republican Party in Vermont. In Congress he rose to a position on the powerful Ways and Means Committee and became one of the most outspoken advocates for the democratic ideal that a college education should be available, at low cost, to all who desired one.

Morrill's thinking was heavily influenced by Jonathan Turner of Illinois College, who had long argued for the establishment of state agricultural colleges through the use of federal land grants. Morrill proposed plans for land grant colleges as early as 1857, and a plan of his passed the House in 1858. The bill faced opposition in the Senate from Southerners objecting to the increased federal role in dictating the course of higher education within the states. Morrill's bill eventually passed the Senate in 1859 in the midst of an economic downturn. President James Buchanan, however, vetoed the bill for both constitutional and economic reasons.

With a new president and the departure of the Southern congressional delegations, Morrill was able in the first Civil War Congress to finally steer his bill to passage. Under the terms of MLGA, the federal government distributed land proportionately to the states, which then sold it. The proceeds of the land sales supported colleges in the instruction of "agriculture and the mechanical arts." Some states used the money from the sale of land to aid existing schools, and other states used the money to establish new colleges and universities. Each state was given 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative it had in the Congress. Most of the land given to the states was in the West, where the vast bulk of unsold federal land remained. Additionally, the most populous eastern states, such as New York and Pennsylvania, received a larger share of western land than the western states themselves. This provoked some opposition from western delegations in the Congress, but the simultaneous passage of the Homestead Act secured the support of enough western Republicans to pass the act on July 2, 1862. Although first applied in the Union states, after the Civil War, the MLGA was extended to the former Confederate states.

The passage of this legislation in the midst of war is emblematic of the dynamism and creativity of this Congress, even on nonmilitary matters. President Lincoln, consumed with the day-to-day fighting of the war, gave Congress a remarkably free hand in social and economic legislation. The Morrill Land Grant Act remains one of the great legislative achievements of the Civil War Congress, and countless Americans went to college as a direct result of this law. Through this legislation the state universities of Wisconsin, Illinois, California, Minnesota, and Ohio, as well as dozens of other state institutions were created or expanded. State universities from Maryland to Nebraska to Washington have a Morrill Hall on campus. Morrill was elected to the Senate in 1866, where he remained until he died in office in 1898.

Bibliography

Donald, David H., et al. The Civil War and Reconstruction. New York: Norton, 2001.

McPherson, James M. Battle Cry of Freedom. New York: Ballentine Books, reissue ed., 1989.

Nevins, Allan. The State Universities and Democracy Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1962.

"Morrill Act" redirects here. For the act regarding polygamy, see Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act.

The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are United States statutes that allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges, including the Morrill Act of 1862 (7 U.S.C. § 301 et seq.) and the Morrill Act of 1890 (the Agricultural College Act of 1890, (26 Stat. 417, 7 U.S.C. § 321 et seq.))

Justin Smith Morrill

Contents 1 Passage of original bill 2 Land-grant colleges 3 Expansion 4 Cooperative extensions 5 List of land-grant colleges and universities 6 See also 7 References

Passage of original bill

For fifteen years prior to the first introduction of the bill in 1857, there was a political movement calling for the creation of agriculture colleges. The movement was led by Professor Jonathan Baldwin Turner of Illinois College. On February 8, 1853, the Illinois legislature adopted a resolution, drafted by Turner, calling for the Illinois congressional delegation to work to enact a land-grant bill to fund a system of industrial colleges, one in each state. Senator Lyman Trumbull of Illinois believed it was advisable that the bill should be introduced by an eastern congressman,^[1] and two months later Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont introduced his bill.

Unlike the Turner Plan, which provided an equal grant to each state, the Morrill bill allocated land based on the number of senators and representative each state had in Congress. This was more advantageous to the more populous eastern states.^[2]

The Morrill Act was first proposed in 1857, and was passed by Congress in 1859, but it was vetoed by President James Buchanan. In 1861, Morrill resubmitted the act with the amendment that the proposed institutions would teach military tactics^[3] as well as engineering and agriculture. Aided by the secession of many states that did not support the plans, this reconfigured Morrill Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1862.

Land-grant colleges

The purpose of the land-grant colleges was:

without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.^[4]

Under the act, each eligible state received a total of 30,000 acres (120 km²) of federal land, either within or contiguous to its boundaries, for each member of congress the state had as of the census of 1860. This land, or the proceeds from its sale, was to be used toward establishing and funding the educational institutions described above. Under provision six of the Act, "No State while in a condition of rebellion or insurrection against the government of the United States shall be entitled to the benefit of this act," in reference to the recent secession of several Southern states and the currently raging American Civil War. After the war, however, the 1862 Act was extended to the former Confederate states; it was eventually extended to every state and territory, including those created after 1862. If the federal land within a state was insufficient to meet that state's land grant, the state was issued "scrip" which authorized the state to select federal lands in other states to fund its institution.^[5] For example, New York carefully selected valuable timber land in Wisconsin to fund Cornell University.^[6] As a result, even though New York received only one-tenth of the 1862 land grant, the university’s management of that scrip yielded one third of the total grant revenues generated by all the states.^[7] Overall, the 1862 Morrill Act allocated 17,400,000 acres (70,000 km²) of land, which when sold yielded a collective endowment of $7.55 million.^[8]

With a few exceptions (including Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), nearly all of the Land-Grant Colleges are public. (Cornell University, while private, administers several state-supported contract colleges that fulfill its public land-grant mission to the state of New York.)

Expansion

A second Morrill Act in 1890 was also aimed at the former Confederate states. This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for persons of color.^[9] Among the seventy colleges and universities which eventually evolved from the Morrill Acts are several of today's Historically Black colleges and universities (indicated below with *). Though the 1890 Act granted cash instead of land, it granted colleges under that act the same legal standing as the 1862 Act colleges; hence the term "land-grant college" properly applies to both groups.

Later on, other colleges such as the University of the District of Columbia and the "1994 land-grant colleges" for Native Americans were also awarded cash by Congress in lieu of land to achieve "land-grant" status.

In imitation of the land-grant colleges' focus on agricultural and mechanical research, Congress later established programs of sea grant colleges (aquatic research, in 1966), urban grant colleges (urban research, in 1985), space grant colleges (space research, in 1988), and sun grant colleges (sustainable energy research, in 2003).

Cooperative extensions

Congress later recognized the need to disseminate the knowledge gained at the land-grant colleges to farmers and homemakers. The Smith-Lever Act of 1914 started federal funding of cooperative extension, with the land-grant universities' agents being sent to virtually every county of every state. Starting in 1887, Congress also funded agricultural experiment stations and various categories of agricultural and veterinary research "under direction of" the land-grant universities.^[10] In some states, the annual federal appropriations to the land-grant college under these laws exceed the current income from the original land grants. In the fiscal year 2006 USDA Budget, $1.033 billion went to research and cooperative extension activities nationwide.^[11] The President has proposed $1.035 billion for fiscal year 2008.^[12]

List of land-grant colleges and universities

Main article: List of land-grant universities

See also

• Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities
• Hatch Act of 1887
• Smith-Lever Act of 1914
• United States Department of Agriculture

References

1. ^ Letter from Lyman Trumbull to J.B. Turner, 1857-10-19.
2. ^ Carl L. Becker, Cornell University Founders and The Founding, (Cornell University Press 1943) p. 28-30.
3. ^ The Morrill Act used the phrase "military tactic."
4. ^ 7 U.S.C. § 304
5. ^ 7 U.S.C. § 302
6. ^ http://www.cornell.edu/landgrant/resources/Land_Grant_Univ_Whalen.pdf p. 9
7. ^ http://www.cornell.edu/landgrant/resources/Land_Grant_Univ_Whalen.pdf p. 10
8. ^ http://www.cornell.edu/landgrant/resources/Land_Grant_Univ_Whalen.pdf p. 8
9. ^ 7 U.S.C. § 323
10. ^ 7 U.S.C. § 361a
11. ^ USDA Budget Summary 2006 - Research, Education, and Economics
12. ^ CSREES FY2008 President's Budget Proposal

This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)