Lincoln, Justin Morrill and the Land Grant That Built the State University

In the summer of 1862 the Union was losing a war, the Treasury was borrowing at a rate that alarmed everyone who could add, and the President was hunting for a general who would fight. Abraham Lincoln found time that July to sign a bill about farm colleges. Think about the confidence that takes. A government fighting for its life sat down and planted the seed of institutions that would still be growing a century and a half later.

That bill is the Morrill Act, and I want to tell its story in order, with its dates and names, because it is the best example in American history of how a federal government can help the education of a people without taking over the education. It gave land. It did not give orders. The difference between those two things is the thesis of this post.

A Vermont congressman with a stubborn idea

Justin Smith Morrill was a self-educated Vermonter. He left school young, worked as a store clerk, made enough money in business to retire at thirty-eight, and then went into politics. He entered the House of Representatives in 1855 and stayed there until he moved to the Senate, where he served until his death in 1898. He was no orator. He was a patient builder of statutes, and he had a conviction that American higher education was failing the people who did most of the country's work.

In his day the colleges were mostly classical institutions, built to train ministers, lawyers and gentlemen, with Latin and Greek at the center. A farmer's son who wanted to learn soil science or a machinist's son who wanted to understand engineering had few places to go. The country was a nation of farms and workshops, and its colleges were looking the other way.

Morrill introduced his land-grant bill in December 1857. The idea was simple. Congress owned enormous quantities of western land. Give each state a portion of that land, let the state sell it, and let the proceeds endow a college. The college's central purpose would be teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts, which in the language of the day meant engineering and the practical trades.

The veto

The bill passed both houses in 1859 and went to President James Buchanan, who vetoed it on February 24, 1859. His reasons are worth stating fairly, since they are the best objections to the whole idea.

Buchanan argued first that the bill was beyond the powers the Constitution gives Congress. Nowhere does Article I list education among the powers of Congress, and he rejected the claim that the power to dispose of federal property could reach so far. He argued second that the grant would give away roughly six million acres and deprive the Treasury of nearly all its income from land sales. He argued third that if the states came to rely on the federal Treasury for education, the arrangement would be "equally ruinous to both" governments, which he wanted kept distinct. He called the bill "both inexpedient and unconstitutional."

It is a better argument than the history books usually allow. A constitutionalist ought to take it seriously. The Constitution does not list education. Congress does have power over the property of the United States, under Article IV, Section 3, which lets it "dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States." The Morrill Act rested on that clause, not on any power over schools. Congress was disposing of federal property, as it had many times before, in the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance, covered in Religion, Morality and Knowledge, the Northwest Ordinance's School Clause, for a purpose it judged to be good. Whether that is a sufficient answer depends on how one reads the clause, and honest constitutionalists have disagreed. I think the answer is a good one, and the precedent of the school lands supports it. But Buchanan was not foolish to ask the question.

Lincoln signs, July 2, 1862

Morrill kept at it. By 1862 the political situation had changed. The Southern states, which had opposed the bill, had left the Union and their representatives were gone. The Republican Party held a large majority, and the administration had a stake in building the economic base of the country. Congress passed the bill in the spring; a period encyclopedia credits Senator Benjamin Wade of Ohio with presenting it to the Senate.

Lincoln signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862. Lincoln had grown up poor, worked with his hands and educated himself from borrowed books, and he knew what a farm was. He had signed the bill creating the Department of Agriculture in May of that year, and the Homestead Act in the same month, and the Pacific Railway Act the day before the Morrill Act. In a single summer, in the middle of a civil war, he put his name to a sequence of laws that built the economy of the continent.

What the act did, exactly

The mechanics are the heart of the story, so let me lay them out.

The grant. Each state received 30,000 acres of public land for each Senator and Representative it had in Congress under the census of 1860. The arithmetic is simple. A state with two Senators and five Representatives had seven members of Congress, so it received 7 x 30,000 = 210,000 acres. A state with two Senators and one Representative received 90,000.

The scrip. Many eastern states had no federal land within their borders. They received land scrip, certificates the state could sell to buyers who would then locate land in the western states. New York, with the largest delegation, received 990,000 acres of scrip. Ezra Cornell bought a large share of it and used the proceeds, and his own money, to found the university that bears his name.

The endowment. The state was to sell the land, or the scrip, and invest the proceeds in safe securities, a perpetual fund whose income would support the college. The principal could not be spent. Only the interest could.

The purpose. The Act says that the income should go to the endowment, support and maintenance of at least one college where the leading object would be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach branches of learning related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States might prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.

Read that last phrase again: the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes. Liberal and practical. Morrill did not set the two against each other. The college would teach the classics too, "without excluding other scientific and classical studies." But its center of gravity was the work that Americans actually did.

The control. And here is the point. The Act said the state legislature would prescribe the manner. The federal government gave the land, set a broad purpose and a few conditions, and stepped back. Each state built its own college in its own way, under its own board. No federal department ran them, no federal bureau appointed their presidents, and no federal official wrote their curriculum.

What it built

The result was the state university system that so many of us take for granted. Some states created new colleges, and others gave the money to existing institutions. Several of the largest state universities, and a private one, Cornell, trace part of their founding resources to the grant.

The practical consequence was the American habit of university research tied to the farm and the factory. In 1887 the Hatch Act funded agricultural experiment stations at the land-grant colleges. In 1914 the Smith-Lever Act created the cooperative extension service, which sent county agents out to teach farmers what the colleges had learned. A farmer in a distant county could get advice on seed, soil and livestock from a college professor. That was an extraordinary thing, and it is part of why American agriculture became the most productive in the world.

The second act of 1890

In 1890 Congress passed the Second Morrill Act, signed on August 30. It added annual federal appropriations to the land-grant colleges, and it required that states either admit students without distinction of race or color, or provide separate colleges for Black students. The effect was the creation of the 1890 institutions, historically Black land-grant colleges, many of which remain today.

This part of the story needs honest treatment. The Act accepted "separate" as an option, which was the compromise of its day and which was later repudiated by the Court and by Congress. It also produced real institutions that educated generations of Black Americans in the sciences and trades at a time when most colleges would not admit them. Both facts are true, and neither should be hidden.

The argument, in numbered premises

What can we learn? Let me state the principle.

1. A national government may support education without administering it. The Morrill Act gave an endowment and a purpose and left the work to the states.
2. The form of the help matters. A grant of property is different from a regulatory mandate. A college that lives on an endowment answers to its trustees and its legislature, not to a bureau.
3. The mission was useful knowledge. The Act was aimed at farmers, mechanics and the industrial classes, the ordinary Americans whose work fed and built the country. Its purpose was not prestige.
4. The mission has to be defended. An institution that forgets its founding purpose is spending an inheritance on something its founders did not intend.

A fair objection

The strongest objection is that a land grant is still federal money and still shaped the colleges. A federal government that gives land with a purpose attached is, after all, directing education, however lightly. Conservatives who worry about federal control should be wary of precedents that invite it.

I think the objection has force, and the later history confirms it. The Second Morrill Act brought annual appropriations and conditions, and from there the road to modern federal funding, with its mass of regulations, is a straight one. The Title IX story, told in Title IX Began as 37 Words in 1972, Here Is How It Grew Into a Rulebook, is what happens when a funding stream becomes a lever. So the lesson is not that Washington should never help. It is that the form of help determines whether the recipients remain free. An endowment from property is a gift. An annual appropriation with strings attached is a leash. The first Morrill Act is the gift.

What it says to a university that has drifted

Here is the part I would put before every university board.

The land-grant mission was useful knowledge for working people. Many of the institutions the Act helped found have grown into vast research enterprises with large administrative staffs and costs far beyond what the founders imagined. I have looked at where the money goes in Where Tuition Dollars Go, From Administrators to the Lazy River, and at the alternative paths to a skilled life in Four Years of Wages Versus Four Years of Debt, the Apprenticeship Math and German and Swiss Apprenticeships Compared With the American Path.

I would put three questions to any land-grant university. Does it still serve the farmers, mechanics and working families of the state that gave it its charter? Is it teaching things that people can use? And is its price one that those families can pay without debt? A university that answers yes to all three is living up to Morrill. A university that cannot has the same obligation as any trustee who has wandered from the terms of the trust.

And I would add something for farmers and ranchers themselves. The land-grant system is your inheritance. The extension offices, the experiment stations and the state colleges were built for you, and you can still call them. Use them, ask them hard questions, and expect them to answer.

The case in brief

1. Justin Morrill of Vermont proposed funding colleges of agriculture and the mechanic arts with federal land, and President Buchanan vetoed the bill on February 24, 1859, over constitutional objections.
2. Lincoln signed the Morrill Act on July 2, 1862, granting each state 30,000 acres for each member of Congress, with the proceeds held as a permanent endowment.
3. The states, not Washington, built and ran the colleges, which is the feature that made the system durable.
4. The Second Morrill Act of 1890 added appropriations and produced the 1890 institutions, with a compromise on race that history has judged harshly.
5. The land-grant mission of useful knowledge is a standard every university should be asked to meet.

What you can do: look up the land-grant university in your state, find its extension office on its website, and call it with one practical question about your own farm, garden or business.