Through its land policy, the federal government from its inception supported common schools, but education was regarded as a state responsibility, exercised by local communities subject to state oversight. Using the sale of public lands to support education had its origins in the colonial period and was adopted by the Congress of the Articles of Confederation. Its Land Ordinance of 1785 created a system for surveying western lands into six-mile-square townships. In each township, one of its 36 sections was designated to support common schools. In the late 19th century, two sections (and in the early 20th century, four sections) in each state as it entered the Union were set aside for education.
In the late 19th century reformers tried to secure substantial federal aid for impoverished school districts, primarily in the South and West. Republican senator Henry W. Blair introduced a bill in 1881 to distribute among states, on the basis of illiteracy, $120 million over a 10-year period. The chief beneficiaries would be African-American children. Although the Senate passed the bill three times, it was killed in the House of Representatives by racist southerners and parsimonious northerners and never passed.
The federal government also supported higher education and research. Prior to the Civil War, public land granted to states as they entered the Union resulted in the establishment of state universities in Michigan, Indiana, and Wisconsin. In the 1840s and 1850s numerous advocates of an increased federal role in improving agricultural methods studied European models and petitioned Congress for the funding of research and teacher training. In 1857 Republican senator Justin Morrill of Vermont introduced a bill encouraging the growth of higher education through the sale of public lands, and by 1859 it passed Congress only to be vetoed by President James Buchanan, who believed it would unconstitutionally encroach on states’ rights by expanding federal power over education. Southern Democrats prevented an override of the veto.
In May and July 1862, with the nation at war and southern Democrats absent, the Republican Congress, with President Abraham Lincoln’s approval, created the Department of Agriculture (which immediately began research on seed development and plant diseases) and signed Morrill’s Land-Grant College Bill into law. The Morrill Act gave each state 30,000 acres of land for each senator and representative in Congress, and the states were free to sell these lands and use the proceeds to establish agricultural and mechanical colleges. As a result, land-grant institutions were created in every state, but the Morrill Act never provided enough money for the total support of a school. The federal government also provided special land grants for normal schools, schools of mines, military institutes, and segregated schools. An additional Morrill Act (1890) gave $25,000 annually to each land-grant college for studies related to the “industries of life.” This term was used to prevent diverting the money to the liberal arts departments that existed in those institutions.
The 1887 Hatch Act, which gave states money for agricultural research stations, grew out of the work of land-grant universities and the Department of Agriculture. Department officials and college professors had for years been meeting in efforts to disseminate the results of agricultural experimentation to farmers. The research stations were designed to meet that need. By 1899, 56 research stations based in farming areas produced 445 reports and bulletins reaching more than a half-million farmers.
During the Gilded Age—a period of unparalleled agricultural and industrial expansion—the federal government recognized the value of technical training and scientific experimentation and, in limited but precise and important ways, encouraged higher education and the distribution of useful information.
Further reading: Fred A. Shannon, The Farmer's Last Fron-tier: Agriculture, 1860-1897 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1945).
—Harry Stein
World History
