The Agricultural and Mechanical Colleges Act, better known as the Morrill Land-Grant Act for its sponsor, Vermont congressman Justin Morrill, established the land-grant college system, which widened the reach of higher EDUCATION while supporting agricultural, mechanical, and military education and research.
Morrill first introduced the bill in December 1857. A largely self-educated man, Morrill conceived of the legislation as a means of addressing the declining agricultural productivity of the 1850s. Taking inspiration from the agricultural schools and colleges of western Europe and observing the development of new technical and vocational colleges in the United States, Morrill proposed the sale of federal lands to fund the creation of colleges in each state. A founding member of the Vermont REPUBLICAN Party, Morrill’s vision of an expanded role for the federal government in funding education met with strong opposition from legislators from the South and West, including JEFFERSON DAViS and James Mason, who found the bill to be questionable. Mason called it “an unconstitutional robbing of the Treasury for the purpose of bribing the states.” Despite the opposition, the efforts of Morrill and Ohio senator Benjamin Wade led to the passage of the bill in both houses. James Buchanan, however, at the urging of Louisiana senator John Slidell and other Democrats, vetoed the bill, questioning its necessity and constitutionality.
Reintroducing the bill in December 1861, Morrill strengthened its provisions, allotting each state 30,000 acres of federal land to be sold for each member of its congressional delegation. The language of the bill continued to emphasize the development of technical and agricultural curricula, endowing in each state “at least one college where the leading object shall be, without excluding other scientific and classical studies, and including military tactics, to teach such branches of learning as are related to AGRICULTURE and mechanic arts.” Motivated by the onset of war, the inclusion of military training in the provisions of the bill allowed for the development of the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC), an educational program from which military officers could be drawn. Without the presence of the Southern Democratic delegation to fight the bill, it encountered comparatively little opposition and passed both houses easily, by a 32-7 vote in the Senate and a 90-25 vote in the House. President Abraham Lincoln signed the bill into law on July 2, 1862.
The parameters of the act allowed for the founding or expansion of a number of prominent American institutions of higher learning, including Ohio State University, Cornell University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rutgers University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of California system. Providing the backbone of the American state college system, the Morrill Act aided in bringing an expanded body of academic programs, including agricultural science, botany, veterinary medicine, and engineering, to a larger proportion of the American population. Offering higher education at a lower cost and employing more liberal admissions standards, the land-grant colleges improved educational access for women, the working class, and marginalized ethnic groups. The formation of Alcorn State University in Mississippi, Hampton University in Virginia, and Clafflin University in South Carolina after the CiViL War gave America its first land-grant colleges for African Americans, though funding from the Morrill act continued, in general, to serve predominantly white institutions during the remainder of the 19th century.
A second Morrill act, passed in 1890 under President Benjamin Harrison, increased and solidified economic support for colleges founded under the 1862 legislation. Denying funding to states “where a distinction of race or color is made in the admission of students,” the act encouraged the development of institutions of higher education for African Americans. In doing so, however, the act allowed for the construction of separate facilities for black and white students, declaring the legitimacy of a “separate but equal” doctrine affirmed six years later in Plessy v. Ferguson.
The land-grant college system created by both Morrill acts has continued to have a considerable influence on American education, now including more than 100 institutions that have granted more than 20 million degrees since 1862.
Further reading: Ralph D. Christy and Lionel Williamson, A Century of Service: Land-Grant Colleges and Universities, 1890-1990 (New Brunswick, N. J.: Transaction Publishers, 1992); Coy Cross, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999).
—Adam Barnhart
Legislature. Undeterred, Morton declined to call the legislature into session. Instead, he ran state affairs using money raised from private sources and loans from Washington, D. C. In 1864 Indiana voters approved Morton’s forceful performance in office, voting him to another term as governor and electing a Republican legislature. He continued facilitating Indiana’s significant contributions to the ultimate Northern victory.
Though felled by a stroke in 1865, Morton remained a powerful ally of Radical Republicans during Reconstruction. Two years later the state legislature appointed him to the U. S. Senate, where he endorsed the Fourteenth Amendment to establish African-American suffrage. Morton continued in his senatorial capacity until 1877, when he suffered a second stroke. He died at Indianapolis on November 1, 1877.
Further reading: Thomas E. Rodgers, “Northern Political Ideologies in the Civil War Era: West Central Indiana,
1860-1861” (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1991); Lorna L. Sylvester, “Oliver P. Morton and Hoosier Politics in the Civil War” (unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1968).
—John C. Fredriksen
Morton, Oliver P. (1823-1877) lawyer, politician Oliver Hazard Perry Morton served as governor of Indiana during the Civil War. Morton was born in Salisbury, Indiana, on August 4, 1823. Following the death of his mother, he was raised by two stern Presbyterian aunts, from whom he developed a tendency toward inflexibility. As a young man, Morton studied law at Miami University, Ohio, and he was admitted to the Indiana state bar in 1846.
Morton enjoyed considerable success as a district attorney, and he developed a taste for politics as a Democrat. In 1854, when the Democrats abandoned the Missouri Compromise in favor of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Morton changed his political affiliation to the People’s Party, a precursor of the Indiana state Republican Party. Two years later he unsuccessfully ran for governor as a Republican, but in 1860 he was elected vice governor to Governor Henry S. Lane. Soon afterward, the state legislature appointed Lane to the U. S. Senate, and Morton succeeded him.
As governor of Indiana, Morton was a highly efficient prowar administrator and a staunch political ally of President Abraham Lincoln. He strongly supported military action against the Confederacy and raised 150,000 troops, twice the state quota, for the Union army. He also took direct action against Copperheads and other dissenters. His actions prompted a backlash, however, and in the ELEctions of 1863 the Democrats took control of the state
Mosby, John Singleton (1833-1916) lawyer, Confederate soldier
Confederate colonel John Singleton Mosby was a leader of the Partisan Rangers in northern Virginia from 1863 to 1865. Originally a scout for Maj. Gen. J. E. B. Stuart in the First Virginia Cavalry, Mosby successfully lobbied for his own company, which grew from nine men to as many as 1,900 before the war’s end, with no less than 400 serving at one time. His guerrilla operations in Virginia were an interminable nuisance to the Union picket posts in the defensive parameters around Washington, D. C., as well as to Union army efforts in the Shenandoah Valley. He constantly diverted troops, supplies, and attention away from intended Union campaigns, often capturing forces several times larger than his own.
Born on December 6, 1833, in Powhatan County, Virginia, Mosby was a sickly child, though intelligent and well read. He attended college at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville until he was expelled and imprisoned for shooting a fellow student. While in jail, he studied law, and upon his release he practiced law in Howardsville, Virginia. In 1857 he married Pauline Clarke of Frankfort, Kentucky, and they moved to Bristol, Virginia, a year later. In December 1860 he enrolled in the state militia and became a Confederate cavalryman when Virginia seceded in April 1861.
Mosby quickly became one of Stuart’s most trusted scouts, obtaining information that helped pave the way for Stuart’s raid around the Union army during the PENINSULAR CAMPAIGN of 1862. Like Stuart, Mosby was flamboyant in dress. Sporting an ostrich plume in his hat, the slight, blond cavalier wore a gray cape with bright red lining. In January 1863, Stuart permitted Mosby and a detail of nine men from the First Virginia Cavalry to begin partisan, or guerrilla, operations in Loudoun County, Virginia. The outfit officially became the 43rd Battalion of Virginia Cavalry in June 1863, and Mosby was promoted to colonel on December 7, 1864. The battalion’s operations were based in Loudoun and Fauquier Counties in north-central Virginia, an area that became known as “Mosby’s Confederacy.”
One of the best-known exploits of Mosby’s rangers was the capture of Union Brig. Gen. Edwin H. Stoughton, who was captured while sleeping in a house in Virginia, five miles inside the line of Union defense. Other successful raids include the “Great Wagon Raid” and the “Greenback Raid” in August and October 1864, respectively. The rangers also succeeded in cutting TELEGRAPH wires, halting traffic on the important B&O Railroad, and hampering Union major general PHILIP H. Sheridan’s supply line during his Shenandoah Valley campaign. Although determined and forceful in command, Mosby and his men never lapsed into the cruel and criminal behavior that characterized other Southern guerrilla units.
Rather than surrender his command, Mosby instead disbanded his battalion on April 21, 1865. After the war he practiced law in Warrenton, Virginia, and outraged fellow Confederate VETERANS when he expressed Republican sympathies and actively supported President ULYSSES S. Grant’s 1872 reelection campaign. Grant admired his former foe and wrote, “Since the close of the war, I have come to know Colonel Mosby personally. . . . He is able and thoroughly honest and truthful.”
Under President Rutherford B. Hayes, Mosby served as consul in Hong Kong and helped expose and correct the abuses of his corrupt predecessors in office. He also served in the land office in southern Nebraska and as assistant attorney in the Justice Department. In 1908 he published an impassioned defense of Stuart’s actions during the Gettysburg campaign, a topic of hot debate in Confederate circles after the war. Mosby died on May 30, 1916, at the age of 82.
Further reading: John Singleton Mosby, Memoirs, ed. Charles Wells Russell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959); James A. Ramage, Gray Ghost: The Life of Col. John Singleton Mosby (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1999); Jeffry D. Wert, Mosby’s Rangers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990).
—Stacey Graham
World History
