Essay 14-C: The Morrill Act Is Passed In 1862 And The Founding Documents

Essay Read by Constituting America Founder, Actress Janine Turner

Years after the event, John Adams recounted his admission exam to Harvard College: “Mr. Mayhew, into whose Class We were to be admitted, presented me a Passage of English to translate into Latin. It was long, and casting my Eye over it, I found several Words the Latin for which did not occur to my memory. Thinking that I must translate it without a dictionary, I was in a great fright and expected to be turned by [rejected], an Event that I dreaded above all things.” Fortunately, Mayhew kindly permitted Adams to use a dictionary, and the young scholar was on his way. As admission to Harvard also required knowledge of classical Greek, Adams could read and write that language, too. 

Adams’ experience was familiar to many leading figures of the American founding, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson. These languages were an integral part of the classical curriculum, which constituted the education of the American elite from academies through colleges. Classical education was civilizational, to inculcate values distilled from the intellectual patrimony bestowed by the ancients. It was the acquisition of practical wisdom, not of practical skills. 

The emphasis on classical languages coincided with a fascination for the cultures from which they sprang. The influence of the ancient Greeks and Romans on the Americans of that time is obvious from the writings during the struggle for independence and the adoption of the Constitution. Americans saw in their society the incarnation of classical ideals in a new order for the ages; “novus ordo seclorum” is a phrase derived from a work by the Roman poet Virgil. The civic virtue fostered by this “proper” education was considered the foundation on which rested the republicanism that was at the core of the American experiment. 

Although eighteenth-century American republicanism was philosophically rooted in the consent of the governed, its political institutions stayed in the hands of a classically trained “natural aristocracy” of virtue and talent. However, change was in the offing. Science, industry, and agriculture were soon to undergo a profound metamorphosis, contemporaneous with a similarly significant transformation of education and the political order. 

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 famously proclaimed, “Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” Two years earlier, the Land Ordinance of 1785, which regulated the surveying and sale of Western lands, had made it national policy to set aside a one-mile-square parcel of land in each six-mile-square township in new territories for the establishment and funding of public schools to be created by the local towns. In 1787, the Confederation Congress, acting under the 1785 ordinance, granted two townships of 36 square miles each for the establishment and support of a public university in the Northwest Territory. The land would be sold to raise funds for that university. As a result, Ohio University was chartered by that state in 1804.

The technological innovations of the Industrial Revolution and the acquisition of a vast expanse of arable land through the Louisiana Purchase drove a demand for research and advanced training in the practical arts of manufacturing and agriculture. The discovery of mineral wealth in California gold, Nevada silver, and coal and petroleum for industrial use sparked interest in the science and technology of mining. Finally, advances in weaponry, changes in the nature of warfare triggered by the rise of mass armies through the Napoleonic Wars, and the dual challenges faced by the United States of controlling a vast area of land and of fighting the Civil War generated a pressing interest in military science.

These material changes in the lives of Americans coincided with fundamental political change in the era of Jacksonian Democracy. Broad popular participation in politics required an educated public to constrain tendencies to mobocracy, as did a more advanced, complex economy. These influences precipitated a democratization of children’s education through the Common School Movement, starting in Massachusetts in the 1830s, and of higher education through the Morrill Act of 1862. 

The Morrill Act was built on the model of the Land Ordinance of 1785. It granted each state 30,000 acres of federal land for every representative and senator to which the state was entitled. Funds raised from the land sale would establish at least one qualifying state college or support already existing state colleges. These public colleges would focus on agricultural science, mechanical arts and engineering, and military science. It was to be applied science, rather than theoretical science. These topics more likely appealed to students from non-elite backgrounds and reflected the dynamism and pragmatism of 19th-century America. After the Civil War, the Morrill Act also expanded educational opportunity by funding a number of what today are known as Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

The Morrill Act did not replace the influence of elite private universities, just as Jacksonian Democracy and its sequels—the 15th and 19th Amendments for Black and women’s suffrage—did not replace the influence of political elites. The classical curriculum, and with it the quest for civic virtue, was subordinated to the goal of material advancement that improved ordinary Americans’ lives. Expanding the scope of advanced education and making it available to many Americans through public funding, the Morrill Act ultimately promoted American republicanism in harmony with John Adams’ postulation, “Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people.”

An expert on constitutional law, and member of the Southwestern Law School faculty, Professor Joerg W. Knipprath has been interviewed by print and broadcast media on a number of related topics ranging from recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions to presidential succession. He has written opinion pieces and articles on business and securities law as well as constitutional issues, and has focused his more recent research on the effect of judicial review  on the evolution of constitutional law. He has also spoken on business law and contemporary constitutional issues before  professional and community forums, and serves as a Constituting America Fellow.

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