The Morrill Land-Grant Acts are pieces of USlegislation which allowed for the creation of land-grant colleges, which would be funded by the grant of federally-controlled land to each of the states which had stayed with the United States during the American Civil War.
The Morrill Act was first proposed by Representative Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont 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 as well as engineering and agriculture. This reconfigured Morrill Act was signed into law by President Lincoln on July 2, 1862.
Under the act, each eligible state received a total of 30,000 acres (121 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.
A second Morrill Act followed in 1890 aiming to include the former Confederate states in the program. This act also 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. Among the seventy colleges and universities which eventually evolved from the Morrill Acts are several of today's historically black colleges.
The original mission of these institutions, as set forth in the first MorrillAct, was to teach agriculture, military tactics, and the mechanical arts as well as classical studies so that members of the working classes could obtain a liberal, practical education.
The first MorrillAct provided grants in the form of federal lands to each state for the establishment of a public institution to fulfill the act's provisions.
MorrillÂ’s bill was designed to donate federal land (30,000 acres) to each state and territory as an endowment.
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