Morrill Act

Context

The passage of the Morrill Act took place against the dramatic events of the Civil War. War production helped heavy industries in the North and strengthened the complementary relationship that already existed between agriculture and industry. Although the mechanization of agriculture had begun before the war, military recruitment and conscription gave farmers an added reason to buy machinery that could replace human labor, at least in part. As Benjamin F. Quillian has pointed out, “The young republic was highly dependent on agriculture, but American farming was inefficient and lacking in scientific knowledge and technology” (p. 93). With the growing of eastern cities and the opening up of European markets, American agriculture was gradually changing from its immediate purpose of feeding farmers' families into a commercial agriculture. This new commercial dimension required an educational system that could introduce newer and more advanced farming methods. The Morrill Act, from the very title, declared itself instrumental to this transition.

During the nineteenth century, debates on the institution of slavery had become increasingly prominent. The positions of free northern states and slaveholding southern states were becoming increasingly polarized and difficult to reconcile. In 1820 the Missouri Compromise had prohibited slavery in the former Louisiana Territory north of the parallel 36°30′ north, except in the proposed state of Missouri. Particularly from the mid-1840s, with the expansion of the nation westward and the settlement of the Great Plains, Americans were confronted with the complex issue of whether new states and territories should be free or slaveholding, a thorny problem the Missouri Compromise failed to address.

This question eventually proved too divisive for an effective compromise. Factional interests with political parties and church denominations gradually replaced the tendency toward compromise for the national well-being. Northern Republicans were especially concerned that Democrats were planning to take over federal institutions and make slavery legal throughout the Union. They believed that slavery violated the principle of the free labor of free men, which they thought should be the guiding tenet for the country's development. These antislavery northerners were not necessarily antiracist; on the contrary, it was possible to oppose slavery and still be racist. Fears of so-called slave power, the idea that a slaveholding oligarchy was expanding its political control over the whole country, were encouraging the growth of a larger antislavery movement, and slavery was increasingly seen as endangering the rights of white men to obtain jobs in slaveholding states.

On the other hand, southern Democratic leaders defended slavery and invoked the Constitution, claiming that the enslavement of African Americans was based on the Bible and above moral criticism. According to the southern proslavery thinker John C. Calhoun, the new territories added to the Union belonged to all states, including slaveholding ones. Thus, Calhoun invoked the constitutional right of slaveholders to take their slaves anywhere in the new territories. Another prominent southerner, the sociologist George Fitzhugh, declared slavery morally superior to wage labor, as factory owners did not take care of their sick workers and simply exploited their work. On the contrary, paternalistic southern slaveholders looked after their aged slaves.

The polarizing effects of the debate over slavery became apparent in the election of 1856. Fought immediately after the bitter and violent controversies surrounding the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854), which had opened the two states to slavery, the election witnessed the victory of the Democratic candidate James Buchanan, the former ambassador to Britain. Buchanan had been selected as a candidate precisely because his role as ambassador had left him out of the territorial disputes over the extension of slavery to the new territories. The support of southern states was decisive for Buchanan's victory. The new president was elected without the support of eleven free states that would remain adverse to the Democratic Party for decades. John C. Frémont, the Republican candidate, won those states, making his party the dominant political force in the North.

Buchanan did not fully grasp the widening rift that slavery was causing in American society and was persuaded that he could keep the nation united if the American people accepted the interpretations of the Constitution by the Supreme Court. Yet following the Dred Scott v. Sandford Supreme Court ruling in 1857, northern concerns over the threat of slave power all but increased. Dred Scott was a Missouri slave who had decided to sue his owner for his freedom. Scott claimed that he should be freed because his owner had taken him to Illinois, a free state, for several years before moving to the Wisconsin Territory, where slavery was also barred because of the 1820 Missouri Compromise. Far from limiting itself to the case of Scott, the majority opinion, which ruled against the slave's claim, also declared the 1820 Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. With the Scott ruling, slave power seemed to have won a major constitutional victory, as the verdict came close to an endorsement of Calhoun's ideas.

Republican politicians used the growing fears of a possible takeover by slave power to strengthen their diverse coalition, which also included racists who felt that slavery could endanger their interests. Abraham Lincoln emerged as the party's nominee for the 1860 election. While Lincoln denied that Republicans intended to interfere with slavery where it existed, the party also stood firm against the extension of the institution into the new territories. In the meantime, the Democratic Party was becoming increasingly divided over the issue of slavery, and, as compromise failed, Democrats presented two nominees: Stephen A. Douglas for the northern wing and Vice President John C. Breckinridge for the South. This fragmentation helped Lincoln to win the vote in the Electoral College, although the sum of his opponents' votes exceeded Lincoln's.

Shortly after Lincoln's victory, the southern states, starting with South Carolina, began to secede from the Union. By February 1861, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas had joined South Carolina and created the Confederate States of America with Jefferson Davis as their president and a new government based in Montgomery, Alabama. Military hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy broke out when, in April 1861, Lincoln notified South Carolina authorities that he was sending a ship to resupply the federal garrison of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor. The Confederate government refused to recognize Lincoln's authority, as they realized they could not claim to head a sovereign nation if their ports were under the Union's control. When the garrison refused to surrender, Confederate forces attacked and, after two days, the garrison did surrender. Union troops were allowed to leave unharmed, but the Civil War had effectively begun.