During the Civil War, the Union Congress passed legislation that included the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, which created land-grant institutes that expanded access to higher education for the well-heeled “agricultural and industrial classes.” Teachers colleges did not fare so well. The Morrill Act did not extend support to teacher training; states had already legislated “normal” schools designed to train teachers to serve local populations. Separate and shared responsibility for education increased access to education for white northerners and southerners, but not for African Americans. Men who had served in the U.S. Colored Troops, as enlisted men, chaplains and officers, urged state legislators to use Morrill funds to fund teacher education. State legislators refused those requests. U.S. congressmen debated the constitutional authority of the national government, but ultimately, advocates of land-grant funding to address the needs of “agricultural and industrial freedmen” failed to convince state legislators. Furthermore, the U.S. Congress refused to intervene. Ultimately the U.S. Congress passed the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1890, which created schools to serve two purposes for one population (teacher training and training for the agricultural and industrial classes).
Debra Reid is a professor in the Department of History at Eastern. She earned a Ph.D. at Texas A&M University, the Texas land-grant university, and she studied the Texas 1890s institution as part of her dissertation research. She expanded her research on the history of 1890 land-grant institutions before 1890 because of her participation in a colloquium on the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Land-Grant Act, hosted by Mississippi State University in 2012. Her article, “People’s Colleges for Other Citizens: Black Land-Grant Institutions and the Politics of Educational Expansion in the Post-Civil-War South,” is part of the first volume published from papers presented at this symposium: Science as Service: Establishing and Reformulating American Land-Grant Universities, 1865-1930, edited by Alan Marcus (University of Alabama Press, 2015).
