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" For the next three years or so, we are going to be celebrating, if that&amp;#039;s the right word, which it probably isn&amp;#039;t, a long series of 150th anniversaries of the worst bloodletting the continent ever saw. Accountants, mechanics, historical fantasts, and more than a few armed noistalgics are going to dress up in blue or gray, sleep out in the field, and pretend to storm Cemetery Ridge, or the Wheatfield, or Lookout Mountain, or the Dunker Church. Last week, however, there was a sesquicentennial of a different sort, the 150th anniversary of a commitment that Americans made to each other, and to their children, and to their children&amp;#039;s children. It was a commitment made in the middle of a ferocious struggle in which Americans were slaughtering each other wholesale, a stubborn statement of belief in the idea of an enduring political commonwealth in the middle of a horrific Civil War. If we were truly cognizant of our history, at least a few folks would have dressed up like 19th-century legislators, waistcoats and all, and gathered in the old Senate chamber of the Capitol and pretended to cast a vote. On July 2, 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed into law what was known as the Morrill Act. The new law authorized the creation of what became known as &amp;quot;land-grant colleges,&amp;quot; the purpose of which, as described in the Act was: &amp;quot;...without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.&amp;quot; The Act enabled each eligible state to receive 300,000 acres of federal land for each member of Congress representing that state to be used to build institutions of higher learning to fulfill the educational mission as described in the Act. (If the state didn&amp;#039;t have enough federal land within its borders to fulfill the requirements of the Act, it was allowed to use federal scrip with which it would select federal lands in other states to fund its institutions. That&amp;#039;s how Wisconsin timber came to help build Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.) The passage of the law itself was a masterpiece of legislative legerdemain and historical serendipity. First passed in 1859, it was vetoed by President James Buchanan, in one of the few decisive moments of his presidency. It got caught up in the fierce sectional rivalries that were tearing at the country&amp;#039;s political vitals \u2014 not only north versus south, but also Eastern urban versus Western rural. The idea for the bill had originated in the Illinois legislature, but Senator Lyman Trumbull of that state shrewdly decided that it should be sponsored in the Congress by someone from the East, so he settled on Congressman Justin Smith Morrill of Vermont.  Morrill resubmitted the act in 1861. By then, most of the states that had opposed the original Act already had seceded, and with the Civil War raging, Morrill defanged the remaining congressional opposition by including provisions through which the proposed new institutions also would teach military tactics. The Act sailed through to passage. The first of the colleges to open was Ames College in Iowa, now Iowa State University. The Act became so popular that its provisions were extended to the former states of the Confederacy almost immediately after the end of the war and, in 1890, a second Morrill Act was passed that benefitted what became known as the &amp;quot;historically black&amp;quot; colleges and universities in the South. From the established land-grant colleges came the cooperative extension services that aided farmers all over the country and the agricultural experimentation centers that produced, among other things, the National Arboretum in Washington, D.C. The idea behind the Morrill Act was a commitment by the entire nation to extend higher education to as many of its citizens as possible. This was an idea embedded in the country&amp;#039;s political DNA from its founding. (James Madison appealed early on for a national university, and the idea that an educated citizenry was necessary for a viable republic was at the heart of what he and Thomas Jefferson had in mind for the University of Virginia.) This belief was central to the emerging idea of an American political commonwealth, the idea that the country is a union of the people, and not simply an alliance of states. The opposition to it was generated by those same forces that always have been arrayed against that idea. In 1968, John Florer wrote a lengthy account of the congressional debates over the Morrill Act for the History of Education Quarterly, and much of it rings painfully familiar to a great deal of what&amp;#039;s happening in the country today. He writes: Representative Morrill anticipated the constitutional challenge to his bill and attempted to minimize its impact by questioning the consistency of those who were about to raise the question. He noted that &amp;quot;lions accustomed to roar around the Constitution are quite disposed to slumber whenever it is desirable for certain gentlemen, who carry extra baggage, to leap over the impediment.&amp;quot; Morrill was obviously casting a few barbs at some of his colleagues who had been most generous in passing federal lands into the hands of railroads but were now prepared to find it unconstitutional to dispose of additional lands for educational purposes. Morrill went on to assert that Article IV, Section 3, of the Constitution, providing Congress with the power to &amp;quot;dispose of federal lands,&amp;quot; offered ample legality for his bill. The proponents of the bill used this citation as their major constitutional defense. Jacob Collamer, a Republican from Vermont, used it extensively in the Senate, as did Senator John Bell (Tennessee Whig) who went on to assert that &amp;quot;a hundred million acres of public lands have been given for objects not defined in the Constitution specifically.&amp;quot; This heavy reliance upon Article IV led to strong counterattacks.Democratic Senator Clement Clay of Alabama was by far the most eloquent to stand against it. He insisted that the land grants were a &amp;quot;magnificent bribe&amp;quot; to encourage Alabama to &amp;quot;surrender to the federal power her original and reserved right to manage her own domesticand internal affairs.&amp;quot; He argued that public lands were never meant to support such arrangements. This was followed witha long, vivid picture of judicious forefathers building limitation afterlimitation into the Constitution concerning the powers of the Federal Government. With the last stroke of his brush, Clay asked if one could believe that such a careful limitation was only a sham, that through deliberate intent or stupidity these great men had provided a means to circumvent their careful limitation of federal power.  For his part, Morrill argued that the needs of the nation had outgrown the spavined system of higher education that had developed willy-nilly in the several states and that, in any case, operated on an aristocratic model that denied the benefits of education to far too many of the young nation&amp;#039;s citizens. Pass the Act, he told the Congress, and... &amp;quot;...we shall have done something to enable the farmer to raise two blades of grass instead of one; something for every owner of land; something for all who desire to own land; something for cheap scientific education; something for every man who loves intelligence and not ignorance; something to induce the fathers&amp;#039; sons and daughters to settle and cluster around the old homestead; something to remove the last vestige of pauperism from our land; something for peace, good order and better support of Christian Churches and common schools; something toenable sterile railroads to pay dividends; something to enable people tobear the enormous expenditures of the national government; something tocheck the passion of individuals and the nation for indefinite territorial expansion and ultimate decrepitude; something to prevent the dispersion of our population, and to concentrate it among the best lands of our country \u2014 places hallowed by church spires and mellowed by the influenceof time- where the consumer will be placed at the door of the producer;something to obtain higher prices for all sorts of agricultural products,and something to increase the loveliness of the American landscape.&amp;quot; It took secession, and the jettisoning of that fool, Buchanan, and a Civil War, to do it, but Justin Morrill&amp;#039;s argument succeeded. Democracy, as it developed here, anyway, was about a chance, and its worst enemies always have been ignorance allied against itself with aristocracy. The Morrill Act was a blow against that lethal combination just as surely as was the defense of Cemetery Ridge or Sherman&amp;#039;s march to the sea. The triumph of the land-grant colleges was a triumph for the idea of the American political commonwealth, of the idea that we are a self-governing people, and not an administrative convenience of states, as surely as was Appomattox. I rather wish there had been a few fireworks, and at least a couple of people wandering the Capitol, dressed like Justin Morrill, who saw the future of American democracy, and who saw very clearly the forces arrayed against it. Looking back, in 1899, he wrote: In every age, where liberty and human progress have made notable advances, there comes a time when a brood of stragglers in the rear appear to denounce the progress made as nothing worth, and to demand the restoration of the Bourbons with all of the conditions which once restricted the greater part of mankind to less of freedom, to less of the comforts of life, and to less of intellectual individuality, but which gave to a stupid aristocracy political supremacy.  He had their number, Justin Morrill did. MORE ON OUR COMMONWEALTH: The Public Trust of Your Tax Dollars at Work, I Dream of Common Wealth, a Prayer for the Defenders of Political Commonwealth, and the Post Office "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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