page_title: Justin Smith Morrill
section_title: Legislation
hierarchical_section_title: Justin Smith Morrill / Legislation
caption_attribution_description: English: Front of Morrill Hall on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, United States. Built in 1891, the building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
context_page_description: Justin Smith Morrill was a Representative and a Senator from Vermont, most widely remembered today for the Morrill Land-Grant Acts that established federal funding for establishing many of the United States' public colleges and universities. He was one of the founders of the Republican Party.
context_section_description: The Morrill Tariff of 1861 was a protective tariff law adopted on March 2, 1861.  Passed after anti-tariff southerners had left Congress during the process of secession, Morrill designed it with the advice of Pennsylvania economist Henry C. Carey.  It was one of the last acts signed into law by James Buchanan, and replaced the Tariff of 1857.  Additional tariffs Morrill sponsored were passed to raise revenue during the American Civil War.
  Morrill is best known for sponsoring the Morrill Act, also known as the Land Grant College Act.  This act was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, and established federal funding for higher education in every state of the country. In his own words:
  This bill proposes to establish at least one college in every State upon a sure and perpetual foundation, accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil, where all of needful science for the practical avocations of life shall be taught, where neither the higher graces of classical studies nor that military drill our country now so greatly appreciates will be entirely ignored, and where agriculture, the foundation of all present and future prosperity, may look for troops of earnest friends, studying its familiar and recondite economies, and at last elevating it to that higher level where it may fearlessly invoke comparison with the most advanced standards of the world.
  — Justin Smith Morrill, 1862, as quoted by William Belmont Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill
  He also authored the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act of 1862, which targeted The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, based on the then-existing practice of plural marriage (polygamy). It imposed a five-hundred dollar fine and up to five years imprisonment for the crime of polygamy. On January 6, 1879, in Reynolds v. United States the Supreme Court, upheld the Anti-Bigamy Act's ban on plural marriage.
  A second Land Grant College Act in 1890 targeted the former Confederate states and led to the creation of several historically black colleges and universities.
  The Land Grant College Acts ultimately led to the founding of 106 colleges including many state universities, polytechnic colleges, and agricultural and mechanical colleges.
caption: Morrill Hall at Iowa State University, one of several Morrill Halls at colleges created by the Morrill Act
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