# Justin Smith Morrill Vermont Republican who served in Congress for **43 years** — the House from 1855 and the Senate from 1867 until his death in 1898 — and whose name attaches to two very different legacies that the vault treats together. ## The land-grant colleges The **[[Morrill Land-Grant College Act]]** of 1862, which he sponsored, granted states federal land to endow colleges teaching agriculture and the mechanic arts. It is the origin of most large American public universities. An earlier version was vetoed by Buchanan in 1859; it passed and was signed by [[Abraham Lincoln]] only after Southern members left Congress. The **Second Morrill Act of 1890**, also his, extended funding on the condition that states either admit Black students or establish separate land-grant institutions — producing the "1890 institutions" that make up a substantial share of today's public HBCUs, founded as the price of segregation and underfunded for a century after. ## Wartime revenue As a member and later chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, Morrill was central to Civil War tax policy, including the tariff act that bears his name and the wartime income tax. His argument for progressive rates rested on **ability to pay** — that a tax should be proportionate to a person's capacity to bear it rather than uniform across incomes. > [!warning] Quotes not verified > The HCR 08-05 material attributes two formulations to Morrill — "a tax proportionate to his ability to pay" and a line about the property of the people belonging to the government. **Neither was verified against the Congressional Globe or another primary for this page**, and neither is quoted here as his words. This page exists partly to satisfy the vault's speaker-must-exist rule so those quote pages can be built once the primaries are pulled. ## Why he matters for the KB Morrill is a useful corrective to a tidy story about the Republican Party's origins. The same legislator who built the federal endowment for public higher education also wrote the amendment that let Southern states segregate it, and argued for progressive wartime taxation from the Finance Committee. **Public investment, racial accommodation, and ability-to-pay taxation in one 43-year career** — which is a more accurate picture of the early Republican Party than any single-strand account. The taxation argument is also live: the [[Missouri Amendment 5 (2026)]] result is the ability-to-pay principle tested by referendum 160 years later. ## See Also - [[Morrill Land-Grant College Act]] · [[Abraham Lincoln]] - [[Missouri Amendment 5 (2026)]] · [[Tax Code Hub]] - [[Republican Party]]