In 1861, Morrill resubmitted the act with the amendment that the proposed institutions would teach military tactics as well as engineering and agriculture.

[7] Aided by the secession of many states that did not support the plans, the reconfigured Morrill Act was signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln on July 2, 1862.

The purpose of the land-grant colleges was: 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.

[8]From the early to mid-19th century the federal government, through 162 violence-backed cessions, expropriated approximately 10.7 million acres of land from 245 tribal nations and divided it into roughly 80,000 parcels for redistribution.

[13] The first land-grant institution actually created under the Act was Kansas State University, which was established on February 16, 1863, and opened on September 2, 1863.

Before the Civil War, American colleges primarily trained students in classical studies and the liberal arts.

The Act prohibited spending the endowment on constructing buildings as expensive and unnecessary, so instead the tools for engineering education increased, such as textbooks, laboratories and equipment.

[16] With a few exceptions (including Cornell University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), nearly all of the land-grant colleges are public.

(Cornell University, while private, administers several state-supported statutory colleges that fulfill its public land-grant mission to the state of New York.)

This act required each state to show that race was not an admissions criterion, or else to designate a separate land-grant institution for African Americans.

The Smith–Lever Act of 1914 started federal funding of cooperative extension, with the land-grant universities' agents being sent to virtually every county of every state.

In some states, the annual federal appropriations to the land-grant college under these laws exceed the current income from the investment of the sales proceeds of the original land grants.