The proceeds of the sales were to
be invested and used for the support of religion, under the direction of
the legislature within the townships in which the reserves were located.--
Payson J. Treat, "The National Land System, 1785-1820."]
But the "section-sixteen" allotment for the aid of public schools
continued as a feature of all future grants within the Northwest
Territory, and also in all the new States of the southwestern and trans-
Mississippi territory erected prior to 1850, from which time forward two
sections in each township (sixteen and thirty-six) were granted for school
purposes, besides specific grants for higher education amounting to over a
million acres.
A recent student [Footnote: Joseph Shafer, "The Origin of the System of
Land Grants for Education." Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No.
63. History Series, Vol. i, No. i, August, 1902.] of this subject has
traced this policy of public aid to education back through New England,
where colonies, in grants to companies or townships, made specific
stipulations and reservations for the support of schools and the ministry
and where townships voluntarily often made like disposition of surplus
wild lands; and through New England to England of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, where, the monasteries and other religious
foundations being destroyed and the schools depending upon them perishing,
schools were endowed by the kings, sometimes out of sequestered church
lands, or were established by towns and counties, in addition to those
chartered under private patronage, so strong was the new educational
movement of the time.
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