War and science have long had a symbiotic relationship. Technological superiority, although not the sole guarantor of battlefield success, generally tips the scales of combat in favor of the side that possesses the best weaponry. And for any leader seeking to ensure the most advantageous military outcome, supporting science well ahead of looming future hostilities is an extremely shrewd strategy.

The mutual benefits to science and government have guided American policy prominently in the decades since the end of the Second World War.¹ But evidence of the reciprocity was apparent more than a century and a half ago. It underscored the establishment of the National Academy of Sciences² at the height of the War Between the States.

President Abraham Lincoln and America’s preeminent scientists of that era well understood the value of science and technology for the conduct of war. Lincoln embraced the idea of a government institution that, according to the enabling legislation, would “whenever called upon by any Department of the Government, investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.”

In the late winter of 1863, Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, a consummate politician who had been shepherding the National Academy bill through the upper chamber, took advantage of the imminent adjournment of a special session of Congress and asked his colleagues “to take up a bill which will consume no time, and to which I hope there will be no opposition…. It will take but a moment, I think, and I should like to have it passed.” Wishing to adjourn as quickly as possible, the members of the Senate listened to a cursory reading of the bill and passed it by voice vote without opposition. The House followed suit within hours, and later that evening Lincoln signed it into law. Science had been indelibly inscribed into the national heritage. The date was March 3, 1863.

The simple historical rendition seems very straightforward, but it belies the intrigues of the previous twelve years.^3,4 The story of the National Academy of Sciences actually began in 1851, and it had little to do with war. America’s preeminent scientists simply were not satisfied with the recognition their scholarly societies provided.⁵ They craved more from the government and the public. They yearned for institutions similar to those of which their European brethren boasted.

Alexander Dallas Bache, a great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin, was about to retire as president of the AAAS in 1851. But he was still superintendent of the United States Coast Survey. And, perhaps more significantly, he held the informal title, “chief” of a group right out of a Dan Brown thriller,⁶ the Scientific Lazzaroni.⁷ Its members, arguably, were the best and brightest scientists in America of that era, among them Louis Agassiz, a naturalist, Benjamin Pierce, a mathematician, James Dwight Dana, a geologist, and, of course, Joseph Henry. There were, to be sure, many lesser lights.

Envious of the status science had achieved in Europe through the Royal Society of London and the French Academy, the Lazzaroni started conspiring to find a way to etch the importance of science into the American psyche. Bache and Henry led the Washington cabal, while Agassiz and Pierce were firmly entrenched in Cambridge, Massachusetts. By the time the Civil War started, all four had settled on forming a select national institution of some sort that would carry with it a government imprimatur.

Recognizing the unique prospect the war offered, Bache and Henry opportunistically enlisted the support of a military man, Charles Henry Davis, to make their case to the federal government. Davis brought with him Massachusetts bona fides, as well, having been educated at the Boston Latin School and Harvard before receiving a U.S. Navy commission in 1823. He had attained the rank of captain in 1861, and rear admiral in early 1863, just as plans for a science academy were nearing fruition.

The impetus was there, but the road to forming the National Academy was by no means smooth. For more than a decade, the Cambridge Lazzaroni had made establishing a new nationally recognized science-based university their highest priority. For them, any connection to military applications carried little, if any, weight. And in Washington, Henry, who was ever mindful of the failure of the National Institute and the decade-long congressional debate over the creation of the Smithsonian, had begun to question whether it was wise to ask Congress to charter a National Academy and fund it with government money.

The leaders of the Cambridge Lazzaroni came around first and enlisted the support of Senator Wilson to advance the enabling legislation that Lincoln ultimately signed. Fearing objections from their colleague, Bache, Agassiz, Pierce, and Davis kept Henry out of the loop in the final days before Congress surreptitiously passed Wilson’s bill. The secrecy of their machinations stirred up resentment not only in Henry, but also in prominent scientists throughout the country, many of whom had been listed among the 50 founding members. And of course, many of the scientists who were not accorded membership undoubtedly viewed the academy as an elitist organization that was at odds with America’s democratic principles.

The Academy’s birthing pains did not subside quickly. Bache, who became the first president of the Academy in April 1863, spent his early days fending off the attacks, led most prominently by William Barton Rogers, who had established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1861, just before the war began. Rogers was still leading MIT when he learned about National Academy’s creation. But his opposition was probably based more on politics than philosophy. And that story is worth recounting.

For more than a year, MIT’s founding president had been at odds with a number of his Massachusetts compatriots, especially two of the leaders of the Cambridge Lazzaroni, Louis Agassiz and Benjamin Pierce. Both of them had been strong advocates of legislation that still stands today as one of the hallmarks and greatest successes of American Science and Technology policy: The Land Grant College Act of 1862.⁸ But at the time, Rogers viewed it as an existential threat to his legacy in establishing MIT.

The Land-Grant initiative originated in Strafford, Vermont, a village that even today retains its quintessential New England charm. The travel website Happy Vermont⁹ calls it “The Prettiest Vermont Town You’ve Probably Never Visited.” And every March since 1801, according to the website, its residents—today numbering a scant 1000—have held a town meeting in an iconic white clapboard building that looks more like a church than a local seat of government. Despite its low profile and out of the way location, the bucolic town was the birthplace of two prominent Americans who left oversized footprints on the fabric of the nation.

William Sloane Coffin, who was born in Strafford in 1923, became one of the most famous antiwar activists of the Vietnam War era. He was chaplain of Yale University, and later senior minister at New York City’s Riverside Church, and is probably the better known of the two, at least to modern American generations. But more than a century and a half before Coffin’s name had become synonymous with the Vietnam War protest movement, Strafford had been home to William Morrill, who was born there in 1810. By age 30, Morrill had achieved sufficient financial success that he could afford to retire and live the rest of his life as a gentleman farmer. But he found himself drawn to politics, and that is how he left his enduring mark.

First elected to Congress as a Whig in 1854, Morris almost immediately cast his lot with the founders of the new Republican party, and thereafter ran as a Republican, first for reelection to the House of Representatives, and then for the Senate, beginning in 1866. Morrill’s interest in agriculture made him a natural advocate for the establishment of agricultural colleges, which promoters had been agitating for since the late 1830s. Morrill’s first foray into the arena ended in failure, when President James Buchanan, a Democrat, vetoed his legislation in 1861, siding with southern states that generally opposed the allocation of federal lands for agricultural institutions, in part, because they had less federal land available than their northern counterparts.

Morrill returned to the drawing board and broadened the land grant college mandate to include academic areas well beyond agriculture. Once the southern states seceded, Morrill resubmitted his amended legislation, which Republican President Abraham Lincoln signed into law on July 2, 1862. The act, which has become known as the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, transformed the American higher education landscape. It mandated the transfer of federal lands to the states for the purpose of establishing¹⁰

It was the first direct federal promotion of science and technology in higher education.

Although the 1862 statute applied only to the states remaining in the Union, it was amended after the war to include the entire Confederacy. In 1890, mindful of the plight of emancipated slaves, Morrill shepherded another bill through Congress, requiring land grant institutions to admit blacks without discrimination. The Second Morrill Act, as it is known, resulted in the creation of a separate set of Negro Land Grant Colleges, when 17 southern and border states objected to racially blind admissions policies for their existing institutions. Finally, in 1994, Congress added 31 tribal colleges to the Land Grant roster, and today the full list contains 106 institutions of higher learning, many of them with preeminent programs in science and technology.¹¹

Ironically, before it opened its doors to students for the first time in 1865, MIT had taken advantage of the 1862 act and had become a land grant college. Today, of course, it is one of the preeminent private American universities, although it’s a fair bet that few, if any, of its students or faculty know about their first president’s early recriminations.

William Barton Rogers was not the only Cambridge denizen who was at odds with the Lazzaroni and their new academy. Asa Gray, the country’s best-known botanist, wearing a Harvard professorship as a badge, was a mainstay and an officer of the Boston-based American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He feared that the National Academy of Sciences would undermine the effectiveness of the American Academy and other scholarly associations, such as the American Philosophical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In addition, as a staunch believer of evolution, he had little use for Louis Agassiz, who was one of the foremost critics of Darwin’s theory.

Gray also had long been a confidant of Henry, and his vocal opposition to the National Academy left the nation’s renowned physicist and Smithsonian president with a difficult choice: to abandon Gray and support the Academy, or to join Gray as one of its critics. Henry cast his lot with the Lazzaroni and presided over the 1863 organizational meeting in New York that led to Bache’s election. Undeterred, Gray joined forces with Rodgers, and less than two months later, he became president of the American Academy, with Rodgers serving as recording secretary.

With Gray and Rodgers hectoring the science community, Bache knew he had to act swiftly to establish the National Academy as the government’s go-to organization for science and technology advice. He took it upon himself and formed committees to address problems deemed critical to a nation at war. With Admiral Davis’s assistance, Bache settled on five subjects for the Academy to study:¹² (1) the uniformity of weights, measures, and coinage; (2) the impact of salt water erosion on hulls of ships; (3) the effect of iron hulls on magnetic compasses; (4) the utility of the Saxton hydrometer; and (5) the reliability of existing wind and ocean current charts. The committees worked carefully and quickly, but their findings proved to be of limited utility. Four studies initiated in 1864 resulted in similar inconsequential impacts.

In the spring of 1864, Bache fell seriously ill, and for the remainder of the war years, the National Academy of Sciences was little more than a shell organization. By design, unlike its European counterparts, it was forbidden to receive government subsidies, and surviving on contributions from its limited membership proved challenging. Bache survived to see the Civil War end in May 1865, but his incapacity almost killed the Academy. His death on February 16, 1867 was probably all that saved it. The following stipulation in his will demonstrates how much of his heart he had put into its creation, and how committed he remained to it to the day he died:¹³

Bache effectively placed the financially strapped National Academy in temporary receivership, naming three leaders of the Lazzaroni as administrators. Henry, the most prominent of them, acceded to the wishes of Bache’s widow and reluctantly took over as president of the Academy. When Nancy Clark (Fowler) Bates died three years later, in accordance with her late husband’s will, the Academy was the beneficiary of a $42,000 trust bequest.¹⁴

Joseph Henry did not sit idly by waiting for the day the Academy would become solvent. Upon assuming his presidency, he moved to fundamentally alter the structure and purpose of the institution. Instead of solely providing the government with expertise to solve practical problems, the Academy would begin to emphasize science in the abstract. Membership in the Academy, which would be enlarged well beyond the original 50, would be based principally on proven distinction in original research. Finally, reflecting Henry’s Washington base, meetings of the Academy would only take place in the nation’s capital once a year.¹⁵

The Civil War left extremely deep, hurtful scars on America’s soul, and more than a century and a half later, many of them are still visible. However, for science and technology, the War era’s indelible impacts have been extraordinarily positive. The epoch produced the National Academy of Sciences and the Land Grant Colleges. But, as the clouds of war cleared, it was evident that those two tangible outcomes presaged something of far greater significance. A new era was dawning in which the role of science and technology in American life would be impossible to ignore. New policies and new structures inside and outside government would be needed to address the extraordinary changes that were in store.

It is difficult to say whether the Civil War’s end in 1865 was a sharp turning point, or just an inflection, but without question, the last 35 years of the 19th century produced rapid industrialization, unfettered extraction of natural resources, development of advanced agricultural methods, explosive economic growth, and extraordinary wealth disparity. Technology was the driver and enabler of the dramatic changes that swept the nation.

The 1862 Homestead Act,¹⁶ for example, opened up millions of acres of farmland, but it was the transcontinental railroads—technological marvels at the time—that made the farms significant economic contributors. That was also true for mining and lumber.

Small electric motors played a similarly transformative role. Developed in the 1880s and 1890s, they freed factories and mills from a need to be sited on rivers or a reliance on centralized steam power. Urbanization was one result. Dramatically improved worker productivity was another, although it was often at the expense of poorly paid laborers suffering under abysmal factory conditions.

During that go-go era, industry and government generally worked hand in glove, with corruption not in short supply. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) captured the essence of the period in a satirical novel,¹⁷ The Gilded Age, which he co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873. The name they appended to that era of extraordinary excess, wealth creation, inequality, and rapid technological change has endured.

As the Gilded Age emerged from the ashes of war, scientific bureaus, commissions, and offices soon began to proliferate within the federal government. The stage for the growth of a science bureaucracy—modest by today’s standards, but quite significant for those times—had actually been set in 1862, three years before the war ended. On May 15 of that year, President Lincoln had signed legislation creating the Department of Agriculture, although not according it Cabinet status. Four days later he had signed legislation providing subsidies and loans for constructing a transcontinental railroad,¹⁸ and a day after that, the Homestead Act. Finally, on July 2, he put his stamp of approval on Morrill’s Land Grant bill. If the South had not seceded, it is doubtful Congress would have been able to pass any of those bills, because they represented an expansion of federal authority, which the Confederate states would have found anathema. Taken together though, the four acts presaged a move toward a more expansive interpretation of Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. The more generous reading soon would be used to justify federal sponsorship of scientific research well beyond the military. It would begin with agriculture and geology.

The enabling legislation that created the Department of Agriculture makes it clear science was intended to play a central role, and to this day, the department retains much of its early science flavor. The actual language is worth considering:¹⁹

The words of Section 3 embody what we recognize to this day as the essence of scientific research: how we obtain new information, gain new insights, and make discoveries, and what we do with the products of our research once we have completed the work.

Although the intent of the legislation was clear, a quarter of a century would pass before Congress recognized the importance of connecting the Agriculture Department’s research mandate to the core competencies of the Land Grant colleges. The Hatch Act²⁰ of 1872 made that connection by establishing agricultural experiment stations on the campuses. But communicating the results of the research to farmers, especially in rural areas, was still a problem. In 1914, Congress addressed the glaring deficiency, passing the Smith-Lever Act,²¹ which created a cooperative extension system, managed by the Land Grant institutions, to help farmers take advantage of agricultural research carried out at those institutions. By that time, the Department of Agriculture had additional heft, having been accorded Cabinet level status in 1889.²²