Abraham Lincoln

The war overshadows it, but 1862 alone gave the United States the Homestead Act, the Morrill Act that funded land-grant universities, the Pacific Railway Act and a new Department of Agriculture, and Lincoln then pushed the Thirteenth Amendment through Congress to abolish slavery. Land-grant institutions such as Cornell and the University of Illinois still educate millions. The cost is part of the record: much of the land given away for homesteads, colleges and railways was taken from Native nations.