What this is
The Land Act of 1796, passed by the Fourth Congress and signed by President Washington on May 18, 1796, is the operational statute that put the surveying and reservation system of the 1785 Land Ordinance into long-term federal practice. It is the first time Congress combined the rectangular-survey grid, a federal land office to sell surveyed lands at auction, a defined minimum price of two dollars per acre, and the explicit Section 16 reservation for schools in a single workable instrument. The statute is short by modern standards — fifteen sections — but it is the bridge between the Confederation Congress’s surveying ordinance and the long century of state-admission acts that inherited its machinery.
Why the Library cites it
The Library cites the 1796 Act at the points where the question is not what the 1785 Ordinance declared in principle but how the federal system actually put school-land reservation into operation. The Eighth Anchor’s argument that the school-trust system was an operational, working machinery — not just a moral aspiration — turns on the existence of statutes like this one. Subsequent state-admission acts, including Ohio’s in 1802 and every later admission act through Arizona and New Mexico in 1910, traced their procedural machinery to the 1796 Act rather than to the 1785 Ordinance alone. When the Library claims that Section 16 was operationally installed in federal practice before any state had ever inherited it, this statute is the citation.
A representative provision
Section 8 of the Act sets out the reservation language directly, reserving the section numbered 16 in each township for the maintenance of public schools within the township, alongside the four sections at the corners of each township reserved for future federal disposal. The reservation is operational rather than rhetorical — it directs the surveyors to mark the reserved sections on the maps, and it directs the registers of the land offices not to sell them. The 1 Stat. 464 citation is the canonical pin-cite.
Where to find it
Library of Congress, Statutes at Large — 1 Stat. 464 — https://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ampage?collId=llsl&fileName=001/llsl001.db&recNum=587. The govinfo.gov Statutes at Large collection is the fallback. The statute itself is rarely read straight through; the Library carries an editorial gloss with the operative reservation language excerpted and links out for the full text.
