Samuel C. Armstrong
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Samuel Chapman Armstrong (January 30, 1839 – May 11, 1893) was an American educator and a commissioned officer in the Union Army during the American Civil War. He is best remembered for his work after the war as the founder and first principal of the normal school which is now Hampton University.
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[edit] Early life
The son of missionaries, Armstrong was born in Maui, Hawaiʻi, the sixth of ten children. He attended Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. In 1860 his father suddenly died, and Armstrong, at age 21, left Hawaiʻi for the United States and attended Williams College in Massachusetts, graduating in 1862.
[edit] Civil War
At the time Armstrong completed college, the United States was engaged in the American Civil War. After graduating, Armstrong volunteered to serve in the Union Army, and recruited a company near Troy, New York. He was appointed a captain in the 125th New York Infantry, a three-years regiment in George L. Willard's brigade. Armstrong was among the 12,000 men captured in September 1862 with the surrender of the garrison at Harpers Ferry. After being paroled, he returned to the front lines in Virginia in December. As part of the 3rd Division of the II Corps under Alexander Hays, Armstrong fought at the Battle of Gettysburg in July 1863, defending Cemetery Ridge against Pickett's Charge.
Armstrong subsequently rose through the ranks to lieutenant colonel, being assigned to the 9th Regiment, United States Colored Troops (USCT) in late 1863. In November 1864, Armstrong was promoted to colonel "for gallant and meritorious services at Deep Bottom and Fussell's Mill"[1] He was assigned command of the 8th U.S. Colored Troops when its previous commander was disabled from wounds. Armstrong's experiences with these regiments aroused his interest in the welfare of black Americans. He led the regiment during the Siege of Petersburg, and the 8th was one of the first Union regiments to enter the city after the Confederates withdrew from their trenches. They pursued the Army of Northern Virginia during the subsequent Appomattox Campaign.
After Robert E. Lee surrendered that army, Armstrong and his men returned to Petersburg briefly before being sent by sea to Ringgold Barracks near Rio Grande City on the Mexican border in Texas. Armstrong was awarded the brevet rank of brigadier general of volunteers. On October 10, 1865, the 8th USCT began marching from Texas to Philadelphia, where Armstrong and his men were discharged out of the military in December shortly after their belated arrival.[2]
[edit] Educator
At the end of the war, Armstrong joined the Freedmen's Bureau. With the help of the American Missionary Association, he established the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute—now known as Hampton University—in Hampton, Virginia in 1868. The Institute was meant to be a place where black students could receive post-secondary education to become teachers, as well as training in useful job skills while paying for their education through manual labor.
During Armstrong's career, and during Reconstruction, the prevailing concept of racial adjustment promoted by whites and African Americans equated technical and industrial training with the advancement of the black race. This idea was not a new solution and traced its history to before the American Civil War. But especially after the war, blacks and whites alike realized the paradox that freedom posed for the African American population in the racist south. Freedom meant liberation from the brutality and degradation of slavery, but as W. E. B. Du Bois described it, a black person "felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships."[3] Although the end of slavery was the inevitable result of the Union victory, less obvious was the fate of millions of penniless blacks in the South. Former abolitionists and white philanthropists quickly focused their energies on stabilizing the black community, assisting the newly freed blacks to become independent, positive contributors to their community, helping them improve their race and encouraging them to strive toward a standard put forth by American whites.
One instrument through which this process of racial uplift could take place was schools such as the Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute. The Hampton Institute exemplified the paternalistic attitudes of whites who felt it was their duty to develop those they regarded as lesser races. General Samuel Armstrong molded the curriculum to reflect his background as both a wartime abolitionist and the child of white missionaries in Hawaii. Armstrong believed that slavery had left blacks in an inferior moral state and only whites could help them develop to the point of American civilization. "The solution lay in a Hampton-style education, an education that combined cultural uplift with moral and manual training, or as Armstrong was fond of saying, an education that encompassed 'the head, the heart, and the hands.'"[4] The general insisted that blacks should refrain from voting and politics because their long experience as slaves and, before that, pagans, had degraded the race beyond responsible participation in government. "Armstrong maintained that it was the duty of the superior white race to rule over the weaker dark-skinned races until they were appropriately civilized. This civilization process, in Armstrong’s estimate, would require several generations of moral and religious development."[5] The primary means through which white civilization could be instilled in African Americans was by the moral power of labor and manual industry.[6]
At the heart of the Hampton-style education was this emphasis on labor and industry. However, teaching blacks to work was a tool—not the primary goal—of the Institute. Rather than producing classes of individual craftsmen and labors, Hampton was ultimately a school for future black teachers. In theory, these black teachers would then apply the Hampton idea of self-help and industry at schools throughout the U.S., especially the South. To this end, a prerequisite for admission to Hampton was the intent to become a teacher. In fact, "approximately 84 percent of the 723 graduates of Hampton’s first twenty classes became teachers."[7] Armstrong strove to instill in these disciples the moral value of manual labor. This concept became the crucial component of Hampton’s training of black educators.
Hampton's model of education was at odds with what many freed Blacks actually desired for themselves and their children. The Hampton model employed menial labor, or "vocational" education, to get Blacks accustomed to menial labor and a subjugated social position. Freed Blacks had been organizing their own schools in the postbellum era, but this was largely squashed by the influx of White paternalistic missionaries and "philanthropists" from the North, such as Armstrong.
[edit] Legacy
Perhaps the best student of Armstrong’s Hampton-style education was Booker T. Washington. After coming to the school in 1872, Washington immediately began to adopt Armstrong’s teaching and philosophy. Washington described Armstrong as “the most perfect specimen of man, physically, mentally and spiritually….” Washington also quickly learned the aim of the Hampton Institute. After leaving Hampton, he recalled being admitted to the school, despite his ragged appearance, due to the ability he demonstrated while sweeping and dusting a room. From his first day at Hampton, Washington embraced the Armstrong's idea of black education.[8] Washington went on to attend Wayland Seminary in Washington, D.C., and returned to Hampton to teach on Armstrong's faculty. Upon Sam Armstrong's recommendation to Lewis Adams, Washington became the first principal of a new normal school in Alabama which became Tuskegee University.
Armstrong suffered a debilitating paralysis in 1892 while in New York, and returned to Hampton in a private railroad car provided by his multimillionaire friend, Collis P. Huntington, builder of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway and Newport News Shipbuilding and Drydock Company, with whom he had collaborated on black education projects.
Sam Armstrong died at the Hampton Institute on May 11, 1893.
Armstrong High School in Richmond, Virginia was named after Samuel C. Armstrong in 1909.
[edit] References
- Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995.
- Anderson, James D., The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
- Bates, Samuel P., History of the Pennsylvania Volunteers, 1861-1865. Harrisburg: State Printers, 1868-1871.
- Du Bois, W.E.B., The Souls of Black Folk. New York: First Vintage Books, 1990.
- Engs, Robert Francis. Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893. U. of Tennessee Press, 1999. 207 pp.
- Fear-Segal, Jacqueline. "Nineteenth-century Indian Education: Universalism Versus Evolutionism" Journal of American Studies 1999 33(2): 323-341. ISSN 0021-8758
- Washington, Booker T., The Story of My Life and Work. printed in Harlan, Smock, and Kraft, vol. 1, 21.
