Samuel Chapman Armstrong

• Samuel Chapman Armstrong
• Born: January 30, 1839
• Died: May 11, 1893

Educator and founder of Hampton Institute, was born on the island of Maui, Hawaii, to Richard and Clarissa Armstrong, missionaries of the American Board of Foreign Missions. Soon afterward the family moved to Honolulu, where Richard Armstrong was pastor of the First Church and, later, minister of education. Samuel Armstrong led a happy outdoor life in a large family and mingled freely with Hawaiian children at play and in the Royal School at Punahou, which became Oahu College. He completed two years of undergraduate study there, then enrolled as a junior at Williams College in 1860.

In 1862, during the Civil War, Armstrong accepted a captain’s commission and recruited a company around Troy, New York. He distinguished himself in battle at Gettysburg, became a colonel before he was twenty-five, and left the army with the brevet rank of brigadier general.

Armstrong accepted command of the Ninth Regiment, United States Colored Troops, seeking to prove that black soldiers could fight as well as white. His regiment’s commendable record impressed General O. O. Howard, commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau (set up to aid former slaves). Armstrong was deemed qualified to bring order out of the chaotic conditions among the freed slaves of Virginia, and he was put in charge of a large encampment near the village of Hampton.

Armstrong was appalled not so much by the freedmen’s lack of enthusiasm for work as by their lack of self-esteem, and he believed that the solution to both problems was the right kind of schooling. Armstrong wanted to create a school that would train pillars of the community. For a model, he used the Hilo Manual Labor School in Hawaii, where Hawaiian students received manual training and paid their way through school by doing housework, gardening, and carpentry. In 1867 he persuaded the American Missionary Association (along with another donor) to buy the estate on which his headquarters were located, and he personally raised the money for the school’s first building among friends in the North. Hampton Normal and Industrial Institute opened its doors in 1868. A decade later the enrollment was 500 and Hampton had become the model for several other schools, most notably Tuskegee Institute, founded by Armstrong’s most famous pupil, Booker T. Washington.

In 1878 Hampton accepted a few Indian students, and within several years about 150 were enrolled annually. The initial success of native-American students at Hampton (and at the Carlisle Indian School) was an important factor in the development of federal Indian policy. It provided the first real evidence that Plains Indians —tribal groups from the Great Plains—could be educated in the same fashion as whites. Armstrong became actively involved in Indian welfare work and in behalf of the Indian Rights Association made several trips to the West to advise on Indian schools. For most native Americans, he believed, reservation schools were adequate; but in spite of mounting evidence that eastern-educated Indians were returning to the reservations culturally disoriented, he continued to believe that potential leaders should be educated away from their own people, where they could be “stimulated by contact with the spirit that lies at the heart of our progress, the spirit of hard work.” To both blacks and Indians, however, Hampton offered general education as well as vocational courses, and it was because of this curriculum that Hampton became a respected institution among black people.

In 1869 Armstrong married Emma Dean Walker of Stockbridge, Massachusetts. She died in 1878, leaving two small daughters. In 1890 Armstrong married Mary Alice Ford of Lisbon, New Hampshire, a teacher at Hampton. They had a daughter in 1891 and a son in 1893. In 1891 Armstrong suffered a paralytic stroke in Boston while on a speaking tour and never fully regained his health. He died at the age of fifty-four and after a military funeral was buried, according to his written instructions, in the school graveyard of Hampton Institute.

Armstrong was a strikingly handsome man with extraordinary powers of leadership and persuasion, plus a gift for publicity. His many fund raising trips also served to advertise the Hampton idea that discipline, thrift, and hard work—rather than political activity—were the only means for Negro advancement. This formula for combining practical and intellectual training had a wider application in the late nineteenth century, and Armstrong was recognized as a founder of the modern education movement in the United States.

Education for Life (1913) is a posthumous collection of Armstrong’s writings. Biographical information about various phases of Armstrong’s career is provided in E. A. Talbot, Samuel Chapman Armstrong (1904) and F. G. Peabody, Education For Life (1918). See also The Dictionary of American Biography (1928).