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 (General ^itn0trong:'0 
 
 Cift anb Work 
 
 By 
 Franklin Carter, Ph. D., LL. D. 
 
 Bx-Pre^i(lcnt (>r\VilIinm<i Collcirc 
 
General ^Armstrong's 
 Life and Work 
 
 By 
 
 Franklin Carter, Ph. D. , LL. D. 
 
 Ex-Fresident of Williams College 
 
 Founders Day oAddress, 1 902 
 
,<= 
 
 
 ^ 
 
 AUG l»W 
 
 Tie Press of 
 
 The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute 
 
 Hampton, Virginia 
 
 1911 
 
General Armstrong's Life and Work 
 
 An address delivered January tivcnty-sixth, nineteen hundred and 
 Huo, in Hampton Institute Memorial Church, by Franklin Carter, Ph D., 
 LL.D., Ex-President of Williams College. 
 
 NOTHING becomes more certain to one who believes that God is, 
 than God's controlling grasp of human history. Indeed, to him 
 who reads aright, there is no more convincing proof that God is, than 
 is found in the study of human progress. The contemplation of an 
 individual life is sometimes bewildering. Many a man with good pur- 
 pose and self-denying aim is beaten down in the collision of forces that 
 envelope him. But in modern days we nearly always wonder at the 
 overwhelming of a good man and ask, "Why does God permit it.?" 
 So we sometimes wonder at the disaster which befalls a nation or a 
 race. But take a large enough view, and the destruction of Carthage, 
 the prostration of Greece, the fall of Home, move into place as evidence 
 that the world grows better, that God guides humanity to nobler 
 visions and grander achievements. 
 
As we meet here this afternoon, our thoughts are invited to con- 
 template both a race and a man — a weak race brought by cruel greed 
 in fear and anguish to this continent, kept weak and denied intellec- 
 ual progress, held in fetters by the power of an ever-growing and at 
 last mighty government — a strong m.an who, coming up among a feeble 
 folk, imbibed the love for humanity from his mother's breast, and, sail- 
 ing to his father's country for education, gave his young, vigorous life 
 to fight for the country of his fathers until that fight was won, and 
 then took upon his heart and mind the weak and helpless race whose 
 .fetters had been suddenly removed, making them through ignorance 
 and degradation a menace to the well-being of the republic. Look at 
 the cargoes of Africans moving westward year after year in the stifling 
 holds of slow-sailing s h i p s, ^ _ 
 
 dumped in chains upon the east- '' 
 ern shore, multiplying in helpless 
 dependence over all these beauti- 
 ful valleys and plains. Does it 
 not move you to ask, " Where is 
 God V Wait, my friends. By and 
 by, from an island in the western 
 ocean, a swifter ship shall sail 
 eastward with a young man on 
 board, of large powers, but almost 
 without purpose save that he will 
 follow his Master, Christ, wher- 
 ever He leads, who shall be trained 
 in college and war to lift this peo- 
 ple into useful service ; who shall 
 be the great pioneer in transform- 
 ing the misdirected instincts of a 
 debilitated race into the fine, free, 
 organic powers of American citi- 
 zens. We can never forget the 
 sufferings and sorrows of those 
 helpless ones through the long years of a century and a half. Nor 
 can we forget the anxieties and fears and the heart-searchings as to 
 duty of those among whom they lived. The faithful record of that 
 history we leave with God, and praise Him that when the day of 
 deliverance came, the teacher, leader, helper, uplifter, also came. 
 
 When the first missionaries sailed from Boston for the Sandwich 
 Islands eighty years ago to begin the work of uplifting and redeeming 
 the Hawaiian natives, not the wildest imagination could foresee that 
 out of that movement and from one of those islands should come the 
 force, the man, who would be to millions of helpless Negroes in our 
 Southern country the uplifter into the thoughtful, loving, dili- 
 gent apprehension of their own duties, into a gentle and rational pa- 
 
 Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Twenty-one 
 
triotism . Love of the degraded natives of the Hawaiian Islands, stirred 
 in New England breasts, was the original force that produced the 
 heroic man, the Christian service, for which we thank God to-day. 
 
 The Old School Hall of Oahii College, where General Armstrong was a Student 
 
 General Armstrong's Birthplace on the Island of Maui, HI. 
 
 " No act falls fruitless ; none can tell 
 How vast its power may be ; 
 Nor what results unfolded dwell 
 Within it silently." 
 
I ask you to consider for a little while how admirably fitted 
 Samuel Chapman Armstrong was for his great work. He was born, 
 as I said, in the midst of a people who needed help, and to give help to 
 whom his countrymen and his own father and mother had travelled 
 thousands of miles. He knew from childhood the perils and sorrows 
 
 Mark Hopkins. President of Williams College from 1836 to 1872 
 
 of a degraded, ignorant race, and he knew also that there is no work 
 so glorious as the uplifting of such a people. When he went to 
 America for his education, he went to a college among whose students, 
 nearly a hundred years ago, the greatest American movement for the 
 redemption of the world was born. He imbibed, during his college 
 course, something of the inspiration of that movement. He lived in 
 the home of one who was and had been for many years the president 
 
The President's House at Williamstown where General Armstrong lived while in College 
 
 of that great missionary society. He was taught by Mark Hopkins 
 the sublime philosophy of Christianity, and that means the rescue of 
 the lost. He learned from Albert Hopkins, on whose window 
 in our chapel are the words, " They that turn many to righteousness 
 shall shine as the stars forever and ever," as he never knew it before, 
 the majesty of Christian loving and living. He did with his might in 
 college what his hands found to do. I remember that when describ- 
 
 The old Plantation " Mansion House"' which was (General Armstrong's Hampton Home 
 
ing fencing with him for exercise, his chum told me that the intense 
 keenness of his eye and the swift plunge of the foil, sometimes terri- 
 fied him. He thought that Armstrong would actually run him through. 
 He was physically sound and strong. I have heard him say since his 
 graduation that he was glad there was no such ama,zingly developed 
 system of athletics in college in his day as now exists. He could not 
 understand such an amount of money and force devoted to a subor- 
 dinate purpose in college. I thought as I hstened to him saying this : 
 " Ah, my friend, if you were in college now, you would yield to no 
 man in vigor of tackling on the foot-ball field, or in the swiftness and 
 precision with which the baseball would be hurled to put a man out on 
 third base ! " His athletic prowess would have given him renown and 
 that would have added scope to his moral power. Yet the play of 
 college life would have remained play to him. He was intense. I 
 think of Von Moltke, the great Prussian general, in the dawn of a 
 summer day of 1870, riding over a plain in eastern France from which 
 the Jura range was visible and planning for the next movement. His 
 young aid-de-camp, enraptured by the beauty of the scene, calls the 
 old general's attention to the mountains glorified by the advancing 
 color of the rising sun. The great general turns and says severely, 
 " Do not speak to me of your private affairs." Armstrong might 
 have said that, but the moment it was said he would have seen the 
 fun of it. But he was always dead in earnest. 
 
 He went into the service of his country. This was his country, 
 though he was born in a distant island of the sea, for it was his father's 
 country and his love of it and service for it early won him citizenship. 
 Now he is glad that those islands, as they were not in his boyhood, are 
 a territory of the country he loved and for which he lived and died. In 
 the war he learned to control men, and that means that his insight was 
 quickened, his patience was enlarged, his judgment of men made com- 
 prehensive, and his swift resort to wise measures in emergency became 
 a habit. It does not mean that he for a moment lost one atom of his 
 hatred of meanness or of his love for righteousness or his love for 
 humanity. What a series of promotions his war record was ! In nearly 
 every important movement from the beginning to the end he had a 
 part, and he learned to love the black race in his two years' command 
 of Negroes. When the war was over and the Southern people lay ex- 
 hausted and quivering with pain and bewildered by their relations to 
 the freed slaves, the Northern people, chastened by the desperate 
 struggle and the desolation of their households, in the nobility of their 
 love for the colored people, gave to them, when they could not well 
 use it, the right of suffrage. Assigned to duty in this region by the 
 Freedmen's Bureau for the care of ten counties, having studied the 
 condition of the race and long since perceived that education of head 
 and hand and heart — the development of character — could alone save 
 this enfeebled people from misery and crime. General Armstrong said 
 to himself : "I will found a school to educate teachers for this race. 
 I will begin in a humble way a more patriotic, more difficult work than 
 
fighting for my country. I will open 
 the door for this people, whom I dear- 
 ly love, into intelligence, self-control, 
 manhood, and womanhood, and send 
 my pupils over all this Southern land 
 to be centers of light and love, ex- 
 amples of diligence and loyalty to the 
 noblest motives." Being thus trained 
 by God it is not too much to say that 
 he was inspired of God. His early 
 visions of this service, his heroic re- 
 solve, his single-minded consecration, 
 his undaunted advance over obstacles 
 — these were because God was in 
 him, guiding and inspiring more and 
 more visibly to the end. 
 
 In the fragmentary notes left by 
 the great Lincoln of the memorable 
 conflict between himself and Douglas 
 in Illinois in the autumn of 1858, are 
 
 found these words : " Suppose it 
 is true that the Negro is inferior to 
 the white man in the gifts of Na- 
 ture, is it not the exact reverse of 
 justice that the white man should, 
 for that reason, take from the Ne- 
 gro any part of that little which 
 he has had given him }" These are 
 manly words, but what Armstrong- 
 would have said, what he did say 
 by his choice of life-work, was : "If 
 it be true that the Negro is inferior 
 to the white man in the gifts of 
 Nature, it should be the high mis- 
 sion and the supreme joy of the 
 white man to help the Negro make 
 the very utmost of what he has 
 had given him." 
 
 And then the site to be select- 
 ed for the school. It was better 
 that it be near enough the North 
 to command and receive attention 
 from Northern Christians, and yet 
 it must be in the South, easy of ac- 
 cess for those to be helped. So, 
 
10 
 
 on the very shore on which the ancestors of this people had been 
 dropped in chains, on soil of that state where for four long years the 
 fiercest battles over the destiny of the Negro had been fought, a soil 
 consecrated by the blood of thousands of Northern and Southern 
 heroes, almost in sight of those waters where the deadly grapple of 
 the huge Merrimac and the little Monitor occurred : on this soil shall 
 they, over whom and for whom all this carnage really was, be taught 
 the sweet reasonableness of the religion of Jesus Christ, the arts of in- 
 dustry, and the true service of country. Here, not very far from where 
 the first college in the Southern country, the second college in Ameri- 
 ca; was planted (but only for the whites) shall be erected a normal 
 school which shall go a little way towards healing the wounds that 
 cruelties and war have inflicted, and towards making it possible for the 
 whites and the blacks to live together in charity and peace. 
 
 But he did not confine himself to the training of the Negroes. 
 The passion for studying how to uplift a race got such hold of him that 
 Indians were admitted in response to an application from one of their 
 true friends. The problem of lifting must vary somewhat with the 
 differing characteristics of different races, but, fascinated by these 
 great problems, he saw that the presence of the two races in the same 
 institution might stimulate the teachers and be of mutual benefit to 
 the two races. All uplifting of a race, like every true redemption, 
 must be made effective by quickening and guiding individual minds. 
 Armstrong knew from his college days what that meant, and it stirs 
 the blood to read the simple confession recorded in one of his papers, 
 that whatever good teaching he had done was Mark Hopkins teaching 
 through him— the teaching of a great teacher, judicious and symmetri- 
 cal in character like the round circle which Everett applied to Wash- 
 ington, the teaching of this great teacher handed down through him- 
 self to God's little ones. 
 
 Armstrong did not concern himself much with the surface of 
 things ; he went straight to the heart of every problem. He was no 
 dealer in fine phrases, no seeker after soft places, no lover of Lydian 
 airs or delicate perfumes ; he was a man, an earnest, downright man ; 
 and "the image of God cut in ebony," as an old writer calls it, was to 
 him just as truly an image of God as the Phidian Zeus or the Venus 
 of Melos. It was the divine that he cared for. For this reason the 
 Negro was more attractive than the Greek, if he needed help. There- 
 fore he was thus far fitted for this great work in which he must 
 grapple with Southern prejudices ; bear patiently and sympathetically 
 the criticisms and sneers of a high-tempered and just then naturally 
 exasperated people ; appeal unceasingly to cold,calculating Northern- 
 ers for aid ; bear courageously the stupidities and frivolities that 
 slavery had begotten and, worse than all, the lapses and relapses that 
 sudden liberty made inevitable. He aimed at broad results and if he 
 was sure that those results were coming, the fashions and manners. 
 
Samuel Chapman Armstrong at Tliirty-tliree 
 
 the sneers and criticisms of onlookers, nay, the trivialities and miscon- 
 ceptions and ingratitudes of those for whom he was working, did not 
 greatly disturb him. Nevertheless, what faith was required to be sure 
 that the results were coming ! What a heroism, in those conditions, 
 " to bate no jot of heart or hope but steer right onward " ! 
 
 "Endurance is the crowning quality. 
 And patience all the passion of great hearts ; 
 These are their stay,- and when the leaden world 
 Sets its hard face against their fateful thought. 
 And brute strength, like a scornful conqueror. 
 Clangs his huge mace down in the other scale. 
 The inspired soul but flings his patience in. 
 And slowly that outweighs the ponderous globe, — 
 One faith against a whole earth's unbelief, 
 One soul against the flesh of all mankind." 
 
12 
 
 There was an inexhaustible fund of fun in Armstrong's mind. 
 He saw the comica] side of every situation, and the humor of the sharp 
 contrasts between the ideal and the real helped him on. In a letter 
 written for his class report twenty years ago, in answer to the request 
 to state what he had published, he said : " I have pubHshed nothing 
 but a succession of howls for money for the Hampton School, to which 
 the dear public have on the whole liberally responded, though, as in 
 war, only one shot in five hundred hits." He loved literature and 
 scholarship, but the idea that he could have any relation to these fine 
 attainments in his absorbing work struck him as comical. Those who 
 knew him well can almost hear him laugh as he wrote the words. The 
 fun in him was indomitable. Neither frightful danger, nor colossal 
 tasks, nor broken nerves, nor religious worship, could stop its flow. 
 
 General Armstrong's Grave in the School Cemetery at Hampton 
 
 Yet with all his vitality, his intense earnestness, his indifference to 
 petty things, his fun,and his faith, God only knows the discouragements 
 that his heroic soul encountered in the great work to which he gave 
 his life. It is because God, to whom he uttered his appeals for help 
 in this great work, knew of his struggles and disappointments and 
 comforted him by the answers to his appeals, that we find in his post- 
 humous papers the declaration that " Prayer is the greatest thing in 
 the world." That, you know, is not what Drummond says. He says 
 that "Love is the greatest thing in the world." But there will not be 
 much prayer to God without love for Him and His will, and prayer 
 
13 
 
 rests on the very foundation of God's love to us. So you see Aim- 
 strong" and Drummond are not very far apart. Moreover, Armstrong's 
 prayer was love — yet how he hated cant ! He was the last man to be 
 willing to claim publicly that God had answered his prayer or that his 
 love to his fellow-men was anything supereminent. 
 
 You know, friends, that this great school whose privileges you 
 enjoy has cost much, but you do not always realize it. It has cost much 
 to many small and large givers in the North who gave of their hard- 
 earned savings to the colored people and the Indians ; much to patient 
 and gifted teachers. Nor should it be forgotten that no school in the 
 North can present in its list of teachers a more distinguished roll of 
 women than this institution. Armstrong knew instinctively a noble 
 woman. He knew also how to attach and keep such in this great work. 
 In this and in ways innumerable this school owes infinitely much to 
 him who conceived the idea of establishing it here and for twenty-five 
 years poured an irrepressible stream of his own life-blood into its daily 
 ongoing and upbuilding, with joy indeed, but often with pain, until at 
 last he had given all that blood, and fell a martyr to his loving zeal. 
 
 My friends, I love to think of him, not rushing up and down 
 before his moving lines in the hot battle, apparently swallowing bullets 
 with the charmed life of a Napoleon ; not standing on a platform and 
 painting for a Northern audience the sad picture of a race rapidly mul- 
 tiplying, but likely to stumble, fall, rapidly die, because with so little 
 inheritance of character, and arousing his hearers to a keen sympathy 
 with the lofty but not unattainable aims of this school ; nor even in 
 the loneliness and complete absorption of prayer to his Heavenly 
 Father when he touched the lever that moves the world ; but teachins" 
 humbly the slow-moving minds of his pupils the great principles of the 
 law of love. I love to think of him, I say, teaching them to think, to 
 get hold of the ideas of cause and effect, sin and punishment, forgive- 
 ness and love, and then driving" home to them with the explosive, 
 volcanic earnestness of the Irish temperament and with Saxon perti- 
 nacity, the truth that work, steady, diligent work, was to be the cause 
 of their progress, the deliverance for them from sin and misery, the 
 sure sign that they were worthy of God's forgiveness and love. With 
 that lofty carriage of the head, with that keen, penetrating flash of the 
 eye, with that swift, jerky utterance (through it all the tenderest 
 sympathy gleaming forth) standing before his students with their dark, 
 pathetic faces he was more than general, more than orator, more than 
 a victorious Israel, he was a fellow-worker with God, inspired, sublime. 
 
 As the years went on, more and more he emphasized the iildus- 
 trial side. More and more he saw that what the colored people need 
 is not Greek culture of the head, not chiefly a knowledge of history 
 and literature, but enough training of the brain to make them think 
 well, control their lower desires, and love their fellow-men, but mainly 
 industrial training, steadiness, and mastery of trades, loving, skillful 
 
SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG 
 
 Born in Wailuku, Maui, Hawaiian Islands, January 30, 1839 
 Graduated from Williams College, Mass., in the class of 1862 
 Entered Union Army, August, 1862, as Captain in the 125th N. Y. 
 
 Volunteers 
 Took command of the 9th U. S. Colored Troops, fall of 1863 
 Mustered out in Nov. 1865, as Brevet Brigadier-General of Volunteers 
 Made officer of Freedmen's Bureau on Va. Peninsula, March, 1866 
 Founded Hampton Institute for Negro youth, April, 1868 
 Began work for Indians at Hampton Institute, 1878 
 Received LL. D. from Williams, 1887 
 Died May 11, 1893. 
 
Hampton Institute, the well-known school for Negroes 
 and Indians, was founded by General Samuel Chapman Arm- 
 strong in I 868, on the shore of Hampton Roads, near Fort 
 Monroe, Virginia. 
 
 It is an undenominational industrial school, controlled by 
 a board of seventeen trustees. The school property includes 
 1 1 00 acres of land and 135 buildings, among which are a 
 church, academic hall, library, dormitories, and buildings for 
 the teaching of agriculture and the mechanical trades. 
 
 The number of students ( I 9 I 0— 1 9 1 1 ) is 1 399, of whom 
 82 are Indians, and 524 are colored children in the Whittier 
 Training School. The 875 boarding pupils pay for their 
 board and clothing. This is partly provided for the Indians 
 by the Government, but the Negroes provide their own, pay- 
 ing their bills partly by labor at the school. But the great 
 majority of students cannot pay their tuition, which is one 
 hundred dollars per pupil. This is divided into an academic 
 scholarship of seventy dollars, and an industrial one of thirty 
 dollars. A permanent industrial scholarship can be endowed 
 for eight hundred dollars and a permanent academic scholar- 
 ship for two thousand dollars. 
 
 Many Sunday-schools, associations, and friends of the 
 two races are interested to give these scholarships, or larger 
 or smaller sums, year by year according to their ability, and 
 thus assist Hampton in raising the $125,000 necessary each 
 year for current expenses in addition to its regular income. 
 Sundaj'-school classes are also often interested in sending 
 Christmas boxes to graduates who are teaching in the South 
 or West. 
 
 More than seven thousand young people have had the 
 benefit of Hampton's ideals and training. They have for the 
 most part gone back to the Western plains or to the Southern 
 States and there have become centers of influence — teachers, 
 farmers, skilled mechanics, thrifty home makers — leading 
 their people more by deeds than by words to a higher plane 
 of citizenship. 
 
 Any subscription, however small, will be gratefully re- 
 ceived and may be sent to F. K. Rogers, Treasurer, or to the 
 undersigned, 
 
 H. B. FRISSELL, Principal, Hampton, Va. 
 
 FORM OF BEQUEST 
 I give tind rJevise to the Trustees of the Hampton Normal nncl 
 
 Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia, the sum of 
 
 dollars, payable, etc. 
 
606 5