Samuel Chapman Armstrong

IT was, I think, in the winter of 1860, when I was rooming in East College at Williams, that into my introspective life nature flung a sort of cataclysm of health named Sam Armstrong. He came, like other cyclones, from the South Seas, — was a Sandwich Islander, son of a missionary. Until Miss Murfree wrote her Prophet of the Great Smoky Mountains it would have been impossible to describe Armstrong’s immediate personal effect. There was a quality in it that defied the ordinary English vocabulary. To use the eastern Tennessee dialect, which alone could do him justice, he was “ plumb survigrous.” To begin with, as Mark Twain might express it, he had been fortunate in the selection of his parents. The roots of his nature struck deep into the soil of two strong races. He bore the stamp of both Saxon and Scot. Then, too, he was an islander: his constitution smacked of the seas; there was about him something of the high courage and the jollity of the tar; he carried with him the vitalities of the ocean. Like all those South Sea Islanders, he had been brought up to the water ; it had imparted to him a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness. It seemed natural for him to strike out in any element. But what impressed one most was his schooling. Not but that it was in unison with the man; it was, in fact, remarkably so ; but it was so entirely out of the common, so free-handed and virile. His father had been minister of public instruction at Hawaii. The son had accompanied him on his official tours, and had been let into the business. He could manage a boat in a storm, teach school, edit a newspaper, assist in carrying on a government, take up a mechanical industry at will, understand natives, sympathize with missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or mathematics, conduct an advanced class in geometry, and make no end of fun for little children. In short, he was a striking illustration of that Robinson-Crusoelike multiformity of function that grows up perforce under the necessities of a missionary station. New England energy, oceanic breeziness, missionary environment, disclosed themselves in him. Such was Armstrong as he first came into my life, bringing his ozone with him.

Williams College was at that time a remarkable place. Nature seemed to have made preparations for greatness. The mountains compassed it about, forming a giant amphitheatre. The buildings were few and poorly fitted Up, the apparatus was meagre, the faculty small in numbers. I doubt, however, if there were many institutions where so much thought-stuff was generated. True, our teachers did not represent metropolitan culture, nor was the mass of knowledge which they communicated prodigious; they were, however, good drill masters, and, still better for those under their care, they were men of mental and moral muscularity. Two or three were of that highly organized New England type, original in their thought, and impetuous as a Berkshire torrent. It is said that the most important agent in the cultivation of the soil is the microbe that sets free the nitrogen. In the process of intellectual cultivation, those men do most who set thought free. Far at the head of all such was President Hopkins. He was a man of undoubted genius, and, happily for his students, that genius had specialized itself on teaching. Furthermore, his genius was fed by a great overshadowing personality. He was a philosopher from sheer love of nature: therefore his philosophy was not of the dryly intellectual kind; it was filled with life, and was deep rooted in the man’s heart. He stood always face to face with nature ; he felt her mystery, he caught her spiritual import ; his soul was full of wonder and inquiry ; he cared more for life than for his theory of it, more for men than for institutions, more for an individual student than for his own success; he first loved, then thought, then taught. His recitation room was more entertaining than a play ; the textbook was a starting-point,— no man could shirk that,— but it was soon left far behind; the method was conversational, Socratic, and spiced with humor. He drew out the thought of each student in turn, and gently compelled each member of the class to wrestle with him ; extending the utmost hospitality to his peculiar views, meeting his arguments with perfect fairness, encouraging him to free his mind and to differ with his teacher, but compelling him at last to face the remorseless logic of his chosen position in a manner sometimes most ludicrous. He was peculiarly gentle, also, toward the weakminded, keeping them on their intellectual legs as long as he could, and letting them down as easily as possible. The whole process was exciting, amusing, and stimulating to the last degree ; and when it was over, the student knew that free thought meant the power to think rationally, and that the power to think rationally was not the inalienable endowment of every American citizen. Over and above the dialectic skill and the mental vitality communicated by such a process was a profound impression regarding the truth itself, its reality, its transcendence above all human conceptions of it, and its nutritive value to the human mind. In fact, while Dr. Hopkins taught a most original and valuable philosophy, it was not this which was the aim or principal result of his teaching. It was rather to make his students themselves citizens of that realm of thought, and to enable them to read the book of life at first hand, and particularly to see the commonly misunderstood relationship between the natural and the spiritual world. The curriculum was organized upon his plan. Without pretending to be so, it really was socialistic in the best sense. The theory was to acquaint the student with man, and thus to put him in working relations with the race to which he belonged.

Armstrong gravitated to Williams College by a social law: it was the resort for missionaries’ sons; there was the haystack at which the missionary enterprise was started; it was a kind of sacred soil, a rendezvous for spiritual knight-errants, and Armstrong, though not very spiritual, was a knight-errant to the core. Like other missionaries’ sons, he poked fun at natives, and entertained small circles with the ridiculous phases of missionary life; yet he was a kind of missionary in disguise, always ready to go out of his way for the purpose of slyly helping somebody up to a better moral or physical plane. His “plumb survigrousness” gave him an eternal effervescence; in fact, his body was a kind of catapult for his mind; it was forever projecting his mental force in some direction, so that he was continually carrying on intellectual " high jinks,” going off into extravaganzas, throwing every subject into a grotesque light: as a result, he was never serious, though always earnest. He took to Williams College as to a natural habitat; he enjoyed the extra molecules of free thought in the atoms of the college atmosphere ; he reveled in the class room discussions ; he bristled with arguments and swarmed with new ideas; he lifted up his “ plumb survigrous ” voice and made intellectual pandemonium at the dinner table.

He was a trifle above middle height, broad-shouldered, with large, well-poised head, forehead high and wide, deep-set flashing eyes, a long mane of light brown hair, his face very brown and sailor-like. He bore his head high, and carried about an air of insolent good health. He was unconventional in his notions, Shakespearean in sympathy, wished to see all sides of life, yet he never formed affiliations with the bad side. If he touched pitch, he got rid of it as soon as he could ; pleasantly if possible, but at all events decidedly. He had a robust habit of will, and laid hold always of the best in his environment.

Intellectually he was a leader. Spiritually he was religious; that is, he had a profound faith in God, and a deep reverence for his father’s life and work, as appears in his Reminiscences, a delightful little book, full of the rarest humor and tenderness. Yet everybody felt he was under tremendous terrestrial headway. Sometimes he seemed to have little respect for the spiritual: he shocked people by his levity; he was irreverent in speech. But there was about him at all times a profound reverence of spirit for God, manhood, womanhood, and all sacred realities. Indeed, with him reverence and religion alike were matters not of form, but of an inward principle whose application he had not yet mastered. Other men were original in thought; he was original in character; but above all there was an immediacy of nature. His greatest tendency seemed to be to go ahead; he has, in fact, often reminded me of Harry Wadsworth, the hero of E. E. Hale’s Ten Times One Are Ten. He was the most strenuous man I ever saw. Naturally he was a problem to us,—what would he come to? Dr. Arnold said of himself, “ Aut Cæsar, aut nullus.” Armstrong said of himself, “ Missionary or pirate.”

He joined us in the junior year. With the senior year began the war. Its tumultuous scenes penetrated by report into our cloisters. Armstrong was more patriotic than many native-born Americans ; he had a stronger intellectual estimate of our country’s worth. As soon as he graduated he helped form a regiment. “ I thought I had seen energy before,” said one of his soldiers, “ but I never did till I saw him.” It needed little to turn him into a veritable Mars. but he did not at once “ drink delight of battle with his peers.” Instead of that, he ate salt pork, and slept in the mud in a little hole in Virginia ; thence came letters in which Hotspur, Artemus Ward, and the Hebrew prophets seem strangely commingled. Armstrong was uncomfortable, plainly. He writes : “ I am on pins. I am tired of this puttering round in Virginia mud. Why live I here ? Here ’s to the heathen ; rather, here’s to the nigger. I wish there were fewer girls, no devil, and a sweet valley like Typee for every mortal. The great conflagration cannot be averted much longer. The cry of the poor is so piteous, of the good so imploring and just, and of the persecuted and enslaved so terrible that it seems as if the fullness of time were accomplished already, and that a devouring fire was needed to quench the wrong and restore the right. I hope that until the slave, and every slave, can call himself his own, and his wife and children his own, the sword will not cease from among us ; and I care not how many the evils that attend it. — it will all be just. The above will do. I feel better.”

Nonsense was Armstrong’s relief from hard work and strong feeling ; it was the escape valve of his brains. He soon had a happier time ; there was plenty of fighting even for him. At Gettysburg he distinguished himself for bravery. His own account of it was that, knowing a moving target was the hardest to hit, he tore up and down the lines like a madman, shouting to his men to come on, which seemed to onlookers the height of gallantry, but was to him the height of prudence. Before long he accepted the command of a colored regiment. Here he first learned the sterling qualities of that race, noting particularly how it was capable of being lifted above the fear of death. A friend who went to see him in camp near Petersburg found the regiment safely quartered in a ravine, while the colonel’s tent was pitched on a little elevated plateau, across which the enemy’s cannon shot were continually ricochetting, after a manner which, according to the narrator’s account, “ turned his liver to water.” He remonstrated with Armstrong on living in a place where, day and night, he was liable to be disemboweled ; but he replied that the morale of the colored troops required it, and that they would do anything for a man who showed himself superior to fear. At the close of the war, he had, without assistance, risen to the rank of brevet brigadier general, but he had not attained to his best manhood. Militarism was not his field; he was essentially constructive ; he was not made to smash things, but to build them.

Thrown in with General Howard, he was led by the influence of that philanthropist to take charge of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Hampton, Virginia. Some ten thousand black refugees were there huddled together, mostly in wretched hovels, on confiscated land. The United States government issued them rations, the American Missionary Association sent them missionaries. Their condition was incoherent and miserable.

Armstrong was always “ helping lame dogs over stiles.” He gathered about him a staff composed of broken-down classmates and war comrades, — I was one of the lot. I was ill on my bed one day, when the door was flung open, and in came Armstrong, his head up in the air, his military cap on one side, and flourishing a rattan cane in his hand. Four other young fellows were following him, and all were roaring out at the top of their lungs, “ Hinky, dinky, darby, ram! hinky, dinky, da!”

Yet that roistering militarism was mere blowing off of steam ; underneath it there lay the germ of a profoundly great and sympathetic manhood. The destructives mature young, smashers of armies, creeds, and the like. But Armstrong did not belong to that class ; his powers were of the highest order, his development had just begun. There were no holes in his mind ; everything good he had kept. In the mud, by the camp fire, the great ideas of the class room had recurred to him. Amid the wild scenes of the war, he had been putting together the elemental principles of human life ; he had studied human nature profoundly, and had critically sifted a wide range of facts. He was not emotional nor sentimental ; was inclined to take a ludicrous view of the “ darky,” as he called him ; was not unconscious of the fact that he had made a brilliant record. Glory tasted good in his mouth ; furthermore, he was offered a brilliant position in the business world. But he had carried away, like others of us, from Dr. Hopkins’s class room a touchstone by which to test glory and all other things, and deep within him there was a principle of which he had never let go, but Which was ever coming more and more to the front. What it was appears between the lines in his Reminiscences. As one reads the description of his boyhood’s home in Honolulu, taking in as it does both the noble and the droll side of mission life; as one sees how he dwells on the sacrifices of his father and mother, one thing becomes clear, — the standpoint of his life. He never ceased to look at things from the doorway of that missionary home. Fundamental in him, inmost treasure of his heart, was that principle of sacrifice and service for the race, for any and every kind of man, because he was a man, and because Christ had died for him, putting on him a divine valuation ; and along with this principle there was at his heart’s core the germ of that kind of faith that obtains promises and stops the mouths of lions.

At this very time, writing to his old college chum, he says: “ Well, chum, I’m rolling over lots of wild schemes in my head, and one of these days I ’ll strike out. I want you along. But mind, effort leads to success. There is a point where one ends and the other begins, and here lies the difference in men : one man will not do a thing till he shall see exactly where this point shall be; another cares not if between where effort stops and success begins there is a gulf, be it ever so wide. Such are the extremes ; men are ranged all along between. I rather lean to the latter extreme, where the eye of sense sees no continuity, but labor and its results widely separate. A certain faith steps in and binds them together ; and trusting to this faith, some men will go forward as freely as if there were no break, no doubt; for just here is the place of doubt.” The after story of his life was a commentary on these words.

So, in the midst of the hard work of the bureau, jolly times with his old comrades, and harmless flirtations with pretty teachers, he was revolving the question how the sacrifices that were being made for the negro might be made practical. The result, as every one knows, was the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. That belongs to history, but three things ought to be said about it here : (1.) It was like the colored regiment in the ravine, with the colonel’s tent on the hill, under fire. Armstrong’s own soul hovered over it, transfused it, and was given for it, life for life. Never in modern times did a heroic personality give a more wondrous perpendicular lift to other souls. Not for one instant would I minimize the skillful and selfdenying work of that noble band who toiled by his side; nevertheless Armstrong himself was the institution and the education. It could not be otherwise. As he himself once said, the greatest institution is a man. (2.) Allowing a large percentage of dead materials, Hampton has sent out into the world hundreds of students, each one of whom, in whatever little dark community he may be, bears the stamp of Armstrong’s character, and shares in the work of putting men thereabouts en rapport with what is best and most practical in human life. (3.) The institution has survived financially by the unparalleled struggles of Armstrong himself. The whole of that gigantic educational industry was created and sustained by a man who never had a penny beyond his salary. There was no accident in this. Armstrong’s constructive qualities were of the highest order, his executive ability was immense. He had a creative imagination, and not only the kind of intellect that sees the means to an end, but that naturalistic turn of mind which comprehends instinctively nature’s organism for producing results. With astute insight, Armstrong not only saw exactly the character and function of the African nature ; he took in the organic value of a New England deacon, a Boston millionaire, a Quaker philanthropist, and a Virginia legislature; he understood the gearing by which they could be united ; he understood the relation of Providence to organisms of all kinds. Speaking of the original bill by which Virginia gave her scrip to her educational institutions, he said to me, “ It will pass, because it is God’s movement, and there are so many rascals in the legislature.”

He had, too, another essential characteristic of every great constructive mind: he saw things in broad relations, he was loyal to his own principles, but he did not needlessly collide with other people; he made the wolf to lie down with the lamb, he combined the energies of the skeptic and of the believer. To some this seemed a want of genuineness on his part. The fact simply was that he saw and made for those broader unities in which all good men stand together. This clear perception not only of wide unities, but of different fields of unity, is in fact the most important quality of the true upbuilder ; for to build is really to coördinate. He had, too, that quality of getting along with things, that patience with existing conditions, so wittily described by Dr. Holmes in his Over the Teacups. He was emphatically an 舠As,” not an “If.” When Academic Hall burned, he said it was the best thing that could have happened.

When certain persons reviled the Scriptures, in which he believed, he said, “ So much the worse for them, but it will do the Scriptures good.” In short, he was at all times a buoyant optimist. Then there was about him the unfailing genial play of humor, by which he subdued the tone of both sacrifices and cares. When reproached by a ministerial friend for the old slouch hat he wore, his reply was, “ We are different; you need a hat to walk round the walls of Zion with.”

One day, after he had been paralyzed, he reverently bowed his head at dinner to ask the usual blessing, but instantly afterwards burst into a hearty laugh, and said, “ I could n’t shut but one eye.” The ludicrous side even of the sharpest distress struck him at once, and when he felt the worst he laughed.

It was a great sight to see him, in the prime of his manhood, sitting clad in his school uniform, with his short jacket just like the boys, in his little dry-goods box of an office, — an embodiment of business and dispatch ; a great sight to see him in Virginia Hall on a Sunday evening, his sturdy form erect, his head thrown back, leading the school, at the top of his voice, in some old plantation song, or, with one hand in his pocket, talking to them about hard facts, with something of the kindliness of a father, the directness of an army officer, and the hard-headed sagacity of an old slaveholding Virginia planter.

It was a greater sight to see him teach Dr. Hopkins’s Outline Study of Man to his own senior class of colored boys and girls. The task would have daunted most college professors, but Armstrong, like his beloved teacher, had a profound belief in the capacity of the humblest soul to receive the greatest truth, provided that truth were properly put. At it, therefore, he went, with all the enthusiasm of his nature ; and he invariably declared that it was the thing which of all things he most enjoyed. He had two rare points as a teacher: with all his powerful originality, he could shut himself up to the patient teaching of another man’s book ; and he understood the fact that because of some personal hitch a large percentage of every class fails to catch the educational movement. He never raved at dull students; it no more angered him when one did not take hold than it irritates a good fisherman when a particular trout will not rise to the conventional brown hackle. It is that particular trout whose personal equation the good angler enjoys studying. Armstrong always prepared the way for the coming lesson ; reading it over to the class sentence by sentence, stopping at every difficult word, drawing out the mind of the class as to its meaning, conversing shrewdly with them about it, bringing out their peculiarities, and so finding the personal hitch of each member.

Like many of the most original and successful thinkers, Armstrong reached his important conclusions from the study of a concrete fact. That fact was, in his case, the missionary history of the Sandwich Islands. It was to him an absorbingly interesting problem in social science. It was also the problem of his father’s life, and of the New Testament as related to modern times. He published a little pamphlet on the subject. It was a hurriedly constructed thing, thrown out in the midst of pressing cares, its ideas half formulated ; yet it is educationally of the highest value. It shows how important it is for us that the ages do not all go tandem. Happily, some of the savage ages are abreast of us.

Armstrong fully realized the value of this little segment of history, and his pamphlet shows what a perfectly fair and sympathetic yet acutely critical intellect could do with it. He could not bear to call Hawaiian Christianity a failure ; still his judgment compelled him to do so. What was the trouble ? Clearly it did not lie in the religion itself; this was obvious to his mind from what he saw in cases which he cites. Where the religion had a chance, it showed itself the same transcendently glorious thing that it was in the apostolic days. It performed moral miracles. Where then lay the trouble ? Evidently with the conditions of the social and industrial structure. To this Armstrong was himself an eye-witness. It precluded morality, he declared. The Christian native struggled vainly with it. The best that could be expected from him was faith’s struggle, not faith’s victory. The only thing that could possibly help him was to teach him so to build the social and industrial edifice that it should harmonize with Christianity. A hut with only one room and a race with no fixed habit of industry are not unitable with Christianity. What was the meaning of this, then ? That Christianity could not stand alone ? Precisely. It never was meant to stand alone. It was meant to take its place in a world of reciprocal organisms among which it is the supreme organism. Education, religion, industry, are different departments of one great process, which he called the building of manhood. It is impossible that one should advance well in any one of these departments without its correlatives. “ We have learned,” he says, “ how to make money, but not how to build men.” From this solution of the problem comes his idea of education. It is easy to talk about Armstrong having devised a good scheme of education for the negro and Indian. It is a grave question whether he has not solved the whole problem of education. Strip his system of its external form, and the principle is this : Take what force the man has and put it to practical use at once. First make him a useful organ of humanity, then give him humanity’s knowledge. It is the completion of Dr. Hopkins’s idea. If it could be carried out, it is possible that the educative process now going on in a good many young gentlemen might be almost as much improved as was the education of the negro and Indian when Armstrong took hold of it.

It would be no fair assessment of his work if I closed without saying a word about his religion. He was not naturally religious; there was about him too much of earthly interest, science, combativeness, and general absorption in the world ; besides, he was keenly critical and alive to the ridiculous, singularly destitute of fear, and not at all inclined to be anxious about his sins or anything else. Yet he saw the worth of religion; and though mystified by its apparent conflict with science, and also by its spiritual processes, he, with his sturdy practical sense and a conviction that it was meant for him as he was, laid hold of the side that was handiest to him and held on. It proved to be, “ Teneo et teneor.” In his earlier days he said to me, “ Work is the best prayer.” In his later days he reversed that saying. In fact, he became a kind of saint. Spiritual things were those on which he had strongest hold. When under terrible pressure, he was in the habit of devoting a tenth of his time to devotional reading, at one time using Thomas à Kempis, his robust spiritual digestion receiving no harm from its asceticism, while he took great delight in its spiritual revelations. I judge he had by no means reached the maximum of his powers ; he still seemed full of undeveloped potentiality. With his wondrous physique, at the time of his death he should have been in the prime of life. As a matter of fact he died from exhaustion, worn out, not by his legitimate function of education, but by his unexampled labors in securing money for his institution.

If Lincoln stood for the emancipation of the negro’s body, no less did Armstrong stand for the emancipation of his mind. The former represented the conduct of the war; the latter, its tremendous issues. The life of a free people is centred not so much in its political as in its educational organs. The death of a great popular educator in the midst of his work is an exceedingly critical event. It would seem, therefore, that in their failure to support such a God-given leader the American people may have inflicted upon themselves a grievous blow ; nor can a nation more than an individual expect that Providence or good luck will mend such mistakes. As for Armstrong himself, it is not wonderful that, seeing the fortunes amassed by many of his countrymen, and the relative pittance doled out to meet the moral and educational necessities of the nation, he was carried away by a scorn of what he called boarding, and that when he received a personal gift he flung it into the treasury of the institution. His death was, to the minds of some, a martyrdom; others criticised the struggle that led to it as a rash expenditure of power. If there be truth in the latter view, it becomes us to be gentle in our judgment. Probably he could not help it. Every man has his necessities, some noble, some ignoble. A certain excess was perhaps a necessity of his profoundly impassioned nature. When he took the cup of sacrifice, he could but drink deep of it, and he was satisfied.

A friend who was his guest during the naval review, April 22, 1893, writes, in a private letter, of his last days : —

“ Sunday morning, the 23d, he seemed very weary and feeble, but in the evening walked laboriously up all those stairs to Virginia Hall, and spoke to the students for half an hour. It was a singularly dramatic sight, all those dark faces looking toward him, as he stood leaning on his cane, with his drawn white face and almost white hair and those wonderful deep-set eyes, talking to them as only he could talk ; impressing upon them, whatever they did, no matter how trivial, to do it well and with their whole heart.

“ They sang ‘ They look like men of war,’ one of his favorite hymns, and marched out to 舠 Jerusalem the golden,’and I thought I could almost wish he might die then, among them.

“ It was his last Sunday in Virginia Hall. After that, he went in a boat through the fleet, with the choir, to serenade the flagships, and did n’t get back till twelve o’clock. Monday, he went with us to see the fleet sail. We climbed on to the outer ramparts, leaving him in the carriage; but he could n’t see there, so he climbed the lighthouse stairs and watched the ships. He seemed fairly well when we left, that night; but the heart-failure attack came Tuesday, and though he pulled through it, he never really rallied, and suffered terribly; every breath was anguish, night and day, in spite of everything love and science could suggest or do. At the last the end came very suddenly : he had a suffocating turn, — no worse than others, — and then was gone. . . .

“The whole front of the platform of that beautiful great church, flooded with, sunshine, was lined with potted lilies and plants; the pulpit had a fringe of bridal wreath, and above were massed roses of all colors, — in the centre the splendid Jacques that grow on his own house, — and just in front of it he lay in his coffin, with the heavy folds of a splendid flag covering it. Two negroes stood at the head, and two Indians at the foot, with their furled flags draped in black. The plate on the coffin said fifty-four years; but it was hard to believe he was only fifty-four, when one looked from it to that worn, tired face, the face in whose drawn lines and sunken, tired eyes was seen the weight of the burden that had killed him. A few hours after his death, the commanding officer at Fortress Monroe sent, asking the honor of giving the general a funeral of full military honors (an absolutely unheard-of thing for an ex-officer), sending the garrison of the fortress, and he came himself as a member of the Loyal Legion. . . .

“ They carried him out through the main door, the bells tolling, and the splendid fort band playing a Dead March. He was borne by the ten school captains, five negro, five Indian, with the coffin covered with the flag, and his hat and the sword he carried at Gettysburg laid over him. Every head was bared and bent, as, very slowly, they bore him to the caisson. The troops fell into line, then the caisson drawn by twenty students, then the four clergymen, the generals and the eight Loyal Legion men, the three carriages with family friends, and then the entire school. He was buried, at his own request, in the school cemetery; and as the caisson could not go in, he was carried on the shoulders of the ten captains. The grave was lined with locust blossoms, which also covered the earth. The service was short, and the students sang the Battle Hymn of the Republic, ‘ Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,’ and then we left.” ¹

John H. Denison.