CHAPTER XXIX.
HAMPTON INSTITUTE, HAMPTON, VA.
The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute first opened its doors for the reception of the freedmen in April, 1868. Of its beginning and purpose, General Armstrong, its founder and for twenty-five years its principal, writes:
"Two and a half years' service with the Negro soldiers (after a year as Captain and Major in the 125th New York Volunteers), as Lieutenant-Colonel and Colonel of the Ninth and Eighth Regiments of U. S. Colored Troops, convinced me of the excellent qualities and capacities of the freedmen. Their quick response to good treatment and to discipline was a constant surprise. Their tidiness, devotion to their duty and their leaders, their dash and daring in battle, and ambition to improve—often studying their spelling books under fire—showed that slavery was a false, though doubtless, for the time being, an educative condition, and that they deserved as good a chance as any people.
"In March, 1866, I was placed by General O. O. Howard, Commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau, in charge of ten counties in Eastern Virginia, with headquarters at Hampton, the great 'contraband' camp, to manage Negro affairs and adjust, if possible, the relation of the races.
HAMPTON ROADS, FROM PRINCIPAL'S OFFICE.
"I soon felt the fitness of this historic and strategic spot for a permanent and great educational work. The suggestion was cordially received by the American Missionary Association, which authorized the purchase, in June, 1867, of 'Little Scotland,' an estate of 125 acres on Hampton River, looking out over Hampton Roads. Not expecting to have charge, but only to help, I was surprised, one day, by a letter from Secretary E. P. Smith, of the A. M. A., stating that the man selected for the place had declined, and asking me if I could take it. I replied, 'Yes.' Till then my own future had been blind; it had only been clear that there was a work to be done for the ex-slaves and where and how it should be done.
"A day-dream of the Hampton School, nearly as it is, had come to me during the war a few times; once in camp during the siege of Richmond, and once one beautiful evening on the Gulf of Mexico, while on the wheel-house of the transport steamship Illinois, enroute for Texas with the 25th Army Corps (Negro) for frontier duty on the Rio Grande River, whither it had been ordered, under General Sheridan, to watch and if necessary defeat Maximilian in his attempted conquest of Mexico.
"The thing to be done was clear: to train selected Negro youth who should go out and teach and lead their people, first by example by getting land and homes; to give them not a dollar that they could earn for themselves; to teach respect for labor; to replace stupid drudgery with skilled hands; and, to these ends, to build up an industrial system, for the sake not only of self-support and intelligent labor, but also for the sake of character. And it seemed equally clear that the people of the country would support a wise work for the freedmen."
HAMPTON INSTITUTE, 1868.
Thus, under a man of the broadest views and almost prophetic foresight, the school had its beginning. Two teachers and fifteen students found living room and class room in the dismantled mansion, the old brick mill and the newer barracks, relics of the slavery days and of the civil war. At the end of the school's twenty-fifth year Gen. Armstrong died, seeing, as it is given to few to see, great and tangible results from his years of self-sacrificing labor. Since his death, the work has been carried on by Rev. H. B. Frissell, D. D., who has taken up with wisdom and courage the task laid upon him and has a record behind him now of five years, during which the institution has shown steady growth and improvement.
HAMPTON INSTITUTE, 1898.
At the beginning of the present year there were on the grounds 1,001 students; of these 135 are Indians representing ten States and Territories; 361 are children coming from the immediate neighborhood, who are instructed in the Whittier Primary School. There are 630 boarders—383 boys and 247 girls. Of the eighty officers, teachers, and assistants, about one-half are in the industrial department.
TRADE SCHOOL BUILDING.
Instead of the old barracks, there are now over fifty-five buildings, including dormitories, academic and science buildings, a large trade school, domestic science and agricultural buildings, a beautiful church, a large saw-mill and shops where students help to earn their board and clothes and receive instruction in blacksmithing, wheelwrighting, painting, house-building, cabinet-making, upholstery, shoemaking, tailoring, harness-making, printing, and engineering. Two large farms with greenhouses, barns, and experiment stations give employment to students and instruction in agriculture. The laundry, dining-rooms, kitchens, and sewing-rooms give employment to the girls, and in them they receive instruction in sewing, dressmaking, laundering, and other branches which fit them to instruct their people in these lines. All the domestic work of the place is performed by the students. The average age of the pupils is nineteen years.
ACADEMIC CLASS-ROOM.
In 1870 this institution was chartered by special act of the General Assembly of Virginia. It is not owned or controlled by State or government, but by a Board of seventeen Trustees, representing different sections of the country, and six religious denominations, no one of which has a majority. The school now has a property worth over $600,000, free from debt, and an endowment fund of over a half-million. It receives aid through the State of Virginia for its agricultural work and from the general government toward the board and clothes of Indians, but it is obliged to appeal to the public for $80,000 a year.
The Slater Fund Board makes a generous yearly appropriation toward its trade-school work, and help is received from the Peabody Fund, but the school depends for the large part of its yearly expenses upon charitable contributions.
GIRLS' MANUAL TRAINING.
Twenty-five years ago the imperative need of the Negro was teachers in the country public schools of the South, who could show the people by example, as well as by precept, how to live, how to get land and build decent houses. This need still remains, but, with the improvement of the colored race, more thoroughly equipped teachers are necessary, not only for the public schools, but for the workshops, and for the industrial and agricultural schools that have started up all through the South and among the Indians of the West. To meet this need Hampton provides an Academic Department with a corps of able teachers, mostly graduates of normal schools and colleges, who give thorough instruction in the English branches. Beside this, manual training is given to the boys, and sewing, cooking, and bench work to the girls. Those of the boys who show aptitude for trades in the manual training classes can receive thorough instruction in the Trade School, a building costing $50,000 and especially adapted to the work. Competent instruction in carpentry, wood turning, cabinet-making, bricklaying, plastering, wheelwrighting, blacksmithing, painting, machine work, and mechanical drawing carry students through a systematic course in their different departments, fitting them to be teachers of trades. Chance is also given to do actual work in the sixteen productive industries on the school grounds.
KINDERGARTEN CLASS.
Those of the girls who wish trades can be admitted into the Domestic Science Department where they are fitted to be teachers of sewing, cooking, and laundering, with an opportunity to do actual work in the school's laundry and kitchen.
All students of the school receive instruction in agriculture, but those who wish to devote themselves especially to it can receive special instruction in the Agricultural Department, with experiments in the laboratory and practical work upon the school's two farms.
Those who wish to fit themselves to become teachers in the public schools, after graduation from the Academic Department, enter the Normal Department, where they receive instruction in methods of teaching, and have practice in the Whittier School, in which there are over three hundred children, with kindergarten and classes in cooking, gymnastics, and the English branches.
The boys are formed into a battalion under the Commandant of Cadets, a graduate of the school, from whom they receive military drill and gymnastic training. A United States officer from Fort Monroe assists in this work. The care of persons, quarters, and grounds are largely under the care of the officers of the school battalion. The girls are similarly organized under their matrons and are instructed in habits and manners.
The school is non-sectarian but earnestly Christian. Careful instruction in the Bible is given by teachers representing different denominations. The Chaplain is assisted by the clergymen of Hampton in the religious work of the school.
TRADE SCHOOL PAINT SHOP.
Six thousand young people of the Negro and Indian races have had the advantages of the school's training and gone out as teachers, farmers, and business men, to lift their people to a higher level. Nearly 1,000 have graduated from the school's Academic Department, and of these 90 per cent. have become teachers. The great majority have gone into the public schools. Whole counties have been transformed by their work. Homes, churches, and schools have been built, land purchased, and the morals of the community improved.
Booker T. Washington, a graduate of Hampton, founded the Tuskegee School in Alabama, and over forty other graduates have gone to help him in his work. Schools at Calhoun and Mt. Meigs, Alabama, Kittrell, North Carolina, Lawrenceville and Gloucester, Virginia, are established on the Hampton plan and carried on by graduates of the school. Under the teachers who have gone out from Hampton and its offshoots more than 150,000 children have received instruction. Of the 500 Indians who have been trained at Hampton, 87 per cent. are engaged as teachers, farmers, missionaries, and in other regular occupations. Twenty years ago, Capt. Pratt brought fifteen prisoners of war from Fort Marion, St. Augustine, to Hampton and remained there one year, bringing in the meantime other Indians from the West. So successful was that first experiment in industrial education that Carlisle School was established and now hundreds of thousands of dollars, which were formerly devoted to fighting the Indians, are given by the government to training their children in industrial schools.
Hampton has given an impetus to industrial education among the Negroes which is felt in every State of the South. But 75 per cent. of the race still live in one-room cabins on rented land, in ignorance and poverty. Teachers of agriculture and home builders are needed.
WHEELWRIGHT SHOP.
There is danger that the blacks will lose the trades, which were their best heritage from slavery, unless industrial education is pushed. Well-trained young women must go out to reconstruct the homes.
In addition to the work done by the school directly for its pupils in class-room and industrial-training shop, it reaches out continually into the home life of its graduates and ex-students. Its graduate missionaries visit in many homes, inspiring interest in land purchase, home building, school-term extension, thrift, temperance, and good citizenship. Its monthly paper, the Southern Workman, deals in a spirit of free inquiry and broad humanity with the race question in its many phases, and publishes in its columns articles of value from leading men and women of both the Negro and white races. Its Summer Conference, held in the vacation season, calls together for earnest discussion some of the best thinkers, white and colored, in the country; and the Virginia Teachers' Institute, assembling each summer on the school grounds, keeps the school in touch with the educational system of the State in which it works. Its aim is, and has been from its beginning, to lay firm and broad the foundation of character upon which all true civilization is built.