The Pious Founder.
The fundamental contrast, however, between the two institutions lies in the fact that at Tuskegee the organizing and teaching staff is all black (or brown), at Hampton all white.[[37]] The founder of Hampton, General S. C. Armstrong, was born in the Sandwich Islands in 1839, the son of a missionary. He was a man of extraordinary strength and vitality, a muscular Christian in the fullest sense of the term. In the war, he commanded a negro regiment,[[38]] and after the war he put aside all opportunities of personal gain and advancement to devote himself to the work of the Freedmen’s Bureau. This brought him to Hampton; and here, in April, 1868, he opened his school, with one assistant teacher and fifteen pupils. Next year the attendance increased to sixty-six, and in 1870 the Institute received a charter (but no endowment) from the Virginia Legislature. In 1878 it was decided to admit Indians as well as negroes, and now about ten per cent. of the students belong to the aboriginal tribes. Armstrong had immense difficulties to contend with. The whole of the money for his enterprise had to be raised by his personal exertions; and the value of his idea—the value of negro education in general and industrial training in particular—was not then a tested fact, but remained to be proven in the face of much scepticism. A minor difficulty lay in the prejudice of the negroes themselves against manual training. This was still, in their eyes, the badge of servitude; and they were apt to rebel when, asking for Greek, they were given a hoe. With indomitable energy and geniality, however, Armstrong stuck to his task; and when, early in the nineties, he was stricken with paralysis, Hampton was already a great institution, and Tuskegee was firmly founded.
At Hampton there are now 113 buildings (65 of them of considerable size) and a home farm of 120 acres; while at Shellbank, six miles away, the school owns a farm of over 600 acres, with 150 head of cattle, 30 horses and mules, 100 hogs, and fowls by the thousand. The students enrolled in the Institute number 863, while the Whittier Preparatory School has nearly 500 pupils. In addition to all branches of agriculture and horticulture, fifteen trades are taught to boys, while girls are thoroughly trained in every form of domestic industry, laundry-work, dressmaking, etc. The teaching and organizing staff numbers about 200, or one to every six pupils. It is the deliberate policy of the Institute to seek for increase of efficiency rather than of numbers, and the entrance tests are correspondingly severe.
The Principal, Dr. H. B. Frissell, was unfortunately absent when I visited Hampton. |A Tour of the Institute.| I had met him a year before at Memphis, and learnt to appreciate his quietly commanding personality. Mrs. Frissell received us most courteously in the very beautiful old plantation-house which is now the Principal’s residence. A patriarchal hospitality is the tradition at Hampton, and we were cordially invited to remain, if not a week, at least a night. But a few hours were all we could spare; and the chaplain, Dr. Herbert Turner, very kindly constituted himself our guide.
He took us first to “the soul of the institution,” the Memorial Church, externally a fine building, internally, to my mind, memorably beautiful. It is a cruciform structure of romanesque style; but the arms of the cross are so short that they may be called apses rather than nave and transepts, and the great body of the space is covered by the dome. The four great arches are magnificent in their airy dignity, and the material, red and cream brick, is at once simple and beautiful. The doctrine here preached is entirely undenominational. The students are encouraged to adhere to their own denominations, “as they will thus be best able to serve the communities to which they return.” The official designation of the building is simple—“The Church of Christ in Hampton Institute”—and after several hours’ talk with Dr. Turner, I feel sure that his flock will imbibe from him no harsh or illiberal theology.
“We lay the greatest stress first and last,” he said, “on character-building. It is not the clever self-seeker that we look for and encourage—not the youth whose aim is personal success and money-making. It is the service he is to do to his people that we keep constantly before the student’s mind; and with the great majority that is actually and effectively the dominant idea. Many of them, of course, are training to be teachers; but all of them feel that they can teach indirectly in their different communities, by uprightness in life and efficiency in work. We follow carefully the careers of our students, and I am able to say that 83 per cent. of those who are now out in the world are Christian men and women, not merely in the sense of church-membership, but of the practical Christianity which is known by its fruits. We are especially careful to cultivate mutual kindliness and good feeling among teachers and pupils alike. It was a saying of General Armstrong’s that ‘cantankerousness is worse than heterodoxy,’ and we still take that view.”
“Have you many students,” I asked, “who are supported by comparatively well-to-do parents?”
“Very few,” Dr. Turner replied; “and we do not particularly care for that class of young man or woman. All new students have to bring with them a registration-fee of ten dollars, and eleven dollars for one month’s board; but the great majority of them need little more than that, for they are immediately put to various sorts of unskilled work by which they are enabled to earn from fifteen to twenty dollars a month, and so can not only pay their current board bills, but lay up a sum to meet the expenses of the next year, when they go into the day-school or into trades in which, during their apprenticeship, they are unable to earn anything. You remember how Booker Washington, when he first presented himself, was so ignorant that he was almost rejected; but when he was told, by way of trial, to clean a room, the superintendent noticed that the dark corners were as thoroughly cleaned as the most visible parts, and accepted him on the strength of that observation.”
We were now in the boot- and harness-making division of the Trade School building. Pursuing the theme of thoroughness suggested by the anecdote of Booker Washington, Dr. Turner continued—
Principles and Methods.