Booker T. Washington

Booker T. Washington called him “the rarest, strongest, and most beautiful character that it has ever been my privilege to meet.” Who was the man who earned such high praise from Washington? General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of Hampton University.

Armstrong was born in Hawaii in 1839, the son of missionaries. He was a student at Williams College when the Civil War broke out, and after graduating in 1862 he volunteered for the Union Army and was commissioned captain of a company of New York infantry. In 1863 he volunteered to command black soldiers and became a colonel in a regiment of United States Colored Troops. He ended the war with the rank colonel and was breveted a brigadier general in 1866.

After the war General Armstrong joined the Freedmen’s Bureau and in 1868 he founded the school now known as Hampton University, in Hampton Virginia. His most famous student, Booker T. Washington, arrived at the school in 1872, with no money but with a strong work ethic and a burning desire to learn. Armstrong saw the promise in Washington, eventually hiring him as a faculty member, then later assisting him in founding Tuskegee Institute.

Washington’s admiration for Armstrong was immense. “It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was the equal of General Armstrong,” Washington wrote in his autobiography. “Fresh from the degrading influences of the slave plantation and the coal-mines, it was a rare privilege for me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I went into his presence he made the impression upon me of being a perfect man: I was made to feel that there was something about him that was superhuman.”

Armstrong devoted his life to improving educational opportunities for black people in the South, and his efforts led not only to elevating Hampton and Tuskegee to prominence, but to the founding of hundreds of other schools for black students across the South.

While on a fundraising tour in the North in 1892, Armstrong suffered a debilitating stroke. He spent two of his last six months of life living in Booker T. Washington’s home in Tuskegee. But General Armstrong wanted to end his live at his beloved Hampton Institute. It was there that he died, on May 11, 1893. As he had requested, he was buried in the student cemetery.

“I do not believe he ever had a selfish thought,” Washington wrote of General Armstrong.

Samuel Chapman Armstrong was born in Maui, Kingdom of Hawaii, on January 30, 1839.