ARMSTRONG, SAMUEL CHAPMAN (1839-1893), American soldier, philanthropist
and educator, was born on Maui, one of the Hawaiian Islands, on the 30th
of January 1839, his parents Richard and Clarissa Armstrong, being
American missionaries. He was educated at the Punahou school in
Honolulu, at Oahu College, into which the Punahou school developed in
1852, and at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he
graduated in 1862. He served in the Civil War, on the Union side, from
1862 to 1865, rising in the volunteer service to the regular rank of
colonel and the brevet rank of brigadier-general, and, after December
1863, acted as one of the officers of the coloured troops commanded by
General William Birney. In November 1865 he was honourably mustered out
of the volunteer service. His experience as commander of negro troops
had added to his interest, always strong, in the negroes of the south,
and in March 1866 he became superintendent of the Ninth District of
Virginia, under the Freedman's Bureau, with headquarters near Fort
Monroe. While in this position he became convinced that the only
permanent solution of the manifold difficulties which the freedmen
encountered lay in their moral and industrial education. He remained in
the educational department of the Bureau until this work came to an end
in 1872; though five years earlier, at Hampton, Virginia, near Fort
Monroe, he had founded, with the aid principally of the American
Missionary Association, an industrial school for negroes, Hampton
Institute, which was formally opened in 1868, and at the head of which
he remained until his death, there, on the 11th of May 1893. After 1878
Indians were also admitted to the Institute, and during the last fifteen
years of his life Armstrong took a deep interest in the "Indian
question." Much of his time after 1868 was spent in the Northern and
Eastern states, whither he went to raise funds for the Institute. See
_Samuel Chapman Armstrong, a Biographical Study_ (New York, 1904), by
his daughter, Edith Armstrong Talbot.
His brother, WILLIAM N. ARMSTRONG, was attorney-general in the cabinet
of the Hawaiian king Kalakaua I. He accompanied that monarch on a
prolonged foreign tour in 1881, visiting Japan, China, Siam, India,
Europe and the United States, and in 1904 published an amusing account
of the journey, called _Round the World with a King_.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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