Plainfield High School - Milestone Yearbook (Plainfield, NJ)

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12 DHE ORACLE, ment he put his hand to the plough he never turned back, and to-day Hamp- ton and Tuskegee are the direct results of his unceasing labors. It seemed as 1f Providence had been preparing the man for the task he was to perform Born of good New England stock and brought up in the Hawaiian Islands, he was early brought into contact with the throngs of na- tives that gathered around his father’s missionary home. With a tender love and pity he watched carefully their needs; and the desire to help them grew in his heart. He came to America to enter Williams College about a year be- fore the Civil War broke out. Here too his interest in those who were helpless in no way decreased. Although never calling himself an American, Armstrong enlisted after he had been graduated from college, and the traits of character which were to make him supremely the man needed to work out the salvation of the freedman were fostered by his years in the army. En- thusiasm, cheerfulness, thoroughness and persistency are the distinguishing characteristics of the man. These characteristics are shown in no better way than in some of his letters. While in the army he wrote: “We are kept con- stantly on the qui vive. The enemy is near. I can see their tents easily. They can at any time throw a 100-po und shell right into my camp,—yes, a dozen of them; we are in easy artillery range, but both sides seem to have tacitly agreed not to fire, and so we live on, perfectly at ease and always ready. I have a splendid regiment and a splendid opportunity; shall do or die; shall be distinguished or extinguished—that is, if I have the chance.” In the most trying times when he was about to be transferred from his own regiment to take charge of six companies of the Ninth Regiment, United States Colored troops, he wrote this cheerful letter to his mother: “To-mor- row I leave my brave old companions, my gallant Company D. It is very hard to do this, very hard. It is harder than leaving my classmates when I left college. I go into untried scenes, but with no fear to meet the future. If the Negroes can be made to fight well, then is the question of their freedom settled. I tell you the present is the grandest time the world ever saw. The star of Africa is rising, her millions now for the first time catching the glimpse of a glorious dawn. I gladly lend myself to the experiment—to this issue. It will yet be a grand thing to have been identified with this Negro movement.” T hus we see from his own words his unselfish willingness to give up the objects nearest to his own ends for the privilege of helping others. After the war, still imbued with a deep love and sympathy for those who were like sheep having no shepherd, Samuel Armstrong applied to the Bureau of Freedman for a position. “With a letter from his late chief of staff and his brilliant record as an officer of colored troops he was received

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THE ORACLE. “It may go far and meet with success on every hand; others may follow in more sheltered paths, quietly doing the little things near at hand. Of failure we hope there will be little. We have always before us our aims, our ideals. Yet these ideals will fade and disappear, unless we share them, unless we en- thuse others with the beauty and the value of the life that we ourselves are slowly learning to realize, and that we are trying to attain. We appreciate the fact that it is to wish us success on this journey that you have come here to-night. You have watched from year to year the graduation of other classes ;-you have taken an interest that has inspired us to do our best; and it is the result of your interest as well as of our own en- deavor that we can now look not mournfully into the past that comes not back again, but hopefully and confidentially forward, with purpose wisely to improve each present opportunity. E. Florence Derey. ESSAY SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG. ANNA LOUISE RUNYON. N these days, educational developments in the South are attract- ing general attention. Men are devoting more and more time to the study of the great problem with which the South has to deal, and are watching carefully every new step taken in its so- lution. Mr. Robert C. Ogden of New York yearly invites a large delegation of well-known northern educators to accom- pany him to educational conferences held in the South, for the express purpose of learning more about the education of the freedman and what is being done for him. You ask why we are all so interested in the education of the freedman? Why do we not let him live his happy care-free life in ignorant bliss, dwelling in his log cabin and never learning even to write his name? The reason is this: At the close of the Civil War our nation was confronted with the problem of dealing with ten million freedmen. Of this number five per cent. possessed a small knowledge of reading and writing, a fewwere skilled manual work- men, and all were totally untaught in the art of taking care of themselves. Plainly something must be done! The nation was bound to take upon her- self the task of fitting these men for the freedom she had bestowed upon them. How should this be done? It required a master to solve this mighty problem, and that master was Samuel Chapman Armstrong. From the mo-

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THE ORACLE. 13 favorably,” and dispatched to Hampton Roads to take charge of a large num- ber of contrabands gathered there. It was dismal on that low, marshy land. Seven thousand contrabands were fast becoming pauperized by the daily ra- tions from the government. Samuel Armstrong set to work to better the situation. With his usual great enthusiasm he undertook the work at Hamp- ton Roads. It took him two long years to bring order out of chaos, but at last he succeeded in making the little community orderly and quiet. In the meantime he had not neglected the education of the children, and daily gathered together fifteen hundred of them for instruction. As this small work grew slowly, Armstrong gradually saw the fitness of the place for a permanent and great educational work. He said, “A day-dream of the Hampton School, nearly as it is, had come to me during the war a few times ; once in a camp during the siege of Richmond, and once one beautiful even- ing on the Gulf of Mexico, while on the wheel house of the transport Il- linois.” If he could have looked ahead he would have seen a Hampton that went far beyond those early day dreams. Starting with only two teachers and fifteen pupils, but filled with the determination to do or die, Armstrong laid the foundations of his famous school. For years he struggled along, and many times, when his helpers would have given up in despair, he with unfailing good cheer and boundless faith kept up their spirits and encourag- ed them in their tasks. Everyone knows the outcome of this small beginning. Hampton now has sixty buildings, eighty teachers, and over a thousand pupils. Such men as Edward Everett Hale, Hamilton Wright Mabie, President Eliot, and An- drew Carnegie, are deeply interested in it. John Graham Brooks. says, “There is no institution in the United States, from which schools, colleges, and universities, North and South, for black and for white, can just now learn more than from Hampton Institute.” It seems to me that nothing so well illustrates the spirit of Hampton, that spirit of enthusiasm, of cheerful- ness, and of thoroughness, which lived in the heart of its great founder, as this little story: Cunningham came when a young man in utmost poverty to Hampton. For two years he worked by day learning his trade of black- smith, and for two years worked faithfully in the night school trying to learn to read, to write, and to cipher. At the end of this period it was necessary for him to be told for the fifth time that he could not be promoted. This came hard to Cunningham, for he was burning with desire to uplift his own people. Soon afterward he was called home to care for his mother and sis- ters, left utterly destitute by the death of his father. Some two years later, one of the Hampton teachers visited a tiny settlement, and this is what she saw: The road appeared to have been raked with a garden rake, so clean it