Samuel Chapman Armstrong; a biographical study

Preface

This brief outline of my father's life, work and character is written in the hope that it may be read not only by those who knew him, but by those to whom the name of Samuel Armstrong suggests no personal memories.

The scenes amid which he moved in his early life have already become unreal in the dimness of a historic past; many of the problems with which he struggled are solved ; even in the ten years which have elapsed since his death such a change has come over Negro affairs that their earlier aspects are almost forgotten. To reanimate these bygone conditions and difficulties which he daily confronted, and more than all to show in the midst of many intricate activities the man himself, an embodiment of life and aspiration combating by sheer determination all discouragement and hesitancy — this is my aim.

This aim alone justifies a disregard of his especial request that no biography of himself should be written. He read many biographies. Some of them he liked and received from them help and encouragement, while others impressed him as "pretty good stories" written by "kind friends" to perpetuate agreeable personal memories. He

V vi. Preface

greatly feared that such treatment would be given him when he was no longer able to defend himself; to be canonized was a fate that he really dreaded. Nevertheless, he felt the value of the simple and sincere story of a useful life ; and had he thought that the telling of his own life-story would strengthen a single impulse for good or encourage a single struggler, he would have cordially assented to the telling of it. Remembering his preferences, I have omitted such details of his personal life as satisfy a merely curious interest.

I wish to express my thanks first of all to my husband; to Doctor Talcott Williams, Professor LeBaron R. Briggs, Colonel T. W. Higginson, Mr. Robert C. Ogden, Mr. BHss Perry, General O. O. Howard, Mr. Herbert Welsh, and Reverend H. B. Frissell, for their kind and generous interest in this book, as well as to those who have lent their treasured letters for publication.

Edith Armstrong Talbot.

Contents

Chapter

I Hawaiian Life. 1839-1860 .

II Williams College. 1860-1862

CHAPTER I Hawaiian Life. 1839-1860

The history of a man's childhood is the description of his parents and environment. — Carlyle.

SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG was fortunate in both parentage and environment. He was born January 30, 1839, on the island of Maui, Hawaiian Islands, and brought up amid the soft airs and noble scenery of that beautiful tropical archipelago. Maui contains one of the most striking natural features of the group, the extinct crater of Haleakala, which thrusts its head into the clouds 10,000 feet above the sea-level, and on the grassy slopes of this mountain, overlooking the island and the surrounding sea, was his birthplace and the home of his parents, Richard and Clarissa Armstrong, missionaries to the Hawaiians. Although the family remained in Maui but a year after his birth, he always retained a peculiar fondness for it, returning to it often as a boy for horseback rambles among its forests and gorges. He gloried in its splendid peaks and coasts ; and about Haleakala (the House of the Sun) centered in later life his thoughts of rest and inspiration.

4 Samoel Chapman Armstrong

The Armstrongs were people of the pioneer type, fitted to enter into unbroken fields and prepare them for later f ruitf ulness ; full of strength ; able to endure and to hand down their power of endurance to their children.

The father came of Scotch-Irish parentage, and was reared in central Pennsylvania, in that wholesome farm life from which have sprung so many men of power. Rather delicate in health, he was regarded as predestined for the ministry, and when of the proper age entered Princeton Theological Seminary. While there he became convinced that his work lay in the mission field, and spent his vacations and spare time studying medicine in Philadelphia in order to prepare himself more fully for this work. On applying to the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions for a position in the Hawaiian Islands, he was accepted by them and prepared to assume his new duties at the earliest opportunity. About this time — in March, 1830 — he wrote home:

"Perhaps you may be somewhat surprised at the course I have chosen, and will be ready to ask, 'Why not preach among the destitute at home.'" In answer to this I would say that the choice is not my own; it appears to be marked out for me by Him whom I am bound to serve forever. The American Board wish to send out twenty missionaries in eighteen months. Most likely I shall be one of them. Then farewell, America, and farewell earthly enjoyments."

The farewell to earthly enjoyments, however, was preceded by a happy event which, with the completion of medical and theological courses, marked the last few months of his stay in America. In September he was married to Clarissa Chapman, of Blandford, Massachusetts.

Clarissa Chapman had been reared in the same plain farm life to which he himself was accustomed, and was endowed with a fine physique and many practical aptitudes. She wrote of her own early life:

"In those days women did their own housework, and it was thought disgraceful to be lazy or untidy. Daughters worked with their mothers and sons with their fathers. The spinning of wool and flax and tow, the knitting and weaving by the fire while one read aloud, and the singing of sacred hymns, were the pleasures. I learned to do all kinds of household work, and also often assisted my father, who was crippled by rheumatism, in the care of the cows and sheep — an experience for which in my years of wandering I have often had occasion to be deeply thankful."

But she had parents who saw in their daughter possibilities of something more than routine farm work, and who, in spite of the scoffing of neighbours, sent her away to be educated. When she met Richard Armstrong she had been graduated from the Westfield (Massachusetts) Normal School, partly through her own efforts, partly through the help her parents were able to give her, and was holding a position as teacher in a Pestalozzian Infant

School in Brooklyn, New York, one of the earliest of schools to introduce from Germany the educational ideas whose later developments found expression in the kindergarten.

She was looking f or^vard cheerfully to the uneventful life of a teacher, when Richard Armstrong, vivacious, impassioned, and demonstrative, a true Irishman and her very antithesis, captured her heart and persuaded her that the Divine call to which he had listened was addressed to her also. Neither dreamed that the future held worldly success and influence for them; it was the love of God and a desire for the coming of His kingdom that alone gave them courage as they set sail westward on board the brig Thaddeiis on a dark November day in 1831. Mutiny on board the ship, and, owing to head winds and consequent delay, a lack of provisions, made the voyage a severe tax on the endurance of the young bride and groom; the only pleasant incident recorded by Mrs. Armstrong in her journal of this voyage is the stop for repairs at Rio Janeiro. Of this she wrote :

"How delightful, it was! The green grass, the fresh fruits ! It was indeed paradise ; but the trail of the serpent was there. On an open space I saw a long trail of black men, miserably clad, chained together, while beside them were others with great bags of coffee on their heads, chanting a mournful lay. From that day my sympathies went out to the poor slaves everywhere, but little did I think I should live to rear a son who should lead the freedmen to victory in the great contest which should come in future years."

At last Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong reached the port of Honolulu in safety and began their work of preaching and teaching there.

At the end of a year, in which a daughter was born to them, they were sent on a dangerous mission to the Marquesas Islands, inhabited by cannibals, where they lived a year in friendliest relation to these fierce folk, and succeeded in holding in check their cannibal habits. Here their second child, who lived but a short time, was born. That husband and wife were made of hardy stuff is shown by the fact that Mr. Armstrong, when compelled to return to Honolulu for a short time, left his wife, infant son,* and little daughter in charge of a cannibal chief, who was, as Mrs. Armstrong noted in a letter, "indescribably horrible in appearance," but who guarded them in safety for weeks by lying in front of their tent every night.

Owing to its peculiar difficulties they were unable to make permanent impressions at this post, and foreseeing reversion to cannibal habits, were recalled to Honolulu, only to be sent away in a few days to the island of Maui, a distance of three days' joiimey by water from Honolulu.

Here was a more promising field for labour. Maui was a thickly settled, fertile district, inhabited

*Bom while in the Marquesas Islands, and named by the parents after their ferocious friend, Hapi.

by a gentle, willing people who flocked gladly to listen to their new teacher. Here Richard Armstrong remained for seven years, and here his peculiar administrative powers found full play. Besides the duties of his pastorate, he assumed the medical oversight of his flock of 25,000 natives and the organization and superintendence of schools for 1,700 children. He saw the need of steady industrial occupation for the natives, and it was through him that the first sawmills and sugar plantations on the island of Maui were started. He foresaw the need of diversified crops, and instructed the natives in the first principles of tilling the land, which had been heretofore untouched by them, since their simple desires were satisfied with its natural fruits. His son Samuel writes later of this time :

"[My father] used to tell us of the two churches that he built here, one over each [missionary] station, each to hold 1,500 people. He planned and superintended the whole work without any carpenter. The timbers of the roof were hewn far up on the mountains, brought down on the backs of natives, and placed on walls of broken stone laid in mortar made from coral brought up from the sea by native divers. Once, when a storm destroyed the work of months, the people, led by their chief, went wilHngly to the mountains and began again. Although my father nearly broke down here, yet afterward, when in the service of the Government, he spoke of these as the happiest days of his life, for his own hardships were forgotten in remembering how gladly the people heard and, in their weakness, followed like children."

While the Armstrongs were at Maui a strange incident of history occurred, and one in which they themselves bore no small part. For twenty years the Hawaiian people had been listening patiently to the teachings of Christian missionaries, many becoming converts; but no impression was made on the mass of the people till the years 1838 and 1839, when a series of waves of religious enthusiasm swept the whole nation, as it were, into the Christian fold in a day. Rulers, chiefs, and people resigned their heathen beliefs, asking only to be taught the law of Christ.

During the great revival Richard and Clarissa Armstrong worked with all their might to secure and intensify good results. If any were skeptical of the value of this hothouse Christianity they were not of them, and, like the Church at home, they regarded the conversion of numbers as the proof of missionary success. While the husband and father addressed great meetings, the wife and mother, in spite of the care of her five children and her prospect of again becoming a mother, found time and strength to gather the women about her nightly and exhort them earnestly to a better life, or to address large audiences when occasion demanded. Who shall say that her son was not influenced by that time of spiritual upheaval in the midst of which he was born?

Richard Armstrong's years at Maui had revealed to the American Board of Commissioners for lo Samttel Chapman Armstrong:

Foreign Missions, who stood in loco parentis to the missionaries in the field, his administrative skill, and in 1840 he was moved from Maui to Honolulu and installed in charge of the First Church, attended by a large native congregation.

In order to understand the influences that surrounded Samuel Armstrong's childhood, one must glance at the history of the relation between the plastic, pleasure-loving native and the stem New England teacher, who would have about him equal rights for all and a wholesome theory of sober and righteous living, based, perhaps, rather on New England than on tropical conditions. The period of 1820 to 1840 had been throughout a period of great change for the Hawaiian people. They had gradually embraced Christianity, established courts of justice, granted universal suffrage with slight property qualifications, established a system of schools throughout the islands so that in 1835 the natives who could read and write were numbered by thousands, and passed laws against drinking, gambling. Sabbath-breaking, and social vice which would have done credit to a New England village and which were at times enforced. These changes, which the Anglo-Saxon race has been himdreds of years in making, were consummated in twenty by the aid of the second and third Kamchamehas, whose beneficent rule culminated in the year 1839 in the passage of a bill of rights which established the right of the common people to hold land, a

Hawaiian Life. J839-t860 ii

right heretofore the prerogative of kings and chiefs, and the Hberty to worship how and where they would. These rulers, themselves fairly attentive hearers of the words of the missionaries, were the first to embrace Christianity and to teach it to their people.

But however zealous the chiefs and however zealous the people, the improvement in manners and morals among the natives did not keep pace with the improvement in civil government and forms of worship. The King, followed by chiefs and people, wavered between the good influences that in the main governed their public course and the temptations of their sensual Polynesian natures. In a land where fish, fruit and the taro could be had with little toil, habits of industry were not indispensable to happiness. Like the old-time Negroes, they made their religion their chief business in life ; like them, they delighted in "speaking in meeting," and were born orators; but they found a strict adherence to the Ten Commandments on weekdays rather burdensome. "The heathen saint is about up to your New England sinner," as Armstrong remarked later. Where one-roomed huts, with perhaps a curtain for the guest, were the rule, no high standard of social morality could be expected.

To complicate the problem of dealing justly and effectively with this simple people, drink, vice, and diseases heretofore unknown in Hawaii were being

12 Samoel Chapman Atmstfong:

introduced by the crews of whaling vessels. Moreover, the beauty, fertility and commercial advantages of these islands had from the first attracted scheming men, sometimes working in the name of a foreign government, sometimes independently, but always for the furtherance of their own plans. The governments of Great Britain and France saw the advantage to the United States in the political ascendency of the missionaries and strove to coimteract it at court and among the people, each through its agents attempting by force to gain possession of the islands. Many Americans also, opposed to the aims of the missionaries, and foreseeing in their control possible hindrances to their own plans, allied themselves with the antimissionary party.

It is a curious fact in the history of the Hawaiian Islands that a group of men, originally non-political in their relations to the natives, should have become allied closely with the governing forces. Church and state were never more completely one than in Hawaii under missionary influence. There are many instances in the history of heathen countries of dishonest and ambitious white men who have played on the vices of native rulers to further their own selfish ends, but few, if any, except in Hawaii, of white men of a high type who have accepted responsible positions in the king's gift and worked with and through him for his people. In the Hawaiian Islands the highest political positions,

Hawaiian Life. J 839- 1860 13

such as Minister of Finance and of Public Instruction, were filled by missionaries. It was into a complicated political and social situation that Richard Armstrong found himself transferred by his removal to Honolulu.

He began his work simply as a preacher, but his interests and ability soon drew him (in 1840) into public life, though he never gave up his public preaching, partly in deference to the wishes of the Missionary Board, who did not encourage much devotion to secular affairs, and partly because he wished to retain a direct hold on the natives.*

Samuel's childhood, like the prime of his father's life, was spent in the midst of the clash of political parties, but he grew up all unconscious of it. To him the conversion of the natives and the fatherly kindness and self-sacrifice shown by the missionary teachers appeared dominant, and if he thought of

*At the time of his death the reigning king, Kamehameha, wrote describing his services to the natives as follows'.

" Doctor Armstrong has been spoken of as Minister of Public Instruction and subsequently President of the Board of Education, but we have only partly described the Important offices which he filled. He was a member of the House of Nobles and of the King's Privy Council, Secretary of the Board of Trustees of Oahu College, Trustee of the Queen's Hospital, executive officer of the Bible and Tract Society, and deeply interested in developing the agricultural resources of the kingdom.

"No other government officer or missionary was brought into such close intimacy with the native as a whole. Although his week-day duties were so abundant and onerous, he never spared himself as a minister of the Gospel. He was an eloquent preacher in the Hawaiian language, and was always listened to with deep interest by the people in whose welfare he took so deep an interest. Nearly every Sabbath his voice was to be heard in some one of the pulpits of the land."

their opposers, it was as bad men representing Satan in the world, with whom he need not hold any intercourse. So the missionary children, a colony large enough for play independent of other Caucasian youngsters who might be about, enjoyed themselves in their own little world.

Honolulu in 1840 was a small town with a cluster of mercantile houses and grog-shops, where fifty to a hundred whalers called annually for supplies, and where some commerce in sandalwood was still carried on.

A little way back from the water, toward the mountains, were the mission houses, built of adobe or wood, the houses of the higher chiefs, and the old palace where the Kamehamehas reigned in a sort of opera-bouffe grandeur. The town boasted but two other buildings of importance — a brick schoolhouse for the children of foreign residents, and Richard Armstrong's church, the Kawaiahao, a great coral-built edifice then in process of erection.

The Armstrong home, "Stone House," was one of the pleasantest in Honolulu; set well back in a fine grove and garden, it sheltered comfortably the eight children who grew to manhood and womanhood there.

Samuel Armstrong's brightest recollections of his home centered in his merry, blue-eyed father, who had always a smile and a caress for the clustering young ones— " silent, tranquil, patient, and

THE ENTRANCE TO STONE HOUSE AT HONOLULU loving," as one of the younger children describes him; alert, wiry, always busy, he carried on all his duties with a light heart. All the mission children loved him, and he was the first to gather them into a class for the purpose of learning the Hawaiian language — a step which was regarded with suspicion by many of the mission mothers, who feared lest knowledge of the Hawaiian tongue might bring their boys into too close contact with that easy-going native life which represented to their minds such fearful laxity of morals. But Richard Armstrong was less afraid that the young people would be contaminated by contact with the Hawaiians than that they should fail to imderstand that race with which they were to have to deal in the future, and so in spite of the frowns of the mothers the class went on.

Stone House might have been a rendezvous for the missionary children were it not for a certain awe which Mrs. Armstrong unconsciously inspired as she moved with stately dignity about her work. Her tmsmiling mien constrained them and they went elsewhere for their little games. It was a stem household, where the rod was not spared, and where many instincts, now called natural, were, after the manner of the day, repressed. But in it justice, truth and respect for duty were thoroughly inculcated. Both parents had been trained in other households, where right was put before pleasure, and both had encountered such stress in i6 Samuel Chapman Armsttong:

life that moral strength appeared to them the greatest need of the growing mind.

Mrs. Armstrong's serious manner was the result not only of a certain Puritan habit of repression, but of an intense moral earnestness. Besides the care of her large family, she was deeply interested in work for the native Hawaiians. She conducted sewing and Bible classes, and gathered about her the lowest outcasts of Chinatown, urging the women to leave their lives of sin. Her training in the science of education gave her a peculiar interest in matters pertaining to the home and to women and children, and to them she mainly devoted her energies. "She was a worker," said one who knew her well at this time; "her great characteristic was to do her work truthfully and well and to seize on opportunities."

In such a home-setting one can imagine little Samuel barefooted, clad in faded blue denim, among his crowd of brothers and sisters and playmates, blond and slim, full of his father's fun, with long, shaggy hair tossed back from dancing eyes, rushing in and out of the water after his little boats, to make and sail which was the greatest delight of Honolulu boys, with their facilities of reef-locked harbour and constant trade-wind. As marbles, chess, and cards were not allowed, and as football was imknown, baseball (in which Samuel was never proficient), swimming, sailing and riding were the sports among boys, followed, as the players advanced from the age of blue denim trousers into that of great care for neckties, by choir practice, debating clubs, and horseback rides by night. There were glorious dashes over the moonlit sands, twenty or thirty couples of boys and girls abreast, when the game was to have one extra man, then break the ranks and let all try for a place in the line with one of the girls. There were week-long excursions and upward dashes to the cool mountain-tops, where the cataracts had their birth and whence one could overlook the ocean rising on all sides to the level of the eye like a great blue saucer. "He was a high-spirited youth," says one who knew yoimg Armstrong well in those times, "with an abrupt manner of looking up, shaking his hair from his eyes. He used to say that he would be a politician or a business man — that he would be a philanthropist was the furthest from our thoughts."

His childhood and boyhood are best described in his own words, written in a chapter of reminiscences by him some forty years later, in which the circumstances of that far-away childhood appear more idyllic for the lapse of years.

"For several summers after our arrival in Honolulu we spent some months at Makawao, high up on Haleakala, at Mr. McLane's sugar plantation, where the view of mountain and ocean was magnificent. Here donkey-riding, eating sugar-cane, hanging round the sugar-house, bathing in the deep gulches, and exploring i8 Samuel Chapman Afmstfong

the wild country and tropic forests filled what were the happiest days of our lives. How exciting it was when we were pulled round into Maalea Bay in whaleboats or sailed in the Maria, and Captain Hobson, in default of a white flag, sent one of father's shirts up to the masthead, to announce the arrival of a missionary party. With our belongings we were piled into ox-carts, and after five hours' slow pulling up the sides of Haleakala would at last reach 'Makawao,' to be greeted by the smiling Hawaiian housewife, 'Maile.' In those days the natives brought their kumu (teacher) their accustomed tribute of fruit, vegetables, chickens, etc., thus eking out the small salary of (I believe) $300 for each couple and $50 extra for each child. Those were days of cheerful greetings, youthful rejoicings, and fatherly benedictions, when the people came — in a minimum of costume — from far and near with bananas, sugar-cane, guavas, cocoanuts, and delicious ohia.

"The large crop of small boys that swarmed about the mission had the usual piratical instincts of their kind, and although we were all subjected to the severest Puritanic discipline, we managed to execute occasional raids on the barrel of lump sugar in the mission depository when good Mr. Cooke and Mr. Castle were not looking. The 'Maternal Association' took up the more hopeless cases of those who played checkers or said * By George ! ' The boys were thrown into convulsions when one of our number reported hearing an excited missionary father say *By Jingo!'

"We had one real luxury — that of being barefooted all the year round, wearing shoes on Sunday only, and then under protest. The Sunday morning cleaningup and dressing was looked forward to with dread, as our sympathies were all with the natives, who, in the early days, took off their clothes when it rained, so that a shower as church was closing produced an extraordinary scene. The material of our usual garments was a blue denim of the cheapest kind, which, to allow for the growth of the wearer, was made with two or three tucks in the trousers legs. These being successively let out after many washings, made a series of humiliating bright blue bands about our ankles. I can remember wearing aprons, which I took every opportunity to discard, although I invariably came to grief from so doing, as the rod in those days was laid on freely.

" Molasses-and- water was bliss to us, and gingercake was too good to be true. . . . We went barefoot, we were hungry, and felt the ferule about our hands and shoulders, and had our lunches stolen by the other himgry boys, and had prayer meeting out among the rocks, and learned seven honest verses by heart for Sunday-school, besides the catechism at home. The small boy of to-day tries to be a gentleman, which we never dreamed of; our ambition was, after getting out of sight of home, to throw away our last vestment — ^the checked apron fastened around our necks by fond mothers — and then in native rollicking freedom delight in sea, in salt ponds and wild mountains.

"We went to Mr. Castle's Sunday-school and also to the 'Bethel.' We were required to recite seven Bible verses to Mr. Castle, and to bow as we went out, which later ceremony was particularly obnoxious to us and gave rise to much cutting-up. I was a pupil at the ' Bethel ' of General Marshall and Mr. C. R. Bishop, and from them received my first instruction in 'Let dogs delight to bark and bite,' etc.

"Father's chief work was preaching, and I am sorry to say that, although we always attended the services, the part we took in them was sometimes far from creditable. We usually sat with mother, and were kept quiet by frequent gingerbread, but I remember that once father took two of us into the pulpit and was obliged to interrupt his sermon in order to settle a quarrel between us. But nothing disturbed the equanimity of the natives, not even the dog-fights, which were of frequent occurrence, for they doted on dogs, often bringing them to church in their arms, while the children toddled on behind.

"These dogs were a perpetual trial. I have seen deacons with long sticks probing after the wretched curs as they dodged under the seats, the preacher scolding roundly the while, and not a smile in the congregation.

"But the services were interesting. Sometimes when I stand outside a Negro church I get precisely the effect of a Hawaiian congregation, the same fulness and heartiness and occasional exquisite voices, and am instantly transplanted 10,000 miles away, to the great Kawaiahao church where father used to preach to 2,500 people, who swarmed in on foot and horseback from shore and valley and mountain for many miles around.

"Outside it was like an encampment; inside it was a sea of dusky faces. On one side was the King's pew, with scarlet hangings; the royal family always distinguishing themselves by coming in very late, with the loudest of squeaking shoes. The more the shoes squeaked the better was the wearer pleased, and often a man, after walking noisily in, would sit down and pass his shoes through the window for his wife to wear in, thus doubling the family glory. Non-musical shoes were hardly salable.