In the University (Archive) But Not of It1
The Foundation of the Hampton Institute and the Forgetting of Abolition Democracy
Vineeta Singh
The vocational model for Black higher education developed at the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia (est. 1868) and its offshoot, the Tuskegee Institute (est. 1881), was a key tool in this concerted effort to protect white economic, political, and social supremacy in the U.S. South during the Reconstruction period.2 By placing paternalistic ideas about respectable gender roles and labor at the core of higher education for Black citizens, Hampton’s founders meant to foreclose on the possibilities of the general strike and restore white political and economic supremacy without spectacular violence by directing free Black women and men into domestic service and agricultural labor while tempering ambitions for landownership. The Hampton model advocated racial harmony through continuing racial hierarchy, and through its near monopoly on philanthropic and federal funding, displaced previous models of Black self-determination, and spurred the withdrawal of federal support for incipient Black institutions in the postwar South.
As such, the institution (renamed the Hampton Institute in 1930 and Hampton University in 1984) was a microcosm of the larger struggle over Black education during this period. Historians and other Black studies scholars describe how Black students and educators expanded the meanings of freedom during Reconstruction, especially through teacher preparation and liberal arts training in service of what W. E. B. Du Bois terms “abolition-democracy,” the constellation of democratic habits, practices, and institutions that would protect Black freedom and allow its maximum expression.3 Others emphasize how white conservatives modeled vocational education to reassert a national unity based on what Du Bois called the “counter-revolution of property,” the campaign to curtail the practice of Black freedom by securing a pool of devalued Black labor to underpin white landownership.4 Most historical treatments of Hampton focus their critique of the school on the syllabus and the limitations inherent in the vocationalization of Black higher education.
This essay shifts the focus of the critique of this limited and limiting vision of Black higher education from the syllabus to the archive, examining how the story that the institute’s first president, teachers, and backers crafted for the school was intentionally made to obscure Black agency and elide the destruction of incipient Black institutions that could support an abolition democracy.5 It advocates a reading practice based on reclaiming the individual and collective intellectual and political labors written over by Founding Father narratives and on understanding the illusory bubble of the ivory tower as an integral part of larger racial capitalist frameworks. Although the case study is focused on Hampton, this reading practice is widely applicable for schools and universities recommitting themselves to telling more honest histories of their foundations.
I locate the university’s origin in a clandestine Black school that was brought above ground by refugees during the period of the Civil War Du Bois called the general strike, when the withdrawal of Black labor from the South and its alignment with the Union army decided the Civil War in favor of Union forces.6 This school was part of an incipient autonomous community in the refugee settlement of the Grand Contraband Camp, a staging ground for the Black institutions that could shore up what Du Bois terms “the abolition-democracy,” the “positive” building of material resources and institutions required to complement the “negative” removal of laws and institutions supporting Black bondage.7 Hampton was created on the literal ruins of this institution (and the figurative ruins of abolition democracy), yet from its earliest days it identified its history with the abolitionist promises of the clandestine school and the Contraband Camp. In order to appropriate the romantic gloss of racial uplift and simultaneously renounce abolitionist thought’s threat to white supremacy, the school’s founders strategically forgot three key elements: the colonial and carceral logics underpinning the vocationalization of Black higher education; the radical labor of Mary Peake, the Black abolitionist who founded Hampton’s forerunner; and the decimation of the Grand Contraband Camp, an insurgent space of Black freedom, by the institute’s first president.
In describing what was forgotten and to what end, I offer an alternative intellectual and political genealogy for stakeholders in Hampton and other historically Black colleges and universities. In remembering that Hampton was founded over and against an emancipatory project, I also seek to create a means of connecting the fields of higher education history, particularly the work exemplified by the Universities Studying Slavery consortium, and the emergent approach of abolitionist university studies. The professional and lay historians who have been working under the umbrella of the Universities Studying Slavery consortium have taken on the daunting task of holding colleges and universities accountable for their complicity in chattel slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and ongoing state-sanctioned anti-Black violence. The scholars convening under the sign of abolitionist university studies have taken on the task of “specify[ing] the university’s particular function in the disciplining and management of non-capital surpluses, such as population and living labor” throughout its historical evolution and of creating an “abolition university” that recognizes the limitations of critique as an ends and seeks instead “a relation, a network, and an ethos with various potentials for transforming what and whom the university can be for.”8
Standing at the intersections of these field formations, this work recognizes not only that producing more knowledge cannot substitute the work of reparative and redistributive justice but also that narrowing the range of permissible lies our institutions can tell about their past allows us to see the institutions more clearly and less romantically. By returning the ivory tower to a larger landscape of racial capitalism, identifying alternative genealogies of (Black) higher education, and claiming alternative genealogies for Black study that exceed the modes of knowledge production and world-making valorized by the university’s articulation of education,9 it is also an attempt to respond to Boggs et al.’s invitation to “steal the sheen from the university’s romanticized history and to repurpose its resources, capacities, and function of reproducing sociality with and for other ways of being, other ways of living.”10
On Hampton’s Carceral and Colonial Roots
The Hampton University Archives are extensive.11 Dependent on philanthropic largess for much of its initial capital outlay and for its year-round expenditures, the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute had a strong incentive to record and announce everything that took place on its grounds. Founding principal and consummate fundraiser General Samuel Chapman Armstrong personally wrote regular annual reports and periodic assessments of Hampton’s achievements and encouraged his teaching staff to do the same.
Armstrong is, by his own design, a towering figure in the institution’s self-narrative. Virginia historian Robert F. Engs points out that “the General” (as he insisted being addressed on campus) took care to recruit young women whose fathers or families he knew well, allowing him to assume something close to in loco parentis powers with his young staff.12 He assured that his vision for the school would be uncontested in its foundational period, and this insistence is reflected in the number of school histories that begin with a biographical sketch of this particular founding figure amid many contenders discussed below. I argue that this biography is also a pedagogical trajectory.
Armstrong was born and raised in a white Protestant missionary family in Maui, educated in “practical Christianity” at the Punahou School for the children of U.S. missionaries and at Williams College before joining the U.S. Army, in which he rose to the rank of general, successively commanding two regiments of the United States Colored Troops. Education historian William Watkins warns historians from following the convention of writing Armstrong’s story as that of “a humble military man who became a schoolmarm.” Instead, he argues Armstrong be understood as “a colonial theorist, social engineer, nation builder, and patriot of the highest order.”13 Following Watkins, I examine Armstrong not only as a pedagogue but as an agent of white supremacist, heteronormative imperialism. In this section, I trace the colonial and carceral roots of Armstrong’s “manual training” model of Black higher education and argue that remembering these roots is crucial to reimagining not only Hampton’s history but also the reparative possibilities of alternative relationships between Black study and institutionalized education. Recovering this history of carcerality and coloniality allows historians of education to look past romanticized narratives of higher education as an inherently progressive and equalizing institution and return the university to a larger topography of racial capitalism.
Armstrong’s biographers trace the birth of his educational philosophy to his upbringing in Hawai‘i. His father, Richard Armstrong, arrived in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i as a missionary for the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions in 1832. His time in Hawai‘i coincided with the greatest demographic catastrophe in the history of the islands. White missionaries, traders, and sailors had brought measles, smallpox, influenza, and a variety of other infectious diseases that killed people of all ages across the islands and depressed fertility among survivors. From an estimated four hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand when James Cook first landed in Kauai in 1778, the Kanaka Maoli population fell to forty thousand by the time the islands were annexed by the United States in 1920.14 Witness to this devastation, Richard Armstrong concluded that in order to make something of their Christianity, Kanaka Maoli needed an education in how to survive colonization and adapt to the new political economy it would create. He developed “manual labor training,” an educational program centered on teaching young Hawaiians how to operate small farms in nuclear family units.15 As the kingdom’s first minister of public education, he oversaw the opening of five hundred schools, all of which included some component of “manual training.”16
Students at these schools were trained to act as missionaries not only for the Christian gospel but also for the value of labor as an economic and a moral force. He was working to train “the heart, the head, & the body at once.”17 As the biopolitical grammar of the slogan implies, the pedagogical practice of manual training was primarily based on disciplining bodies and minds rather than conveying specific subject matter. This education was a part of the imposition of a white supremacist heteropatriarchy that disrupted Indigenous kinship networks and attempted to stigmatize and pathologize cultural practices that celebrated nonheteronormative and nonmonogamous social relationships. Kanaka Maoli feminist scholar Lisa Kahaleole Hall describes this disruption as the core of the colonial mission of educators, missionaries, and priests in the Kingdom of Hawai‘i.18
The younger Armstrong would take this philosophy to heart in training Black students for a “complete manhood,” adapting his father’s phrasing into the more alliterative motto of Hampton, to train “the head, the hand, and the heart,” a rhetorical flourish that harkened to the enslaver’s metonymical counting units of “heads” and “hands.”19 Directly drawing on the pedagogy as a technology of colonization, Armstrong modeled his school on a colonial technology to reshape his students’ subjectivities around heteropatriarchal family roles and gendered divisions of labor.
In its early years, Hampton was divided into normal, trade, and agricultural courses, practical courses of study that avoided the higher branches of liberal arts education (e.g., classics, Greek philosophy, literature). All students attended for three years, during which they received the equivalent of a high school education in arithmetic, spelling, reading, English grammar, sentence-making, geography, natural history, and U.S. history.20 Normal students were encouraged to go home for a service year of schoolteaching between their first and second years, and in their last year they were apprentice teachers at Hampton’s primary school, the Butler School.21 Agricultural students spent their last year receiving “lectures” on “formation of soils; rotation of crops; management of stock; fruit culture; cultivation of crops; drainage; market gardening; [and] meteorology.” These so-called lectures “were in truth ‘demonstrations’ in the field rather than class-room or laboratory exercises, for Hampton’s scientific equipment at the time was practically non-existent.”22 The agricultural program seems to have been more of a curricular fiction than an actuality, as George Phenix, acting principal of Hampton, would point out in 1929.23 The first diploma in agriculture was not awarded until 1897, twenty-nine years after the school was incorporated, and only thirty-two were awarded between that time and 1929.24
After 1872, the bulk of students were enrolled in the night school, a four-year program in which students worked six-day weeks, spending forty-nine hours in shop practice, sixteen hours in academic pursuits, and eight hours in activities like gymnastics and military drills.25 It is worth noting that the night school created the full-time employees the school’s farms and shops needed and that most night school students in fact never completed the normal program.26 For male students, shop practice included carpentry, blacksmithing, shoemaking, printmaking, and similar skills training, while for women it consisted of breadmaking, plain cooking, dressmaking, sewing, and household work. The women were also charged with making, mending, and laundering all the school’s sheets, tablecloths, napkins, towels, and uniforms. Starting in 1884, they were also employed as kitchen and dining room staff.27
Studies of Hampton and other schools modeled on it often compare the students’ labor in school farms, school shops, and private homes to the work-study model college students use to defray educational expenses today. Such a comparison accepts the inevitability and desirability of students giving over a portion of their working week to pursuits often unrelated to their career goals.28 Rather than using similarities in student labor to characterize Hampton as ahead of its time, we might think of how work-study might be behind our time. Hampton students’ labors on the farms and in the trade shops were ostensibly to help them pay their way through school, but even those who could afford to pay all their expenses were “advised to undertake this plan of combined work and study, because of the moral effect of work which was done regularly and under careful supervision.”29 In fact, this pedagogical model has its roots in colonial and carceral logics more concerned with isolating and incapacitating malcontents than with funding education. It was more analogous to a reform school than to an antebellum college.
In fact, Hampton was behind its own time in the emphasis on student labor. In the years before the war, several manual training schools for Black students had opened up across the country. The founders of these institutions had hoped to use the school farm or the trade shop to defray the cost of operating their schools. But they found it impossible to make these enterprises profitable.30 Predominantly white institutions like Amherst, Andover, Oneida, Oberlin, and Wesleyan had also experimented with school farms and shops before the war. They had hoped to give students hands-on experience and an opportunity to finance their education. Black and white schools all found the hours required for farmwork were a severe impediment to classes, and the profit margins on goods crafted by students were negligible or negative as they could not compete with professionally manufactured goods on the market.31 The white schools quietly closed their farms and shops. The Black manual training schools either closed or abandoned their manual training components to focus on providing liberal arts educations.32 But these failed experiments did not faze Armstrong, whose commitment to agricultural and industrial education was based on disciplinary power, not monetary benefit. Armstrong did not see raising money as the primary purpose of this manual labor; rather, it was meant to teach the habits of “work which was done regularly and under careful supervision.”
The values of labor and deference to white authority were the students’ primary lesson. A student could be taken out of lessons to attend to the farm or to fill large orders for the shop but could give no reason to leave morning military drills or Sunday church service, for instance.33 Education historian James D. Anderson compellingly describes Hampton’s pedagogical design as “the logical extension of an ideology that rejected Black political power while recognizing that the South’s agricultural economy rested on the backs of Black agricultural workers.”34 Watkins characterizes Hampton’s curriculum as “the model for the ideological training for the Black South,” wedding racial uplift with “a politics of gradualism and moderation” and creating a Black comprador class for the industrial economy.”35
The analogy of a “Black comprador class” is based on Samuel’s frequent reference to the parallels between his father’s Kanaka Maoli charges and his own Black students, particularly with regard to the franchise. Writing for the Southern Workman in 1888, Armstrong spoke of his father’s education program as “the bold, skillful management of a great majority of weak voters.” The Kanaka commoners, he argued, “were made citizens before they were truly civilized. They were given the right to vote before they were able to use the ballot safely.”36 He cautioned that the Black franchise had similarly “enable[d] some of the worst men who have ever figured in American politics to hold high places of honor and trust.”37 His school, however, could prevent such disasters, as “United States troops are not needed to guard [the Southern Black’s] approach to the ballot box, but there is greatly needed a thorough system of agricultural schools, costing much less than armed men in the South that shall spread the right ideas about farming among the Southern Blacks.”38 These “right ideas” were based on the wage relation. He meant to create cordial plowmen, hotel waiters, and teachers, not a replacement for the landowning aristocracy.39
The Black working and petit bourgeois classes Armstrong imagined would be invested in maintaining racial capitalism as well as settler colonialism. The Black student at Hampton was not just in a colonial relation with the Southern white aristocracy but also being inducted into a wider colonial network, simultaneously being dispossessed and being interpellated as an enduring part of the mechanism of dispossessing Indigenous nations. Hampton’s settling mission would reach full expression with its Indian Program, a course of study Armstrong developed in collaboration with Captain Richard Henry Pratt for Pratt’s Kiowa, Southern Cheyenne, and Arapaho prisoners of war from the Red River War (1874–1875).40 Initially each Native inmate was paired with a Black student to be his roommate, English tutor, and minder. Black roommates were tasked with writing daily reports on Native inmates’ hygiene, grooming, and their care of their room and building.41 Seeing Black men and women interact, Armstrong believed, would teach Indian men the proper manners in dealing with Native women, all while avoiding Indian hostility toward white teachers, and hopefully ultimately eliminating such hostility through the power of example.42
The Native inmates faced more blatant and visible carcerality than the Black students had. Native students had a military escort every time they left campus. If they found a way off school grounds without a military escort, the sheriff would capture and return them. They were refused railway tickets without specific permission from Armstrong. Staff would open their mail or compel them to open it only in the presence of a teacher. Expulsion, which had been the ultimate punishment for Black students, would have been a reprieve for Native inmates, so Armstrong designed new punishments for his Native charges, including solitary confinement in a “guard house,” and arranged with Indian Commissioner Hiram Price to deny food to any Hampton returnee who did not apply their Hampton training.43
Black and Native students’ differential vulnerabilities to different kinds of violence speaks to how they were differentially positioned with regard to the nexus of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. Teachers, legislators, and military leaders were negotiating the extent to which members of either group could be assimilated into the new economic order of the U.S. South. Yet both groups were governed by related logics of coloniality and carcerality through U.S. higher education, a technology meant to reproduce the social relations required by this nexus. Both groups of students were receiving an education that had less in common with Armstrong’s own training at Williams College than it did with the ideological correction of incarcerated children held in reform schools.
Started in various Northern U.S. cities in the 1820s, reform schools gathered children who were found to be engaging in criminalized activities, exhibiting physical or intellectual disabilities, or generally lacking appropriate adult supervision and effectively incarcerated them.44 The children held at these schools were sorted by gender and boys learned farming, carpentry, or trade skills while girls were taught cooking, sewing, washing, and general housekeeping, with a few hours of learning, usually Bible study, scheduled during the week. The schools aimed to place graduates with jobs in rural settings—boys as farmworkers and women as domestic servants in rural families—“far removed from their original, corrupting homes and communities.”45 The reform school was in fact a spatial fix in response to the social pressures of increasing immigration and industrialization and intended to reorganize people in space.46 As nonwhite or destitute white families were found to be defective in producing normative laboring subjects, the reform school presented an alternative site of socialization for poor children.
The reform school was built on the recognition of the legal doctrine of parens patriae in Ex Parte Crouse (1838), which allowed government organs to incarcerate children who had not broken any laws on the grounds that their families could not give them a proper upbringing. Literally translating to “parent of the nation,” this legal doctrine recognized the state as the ultimate legal guardian of all its subjects, whose right to ensure a ward’s welfare superseded any parental or familial rights. Historians frequently cite in loco parentis, a school’s ability to act as a student’s parental authority, to explain the lengths to which Armstrong and other principals and presidents took their authority over their Black students, but given the school’s emphasis on pairing industrial education with assimilating into proper gendered divisions of productive and domestic labor, parens patriae is a more apt framework for understanding how Armstrong understood and enacted his relationship with his charges. Armstrong wrote as much: “That training of hand, head and heart which is alone true education, comes largely to the more advanced races through the influences of their homes; but . . . black [people] in the South must get it at school or not at all.”47 Engs recalls that once the institute’s elementary school was operational, Armstrong would ride through the countryside and, if he came across a Black child working or playing away from adult supervision, would put the child on his horse and take him back to enroll him in the school. The school, like reform schools or child protective services agencies today, was exercising a right to intervene in the face of purportedly inadequate parenting to save Black youth from their families and communities. In doing so, it reiterated the violability of Black domestic life founded in the natal alienation of chattel slavery. It embedded carcerality in the very heart of Black (higher) education.
As with reform schools, one of Armstrong’s primary goals was to remove wards from the corrupting influence of the city and preserve the stationary, docile laboring bodies required to guarantee the long-term viability of the sharecropping model for Southern agricultural production.48 Armstrong assured his funders that a rural environment was key in helping the Black citizen be free from deviancy and to instill a sense of Black home in the South.49 Further, like the reformatories, and like convict-leasing arrangements in the South, Hampton was able to “lease” students to outside employers. Starting in 1878, Armstrong, inspired by the practice of “letting” slaves, arranged for individual students to spend summers on “outings” working for wealthy New England families. The students’ absence from school reduced summer costs and, as most of their salary was forwarded to the school, their labor defrayed the school’s annual expenditures.50 Their identity as students was inseparable from their identity as labor power and is a stark reminder of how the mode of study embraced by vocational higher education and its backers was founded through a carceral logic designed to contain Black spatial and social mobility.
Remembering the colonial and carceral logics that form the core of the original push for vocational education reminds us that the Black student’s relation to their institution is a far cry from the romanticized narrative of education being a social equalizer. The Southern Black learner’s interests were in line with creating the constellation of institutions that would safeguard Black freedoms, including the ability to develop modes of study not wedded to racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy. Hampton’s founders and backers weaponized vocational higher education to dismantle these possibilities. The next two sections take up why these carceral logics were needed and, in doing so, recover alternative genealogies for Black study at Hampton.
On Misremembering Mary Peake
After Armstrong’s own writings (reports, school and personal correspondence, and columns for the school newspaper Southern Workman), the most frequently cited literature on the early years of the school come from the accounts of his handpicked teachers. Together, these primary sources form the foundation of the institution’s self-narration. The 1893 report compiled by long-serving teacher Helen W. Ludlow and the unpublished manuscript “Indian Days at Hampton” by Indian Program teacher Cora M. Fulsom, for instance, are mainstays in nearly all secondary literature on the early years of Hampton.51 These teachers’ perspectives—both as fundraisers hoping to appeal to wealthy white donors and as white women from genteel New England families personally invested in making normatively gendered, docile Black subjects—shape the archive’s narrative about the early work done at Hampton and students’ acceptance of it. In this section, I trace the legacy of these desires in the enduring narrative of Hampton’s origins.
The origins of the school carry great symbolic value for fundraising writing and are frequently retold in the institutional archive. For at least the first thirty years of the school’s operation, these publicity documents began Hampton’s story in 1861 with a school for Civil War refugees created by an “ex-slave,” Mary S. Peake. Armstrong’s introduction to Ludlow’s Twenty-Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia, for instance, notes that when he first came to Hampton, he found that the American Missionary Association (AMA), an abolitionist organization founded by former members of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Home Mission Society, had opened at Hampton “the first school for freedmen in the South, in charge of an ex-slave, Mrs. Mary Peake.”52 This framing makes clear that the AMA missionaries were the intellectual architects of the school—and of Black education more broadly—even though the actual operation of the school was entrusted to an “ex-slave.” This simple narrative of white benevolence uplifting a freedwoman while empowering her to help others of her experience would have been pleasing to potential funders in New England where Armstrong had attended college and made friends who went on to hold high political and judicial offices. Yet 288 pages later in the same document, Ludlow notes: “The daughter of Mrs. Mary Peake whose noble work is noticed on page four calls our attention to the fact that her mother was not an ex-slave as there described. Her husband was given his freedom at the age of twenty-one. Mrs. Peake was herself always a free woman.”53 Armstrong’s account was rhetorically enslaving a woman who had been born free, in order to profit off the fiction of her enslavement. Strategically misremembering her life in the school’s autobiography had a literal and immediate profit motive.
Despite Peake’s daughter’s efforts, multiple archival sources with a publication date later than Ludlow’s 1893 work refer to Peake as a freed woman. The correction did eventually enter the institutional history. Hampton University’s current website, for instance, reads: “In order to provide the masses of refugees some kind of education, Mary Peake, a free Negro, was asked to teach, even though an 1831 Virginia law forbid the education of slaves, free blacks and mulattos. She held her first class, which consisted of about twenty students, on September 17, 1861 under a simple oak tree.”54 This sentence does not specify who asked Peake to teach, but since the immediately preceding paragraph is a description of brigadier general Benjamin Butler’s role in establishing the Grand Contraband Camp, readers likely infer that the request came from Butler or his personnel at Fort Monroe.55 This retelling displaces the AMA with Butler and the Union army as Hampton’s intellectual founders and keeps Peake in the role of its first teacher. In its century of retelling, this history’s white savior heroes have changed, but Peake’s role has remained constant as the subordinate of white beneficiaries.
Neither Armstrong nor any of his staff personally met Mary Peake or encountered the school while she was alive. But outside the Hampton archive, there is at least one extant record of Mary Peake’s life and work written by someone who knew her in life, a sixty-four-page tract by Lewis C. Lockwood titled Mary S. Peake: The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe. Lockwood was the first AMA missionary sent to Norfolk, where he selected Peake’s school as the site for the AMA’s first wartime investment in Southern education.56 His short narrative piece traces Peake’s life from birth to death, with a focus on the Christian motivations and impact of her work.
Lockwood recounts that when Peake returned from ten years of (legal) schooling in Arlington to live with her mother in Norfolk, Virginia, she discreetly arranged to teach her stepfather and other neighborhood men to read and write in the family home.57 By 1845, Peake was running a clandestine school for Black students of all ages at the family home. In 1850, she moved to her new husband’s house in Hampton, where she again started teaching any Black student she could recruit, particularly enslaved children. In defiance of an 1849 state law clearly specifying that “every assemblage of negroes for the purpose of instruction in reading or writing, or in the night time for any purpose, shall be an unlawful assembly,” Peake ran this free school through Virginia’s secession in April 1861, through the burning of Hampton by deserting white rebels, and through the arrival of Union reinforcements at Fort Monroe in August of the same year.58
Evidently a community leader, Peake also founded a “benevolent society, called the ‘Daughters of Zion,’ designed for ministration to the poor and the sick,” which continued after her death in 1862.59 When Lockwood arrived in Hampton in September 1861, Peake was teaching forty to fifty pupils while also working as a seamstress. Lockwood secured her a $1.50/week salary from the AMA. By January of the next year, she was teaching fifty-three children during the day (spelling, writing, elementary arithmetic, and the Lord’s Prayer) and twenty adults at night in her home.60 Since at least October of 1861, she struggled with tuberculosis but continued teaching, her students gathering around her bed when she was too ill to stand.61
Mary Peake’s actual life militated against the narrative of humble origins Hampton’s founders and early supporters desired. Her mobility, access to formal education, her leadership, mutual aid work, and her sustained commitment to contravening unjust laws were not in keeping with the respectability the New England teachers required of a humble founding mother. Peake’s work was radical abolitionist praxis. At a time when Virginia law criminalized enslaved people’s mobility as “akin to the possession of arms,” Peake sought out and educated Black children.62 She taught at least three Black men who would occupy prominent leadership positions and political offices during Reconstruction: Thompson Walker, William Thornton, and William Davis.63 Peake’s work contributed to Black individual and collective self-determination, modeling how Black schools would function both as a site of self-determination and a model that taught students how to pursue self-determination in other institutions under the framework of abolition democracy. Despite hegemonic common sense that cast schoolteachers as caretakers in idyllic environs, the work of teaching Black students has always had great risks associated with it, and Lockwood’s evocative image of Peake’s school operating through the dangers of war is perhaps the most blatant reminder of this. Not only intellectual labor but also radical reproductive labor, the work of teaching Black children and adults, the practice of Black study, was the practice of freedom. Recognizing the specifically political valence of her work situates her as an important role model for young Black women attending the school today, and for all students training to teach.
The willful forgetting of Mary S. Peake as the political and intellectual architect of an institution dedicated to Black self-determination has deprived Hampton students of a potentially radical genealogy and has participated in a larger domesticating of Black women’s intellectual and political labor through a limiting understanding of schoolteaching as apolitical work, an ongoing discourse that continues to devalue such labors.
The misremembering of Mary Peake’s work also has a corollary in the national imaginary. It has been commonplace to imagine young white women from the North as the typical teachers of Black students during Reconstruction—at least since Du Bois’s striking description of “the crusade of the Yankee schoolmarm.”64 But historian Ronald E. Butchart’s extensive archival research with the Freedmen’s Teacher Project shows that over a third of schoolteachers in the South during this time period were Black. Further, one in every six Northerners who moved South to teach was Black. Between 1861 and 1876, there were four Black teachers in Southern schools for every white Northerner.65
These numbers are particularly astounding given the legal and extralegal obstacles to Black literacy in the decades leading up to the war. I mention them to emphasize how common sense about benevolent white schoolteachers has occluded histories of Black autonomy and leadership. Even if white schoolteachers were themselves sympathetic to the work of Black teachers and learners and supportive of Black-led institutions, the historical misremembering of these teachers as the heroes of Reconstruction decenters the intellectual and political labors of Black people in the South. This misremembering is a part of the national forgetting of how abolition democracy might have been immanent in this historical moment and how it was systematically dismantled.
Peake’s dedication to her school, even in the face of violent intimidation, the dangers of war, and personal illness, exemplifies the value of education to antebellum abolitionist praxis. While there is little documentation of the specific work Peake did in her schoolhouse, archival materials allow us to situate her educational project in the larger rival geography of the Grand Contraband Camp, the Black settlement formed on the Norfolk Peninsula during the war years. In the following section, I elucidate Hampton’s connection to this incipient Black community and propose that remembering the institutions that preceded Hampton and understanding Hampton as a response to the putative threats of the Contraband Camp gives today’s students a longer genealogy of Black abolitionist institution building.
On Forgetting the Grand Contraband Camp
The Grand Contraband Camp came together under the shadow of Fort Monroe, a Union fortress about three miles from Mary Peake’s school, which remained under Union control even after Virginia seceded from the Union.66 When three Black refugees arrived at the fort in 1861, commanding officer brigadier general Benjamin Butler refused to negotiate their “return” with a Confederate officer representing their enslaver. A lawyer by training, Butler reasoned that the refugees could not be subject to the Fugitive Slave Act as their purported enslavers had forsaken U.S. citizenship. Butler thus became the founding proponent of the doctrine that Black refugees were “contraband of war.” Reasoning that “the freedmen would never be suffered to return into bondage,” Butler also saw no need to convey the refugees further north, but he encouraged them to seek employment with Union forces and to work the properties abandoned by rebels deserting to Confederate strongholds.67 Word spread that refugees would be given shelter and work at Monroe, and a Black settlement quickly formed around the fort. From a prewar total of ten thousand, the peninsula’s Black population grew to forty thousand in 1865.68 Refugees built cottages, revived farms that fleeing white planters had burned, started dairy farms, set up an economy based on fishing and oystering, and, even before Congress sanctioned their formal recruitment, collaborated with the Union army in large numbers as part of the general strike.69 Butler and later the Freedmen’s Bureau’s superintendent captain C. B. Wilder shared the refugees’ belief that their homesteads would in time receive legal sanctions similar to those enjoyed by white homesteaders settling Native lands in the West.70
The camp’s incipient Black self-determination had to contend with challenges ranging from harsh winters that decimated food sources to massive overcrowding and the literal encroachments of white supremacy through “slavecatching” raids (including by Union soldiers seeking bounties).71 It was also a site where the Union army and the AMA began the process of inducting newly freed people into normative gender roles and family configurations, a contact zone that prefigured the Reconstruction-era conflicts between Black and white designs for Black citizenship.
Priya Kandaswamy argues that heteronormativity, an emphatic promotion of marriage, “proper” gender roles, and “good” housekeeping, “offered a vehicle for simultaneously constructing freedpeople as in need of cultural reform . . . restructuring household economies, and rationalizing state austerity to them.”72 The federal government encouraged nuclear families by promoting the family farm as the basic economic unit of such refugee camps and the ideal economic unit for the postwar order.73 The first summer at the Contraband Camp, the fighting made harvesting crops dangerous, so the fortress employed all able-bodied adults on the camp, paying them wages that were initially withheld to pay for clothes and rations for those who could not work but were eventually paid in cash, at the rate of four dollars a month for women and eight dollars a month for men.74 This system was, as Engs notes, “hardly distinguishable” from slavery and in fact treated all Black subjects, whether refugees or residents, free or contraband, the same.75
Yet, as this relatively autonomous Black community grew, it incorporated at least four schools. By 1861, William Davis (Peake’s former student), Lucinda Spivery, and Emma J. Williams had all begun teaching in schools that they kept open throughout the war and its aftermath.76 With the tacit support of Fort Monroe’s might and later the explicit support of the Freedmen’s Bureau and the AMA, which worked together to provide additional buildings, teachers, and money, these schools flourished during and after the war.
The larger experiment with abolition democracy, however, came to an unexpectedly abrupt end in 1865, when President Johnson issued Circular Order 15 to the Freedmen’s Bureau, decreeing that Black refugees would be moved from their wartime settlements and returned to their prewar “homes” so that rebel property could be restored to its rightful owners. Wilder found it hard to believe that the order would be enforced and stalled its implementation in anticipation of a retraction.77 He felt no authority to forcibly send the refugees where former enslavers would certainly terrorize them as retribution for their participation in the general strike. Wilder was court-martialed on charges of “illegally retaining and selling restored Rebel property.” Although he was exonerated, he was also reassigned away from Hampton.78 Leadership of the region was eventually turned over to Samuel Chapman Armstrong, newly appointed to the Freedmen’s Bureau in March 1866.79
Armstrong was now tasked with removing the “excess” Black population of the region to “re-establish” the economy.80 Unlike the New England abolitionist Wilder, Armstrong felt no qualms in dismantling the camp’s Black community. Over the course of his military service, Armstrong had come around to the abolitionist cause, calling it “the greatest struggle of modern times for the most sacred principles.”81 This embrace of sacred principles, however, did not extend to the full humanity of Black people. Like the positions of Wilder, Butler, and even Abraham Lincoln, Armstrong’s abolitionism was part of an uneasy and uneven coalition that supported a shared goal of Emancipation without a recognition of the full humanity of enslaved Black people. Armstrong’s view of Black refugees was clearly informed by his Puritan missionary upbringing in Hawai‘i. Similar to his parents’ vision of the Indigenous Kanaka Maoli as prone to indolence and sensual excess, Armstrong saw his Black wards in a morally precarious situation. He felt government rations were causing “idleness and dependence” that would in time “destroy self-respect,” “teaching these people a terrible lesson; namely, confirmed pauperism.”82 Therefore, he withheld rations for nearly all residents and disallowed family reunions, ostensibly to teach refugees the importance of “a visible means of support and fidelity to contracts” (i.e., the wage relation) as the defining characteristics of free men—a lesson that, as the previous discussion of Hampton’s syllabus shows, would carry through to Armstrong’s vision for postwar Black citizenship. The Contraband Camp was an experiment in Black citizenship where Black refugees were assaying self-determining institutions like Peake’s school, while white administrators like Armstrong tested their theories of where Black people would belong in the national order after slavery.
Engs recounts that Armstrong toyed with alternative plans to resettle the refugees, including in Black reservations in Florida or Texas or through work gangs “renting out” groups of Black men to go north for annual seasonal work. These plans were never implemented, but they show Armstrong’s willingness to explore all options in settling the question of where Black citizens belonged in the newly united nation. Armstrong tested these ideas even though he knew, from firsthand experience (having presided over courts-martial and executions for Black soldiers who had deserted their posts during their mission to Texas, fearing that they would never be allowed to return to their families in the South), that the threat of landless “removal” was the last thing Black citizens would choose for themselves.83
I propose these plans be understood as first drafts of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. Understanding Hampton as the evolution of these plans makes it clear that the school was, in geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s terms, a spatial fix for a social crisis—a colonial and carceral space of subjection, incarceration, and an education in surviving white supremacy.84 Hampton’s early syllabus was based on replacing any promise of economic transformation implied by Emancipation with a sacralization of the wage relation. The memory of institutions of Black self-determination that could support an abolition democracy were a threat to this pedagogy. Thus, the camp had to fall out of Armstrong’s narration of Hampton’s founding.
As Peake has been strategically misremembered in Hampton’s self-narration, so the Grand Contraband Camp and similar insurgent Black spaces have been overshadowed in the history of Black citizenship by the work of the Freedman’s Bureau and the American Missionary Association. As historian Abigail Cooper writes, the historiography of the Grand Contraband Camp and similar spaces have focused their analysis on how these spaces created or reflected relationships between refugees and the federal government and its organs.85 After mapping 223 such refugee camps across the United and Confederate States, Cooper estimates “approximately 800,000 Black southerners inhabited or passed through Civil War refugee camps.”86 Yet these camps were also insurgent spaces of Black freedom and might (without President Johnson’s directive and with the Freedman’s Bureau’s cooperation) have become the seeds of the institutions that could secure an abolition democracy. As Southern schools confront the racist histories of the Lost Cause monuments and markers that dot their landscape, histories of such spaces offer alternative Civil War heroes for these schools and their communities to commemorate.
Remembering Otherwise
I have argued here that Hampton’s rise to prominence among the white architects of Black education depended upon the strategic forgetting of the carceral and colonial logics underpinning the Hampton curriculum, of the radical abolitionist practice of Black teaching as part of a larger abolition democracy, and of the insurgent space of the Grand Contraband Camp dismantled by Armstrong and his cohort. Yet, the legacies of those other practices have not been extinguished, even in the archive, and certainly not in the practice of Black students.
Despite its success in gathering philanthropic and federal funding, Hampton’s early years were years of attrition. Anderson reports that only 20 percent of students enrolled finished their course of study.87 Many who stayed protested the false promises and unfair treatment. Student complaints from the early years of Hampton center on two basic grievances: first, that their supposedly normal and agricultural education was, in fact, a training to be generalized handymen, not skilled laborers, and much less independent craftsmen. Relatedly, their second complaint was that they were being trained to be servants rather than leaders. William W. Adams came to Hampton to learn the printing trade but found that he was “not learning anything” but rather “going over what [he] had learned in primary school.” John H. Boothe, studying to become a shoemaker, complained that he had not received “any instructions on cutting out and fitting shoes.” J. A. Colbert, who enrolled to learn carpentry, complained he worked “all day for six days each week” but had not been taught “the use of timber.”88
While many students came to learn specific skills with the goal of becoming artisans, their actual education was structured around embracing the wage relation as the sign of Emancipation. The women and men who joined to become certified as teachers would presumably have had similar complaints. They were being taught enough to pass the teachers’ certification exams, although teaching posts were often sold for cash, awarded for political services, or “bestowed for even more objectionable ends,” so the utility of their credentials had to remain uncertain.89
Early students’ dissatisfaction with trade training culminated in an 1887 petition to the faculty. Perry Shields recounted that even though students in the trade program signed the document, the faculty ignored the petition entirely.90 Exercising the right to petition and to create change through democratic channels were well outside the parameters of Black citizenship, as these white architects of not only Black education but Black citizenship saw it. A similar illustration occurred the one time a Black student, Thomas Hebron, was confined in the guardhouse designed for Indian students. A number of Black students protested outside the guardhouse and attempted to release Hebron. Their efforts were unsuccessful, and eleven Black students faced court-martial-style disciplinary proceedings. Five of them left the school rather than face their charges.91 The students who repeatedly organized to push for these changes rejected the carcerality at the core of their curriculum and demanded they be treated as rights-bearing individuals, the way any student at a normal school or liberal arts college for whites would have been.
The docile minds and bodies Armstrong had hoped to produce were not reliable missionaries for the industrial training system. Hampton graduates were schoolteachers for the new public schools for Black students in the South. Although an inherently limited and limiting project under Jim Crow laws, the work done in these schoolhouses exceeds a simple narrative of containment. These teachers were the contradictions of racial capitalism: the imposition of hegemonic thought and the seeds of its antithesis. They prepared the “black studies mind,” Darlene Clark Hine’s term for the “historically sedimented and diverse practices and modes of thought” that have characterized the long Black intellectual tradition and informed the history of Black studies as a field.92 Hampton graduates like Septima Clarke and Clara Byrd Baker, who would insist on the concatenation of education and representation, also went on to become precisely the supposedly dangerous political leaders Armstrong warned against. Indeed, their understanding of the utility of studying had more in common with Mary Peake’s visions than Armstrong’s. Tracing this trajectory of Black study from Mary Peake and the schools of the Grand Contraband Camp through the student complaints and protests of Hampton’s early years, and through the work of the teachers credentialed at Hampton, offers a genealogy of Black study that is “in the university [archive] but not of it.”
Remembering the people, places, and ideas strategically forgotten or misremembered by university archives allows historians and students of higher education to move away from teleological progress narratives and toward contingency, multiplicity, and relationality as the primary characteristics of institutional history. U.S. colleges and universities confronting their troubled racial histories today must retrieve the intellectual and political labors occluded by institutional histories written as the exploits of Founding Fathers (or mothers) and return these otherwise exceptionalized ivory towers to the real world by understanding them as articulating nodes in a larger topography of racial capitalism. Rather than simply being a matter of archival and historical recovery that makes the institutional archive more inclusive, these retellings can in fact embed antiracist and feminist reading practices into the institution’s self-narration, foregrounding their contested natures and opening them to future possibilities.
Author Profile
Vineeta Singh is an assistant teaching professor in the Interdisciplinary Studies Program at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her research and teaching bring together the history and sociology of higher education through the lenses of Black studies and critical university studies.
Notes
The phrase “In the university (archive) but not of it,” and the uneasy belonging/claiming it indexes, has been generative for many critical universities studies scholars. Although I cannot cite a clear origin for it, my earliest encounter with the term came through Roderick A. Ferguson’s dedication for The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).
William H. Watkins terms the white government officials, philanthropists, reformers, and pedagogues who created, funded, and shaped Black higher education in the long twentieth century the “white architects of Black education.” Watkins, The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and Power in America, 1865–1954 (New York: Teachers College Press, 2001), 5–7.
See Watkins, White Architects of Black Education; James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Hilary J. Moss, Schooling Citizens: The Struggle for African-American Education in Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010).
See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction: An Essay toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935); Leon F. Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981); Edward Royce, The Origins of Southern Sharecropping (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 184–86. While Du Bois’s conception of abolition democracy was specifically focused on the Reconstruction period, theorists and organizers have revised and revitalized the term on several occasions, perhaps most impactfully in Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). Andrew Dilts provides a historiographic overview of the term’s evolving utility in “Crisis, Critique, and Abolition,” in A Time for Critique, ed. Didier Fassin and Bernard E. Harcourt (New York: Columbian University Press, 2019).
My understanding of the term abolition democracy is indebted to Abigail Boggs, Eli Meyerhoff, Nick Mitchell, and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein’s “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation” and their citations of Robert Fanuzzi and Allegra M. McLeod. Boggs et al., “Abolitionist University Studies: An Invitation,” Abolition University, https://abolition.university/invitation/, 3; Robert Fanuzzi, “Abolition,” in Keywords for American Cultural Studies, ed. Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler (New York: New York University Press, 2007), 7–9; Allegra M. McLeod, “Envisioning Abolition Democracy,” Harvard Law Review 132, no. 6 (2019): 1,613–49.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 55–83.
Du Bois, 184–86; Davis, Abolition Democracy, 96–97.
Boggs et al., “Abolitionist University Studies,” 8, 28.
Here I am guided by Eli Meyerhoff’s articulation of the difference between “education” as one among many modes of study and one that is dedicated to “modes of world-making that are associated with modernist, colonial, capitalist, statist, white-supremacist, heteropatriarchal norms.” Meyerhoff, Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019).
Boggs et al., “Abolitionist University Studies,” 4.
The website of the University Archives notes, “Among the archive’s holdings are more than 8 million documentary items and over 50,000 photographs and glass negatives.” “University Archives,” Hampton University Museum, http://museum.hamptonu.edu/university_archives.cfm.
Robert F. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839–1893 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 88–89.
Watkins, White Architects of Black Education, 4.
Walter L. Hixson, American Settler Colonialism: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 147–48. Nearly a third of the Native Hawaiian population was lost between 1836 and 1853.
American missionaries like Armstrong were deeply involved with U.S. land reforms in Hawai’i. In 1848, the first Hawaiian land reform, the Mahele, opened the path for white landownership and concentrated ownership in the hands of a few owners. John J. Hulten, “Land Reform in Hawaii,” Land Economics 42, no. 2 (1966): 235–40.
Henry Pitt Warren, “General Samuel Chapman Armstrong: Founder’s Day Address,” 1913, reprinted from Southern Workman, Hampton University Archives (HUA).
Richard Armstrong to Reuben A. Chapman, September 8, 1848, Richard Armstrong Papers, Library of Congress, cited in Donal F. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 2.
Lisa Kahaleole Hall, “Navigating Our Own ‘Sea of Islands’: Remapping a Theoretical Space for Hawaiian Women and Indigenous Feminism,” Wicazo Sa Review 24, no. 2 (2009): 15–38.
William Anthony Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education 1868–93,” unpublished manuscript, n.d., chap. 10, 23, HUA. See, for instance, Helen W. Ludlow, ed., Twenty-Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia (Hampton: Hampton Normal School Press, 1893), 4, HUA.
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 4.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 102.
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 4–5.
In 1930, the school would drop “Normal and Agricultural” from its title.
George Phenix cited in Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 27.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 103.
Robert Francis Engs, Freedom’s First Generation: Black Hampton, Virginia, 1861–1890 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 149.
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 34–39.
See Jennie H. Woo and Susan P. Choy, Merit Aid for Undergraduates: Trends from 1995–96 to 2007–08 (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of Education, 2011); Mark Kantrowitz, “The Distribution of Grants and Scholarships by Race,” cited in Doug Lederman, “Grant Recipients and Race,” Inside Higher Ed, September 6, 2011; Judith Scott-Clayton and Jing Li, Black-White Disparity in Student Loan Debt More Than Triples after Graduation (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 2016).
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 45.
Clyde W. Hall, Black Vocational Technical and Industrial Arts Education: Development and History (Chicago: American Technical Society, 1973), 7–14.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 79.
Avery College closed its doors after twenty-three years of operation; the Philadelphia Institute for Colored Youth became the Cheyney Training School for Teachers (now Cheyney University); Wilberforce University shifted its focus to the liberal arts; and Union Literary Institute became a high school. Hall, Black Vocational Technical and Industrial Arts Education, 10–14.
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 2–3.
Anderson, Education of Blacks, 44.
Watkins, White Architects of Black Education, 61.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Southern Workman, December 1888; Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 18.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Southern Workman, April 1877.
Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 10, 25.
Aery, chap. 10, 16.
Pratt continued to develop these ideas into the genocidal framework of the Indian boarding school after he parted ways with Armstrong in 1879 to found the Carlisle Industrial School.
Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 95.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 121; Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 94.
Lindsey, 160, 20–21, 76, 160–161.
Anderson, Education of Blacks, 43.
Steven Schlossman, “Delinquent Children: The Juvenile Reform School,” in The Oxford History of the Prison, ed. Norval Morris and David J. Rothman, 363–89 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 371.
Paul D. Nelson, “Early Days of the State Reform School, Juvenile Distress, and Community Response in Minnesota, 1868–1891,” Staff Publications, Digital Commons @ Macalester, http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/igcstaffpub/4. See also: Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 79.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, “The Indian and His Future,” n.d., Box: Indian Collection 12: Indian Education, 15, HUA.
By 1930, nearly 25 percent of reform school inmates were Black. Schlossman, “Delinquent Children,” 365–67, 373.
Engs cites Armstrong, explaining: “The Negro who wishes to do a man’s work goes south to live. There is his empire. He may make, in some cases, more money in the North, but accumulates more in the South, where relatively he is more of a man, from his important as a voter and a laborer.” Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 146.
Mary Lous Hultgren and Paulette Fairbanks, To Lead and to Serve: American Indian Education at Hampton Institute, 1878–1923 (Virginia Beach: Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 1989), 31, HUA.
See, for instance, Anderson, Education of Blacks; Engs, Educating the Disfranchised; Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute; David Freedman, “African-American Schooling in the South Prior to 1861,” Journal of Negro History 84, no. 1 (1999): 1–47; Joseph Willard Tingey, “Indians and Blacks Together: An Experiment in Biracial Education at Hampton Institute (1878–1923)” (EdD, Teachers College of Columbia University, 1978); Hultgren and Fairbanks, To Lead and to Serve, 27–29.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, “From the Beginning,” in Twenty-Two Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia, ed. Helen W. Ludlow (Hampton, Va.: Hampton Normal School Press, 1893), 4, HUA.
Armstrong, 292.
“History,” Hampton University, http://www.hamptonu.edu/about/history.cfm.
“History,” Hampton University.
Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 77.
Lewis C. Lockwood, Mary S. Peake: The Colored Teacher at Fortress Monroe (Boston: American Tract Society, 1862), 7.
“Offences against Public Policy,” Title 54, ch. 198, “Assembling of Negroes: Trading by Free Negroes,” Va. Code Ann. § 31 (1849) at 747.
Freedman, “African-American Schooling,” 1; Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, 14–20.
Freedman, 3.
Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, 34–35.
Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 13.
Freedman, “African-American Schooling,” 2.
W. E. B Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940; New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 24.
Freedman, xii, 3, 19.
Robert Knox Sneden, The Union Army Encampment at Hampton, Virginia Showing Picket Lines and Fortress Munroe [sic]., map, available at Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/gvhs01.vhs00245/.
Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, 53–54.
Seven thousand of these were in the village of Hampton itself. Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 7.
Lockwood, Mary S. Peake, 27.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 62. Lest Butler sound a heroic abolitionist, it is important to remember that he was also the author of Order 28, a wartime pronouncement that “ensured that the threat of sexual violence and the fear of rape were common to southern women and central to how they experienced the Civil War.” Crystal N. Feimster, “General Benjamin Butler and the Threat of Sexual Violence during the American Civil War,” Daedalus 138, no. 2 (2009): 132.
Engs, Freedom’s First Generation, 25–43.
Priya Kandaswamy, “Gendering Racial Formation,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Daniel Martinez HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido, 23–43 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 37.
The Bureau of Negro Affairs would rent land to men as heads of household, provide rations until the first harvest, and collect rent in cash or kind after the harvest, leaving the remainder for the family. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 40.
Engs, 30, 32.
Engs, 30.
Butchart, Schooling the Freed People, 21.
On Wilder’s sympathy for the refugees, see “Testimony by the Superintendent of Contrabands at Fortress Monroe, Virginia, before the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission,” Freedmen and Southern Society Project of the Department of History of the University of Maryland, http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/wilder.htm.
Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 58–62.
Edith Armstrong Talbot, Samuel Chapman Armstrong: A Biographical Study (New York: Doubleday Page, 1904), 138.
The appropriate number of Black residents was decided by bureau officials and local white residents. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 61.
Armstrong quoted in Talbot, Samuel Chapman Armstrong, 84–85.
Samuel Chapman Armstrong, letter to Jane Stuart Woolsey, March 28, 1866, cited in Aery, “Hampton Idea of Education,” chap. 7, 28–29.
In his last military assignment, Armstrong took Black troops to patrol the border in Texas. Soldiers who were being sent far from their families while the South was in a state of chaos feared the worst. They would have heard of Lincoln’s original plans to “repatriate” Black Americans to Africa and Confederate propaganda about what the Union Army intended to do with free Black people after the war. Some soldiers panicked and tried to desert to their families. Armstrong understood their fears, but, moved more by adherence to his legal duty than by moral obligation to his men, the general oversaw their court-martials and executions. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised, 53.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
For a thoroughgoing literature review of historical analyses of Civil War refugee camps, see Abigail Cooper, “‘Lord, Until I Reach My Home’: Inside the Refugee Camps of the American Civil War” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2015), 4–5.
Cooper, “‘Lord, Until I Reach My Home,’” 42.
Anderson, Education of Blacks, 54.
All quoted in Henry Allen Bullock, A History of Negro Education in the South: From 1619 to Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 103–4.
G. S. Dickerman, cited in Bullock, History of Negro Education, 103–4.
Anderson, Education of Blacks, 60.
Lindsey, Indians at Hampton Institute, 161.
Darlene Clark Hine, “A Black Studies Manifesto,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 11–15.