| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839–1893. By Robert Francis Engs. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. xx, 207 pp. $32.50, isbn 1-57233-051-1.)

In the first scholarly biography of Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Robert Francis Engs offers a balanced portrait, challenging both the hagiography of contemporaries of "the General" and the dismissive characterizations of the post–civil rights era scholarship. The former saw him as a heroic missionary, lifting up the freedmen from their desperate circumstances with the help of southern white gentility. Donald Spivey's Schooling for the New Slavery (1978), the harshest of the more recent interpretations, portrayed Armstrong as an enabler of the reemerging white supremacy. Indeed, in his first book, Freedmen's First Generation (1979), Professor Engs emphasized Armstrong's paternalism and stifling of African American aspirations. 1

After pursuing the General for another twenty years, Engs tells a more nuanced story of Armstrong's aims and accomplishments. The need to gain support for Hampton Institute from three very different groups—African Americans, northern white philanthropists, and "an increasingly assertive and anti-Negro white South"—made the General a "master prevaricator." Yet Engs finds Armstrong fundamentally dedicated to the advancement of opportunities for African Americans and other "despised races." Drawing upon rich archival sources, he confirms James McPherson's earlier and contested conclusion in The Abolitionist Legacy (1975) that Armstrong was part of that legacy. . . .

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