the formation of Mr. Washington's character, then, went the missionary
zeal of New England, influenced by one of the strongest personalities
in modern education, and the wide-reaching moral earnestness of
General Armstrong himself." In his autobiography Mr. Washington thus
describes General Armstrong's influence and the impression he made
upon him: "It has been my fortune to meet personally many of what are
called great characters, both in Europe and America, but I do not
hesitate to say that I never met any man who, in my estimation, was
the equal of General Armstrong. Fresh from the degrading influences of
the slave plantation and the coal mines, it was a rare privilege for
me to be permitted to come into direct contact with such a character
as General Armstrong. I shall always remember that the first time I
went into his presence he made the impression upon me of being a
perfect man; I was made to feel that there was something about him
that was superhuman. It was my privilege to know the General
personally from the time I entered Hampton till he died, and the more
I saw of him the greater he grew in my estimation. One might have
removed from Hampton all the buildings, classrooms, teachers, and
industries, and given the men and women there the opportunity of
coming into daily contact with General Armstrong, and that alone would
have been a liberal education. (This recalls President Garfield's
definition of a university when he said, 'my idea of a university is a
log with Mark Hopkins on one end and a boy on the other.') The older I
grow, the more I am convinced that there is no education which one can
get from books and costly apparatus that is equal to that which can be
gotten from contact with great men and women. Instead of studying
books so constantly, how I wish that our schools and colleges might
learn to study men and things!"

When the young man imbued with these ideas and fresh from these
influences found himself responsible for the destinies of a
studentless, teacherless, buildingless, and landless school it is
significant how he went to work to supply these manifold deficiencies.
First, he found a place in which to open the school--a dilapidated
shanty church, the A.M.E. Zion Church for Negroes, in the town of
Tuskegee. Next he went about the surrounding countryside, found out
exactly under what conditions the people were living and what their
needs were, and advertised the school among the class of people