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SAMUEL CHAPMAN ARMSTRONG founded the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in 1868 to instruct newly freed African American children according to an ideology ruled by three principles: the gospel of work, the motivation for unselfish love, and the doctrine of Protestant Christianity.1 Although Armstrong, a white humanitarian, had never intended the school to cater to any other group of people, a decade later Richard Henry Pratt, a U.S. Army officer with a burgeoning interest in Native American reform, convinced him to change his philosophy. Mostly because of Pratt's urging, in April 1878 Hampton Institute accepted seventeen Native American male students.2 These young men were among the first of many thousands of Native American students educated in off-reservation boarding schools in the next three decades. During that time, Hampton pursued an active recruiting strategy, regularly sending representatives west to find potential students and receiving government subsidies for the tuition of each of them.
A number of historians have explored Hampton's leading role in the nineteenth-century practice of using boarding schools to assimilate Native Americans.3 Recently, scholars have examined in detail the crucial part these schools played in the coercive assimilationist program run by the United States government during this period. Studies have identified procedures such as haircutting; renaming; forbidding students to speak their languages or practice their religions; military-style discipline; instruction in reading and writing; and the teaching of white methods of farming and agriculture as tools with which reformers instructed Native Americans in the white way of life at institutions far removed from their homes and communities.4 One aspect of boarding school education, however, has not been explored: the importance white authorities placed on students' choice of spouse. Marriages between whites and people of color, and between Native Americans and African Americans, while infrequent, did occur. Hampton staff accepted the marriage of Hampton-educated Native Americans to white spouses, judging such unions to be an indication of the former's absorption of white culture.
The history of Hampton Institute offers a unique vantage point from which to examine mainstream opinions toward interracial marriage during this period. Not only did members of three cultural groups mingle on the Hampton campus, but it was also the site of a number of interracial relationships formed between students, and, most remarkably,...