Octavius Catto's “Our Alma Mater”: An Address to the Institute for Colored Youth, 1864

The opening page of the printed address, 1864. Library of Congress.

The occasion

On the evening of May 10, 1864, at Concert Hall in Philadelphia, civil rights activist and educator Octavius Valentine Catto addressed the twelfth annual commencement of the Institute for Colored Youth, at 716–718 Lombard Street — a school founded to prepare young Black women and men to become teachers and uplift the African American community. The alumni association had the address printed that year. Catto told the school's history, described what its graduates had done, and looked ahead to the end of the Civil War.

Education and the war

Catto began by saying the value of education hardly needed arguing — its principles were as readily accepted as "the axioms and postulates of mathematical science." But even in the midst of "an internal revolution," it was wise to remember that the ideas of right, equity and justice for which the North was fighting had never been spread more widely than through the school. Had the South given its people "a system of education for the masses, irrespective of class or color," with half the zeal it spent keeping them uninstructed, he believed, "we to-night would not be found at the crisis of a civil war."

He called on Aristotle — that the surest way to preserve a state is "to bring up the citizens in the spirit of the Government" — and Martin Luther, who urged that instructing the young was "a grave and serious thing." In Prussia, he said, the state had won control of education; in England, the church. In America the rivalry was "compromised": most schools were public, "left entirely to the control of the people" — a system "liable to many abuses" but "probably the best yet devised" — alongside others founded by benevolent individuals, like the Institute.

The school's history

• The founding gift: the fund came from a member of the Society of Friends, whose opposition to "ignorance, intemperance, war, and slavery" earned Catto's "heartfelt gratitude." Richard Humphreys of Philadelphia first imagined the school and left ten thousand dollars for it. By 1837 the legacy had grown to thirteen thousand three hundred and twelve dollars, and by 1838, with donations, to sixteen thousand two hundred and ninety dollars.
• The charter: in 1842 the Institute was chartered by the Pennsylvania Legislature, to educate colored youths, "male and female," "to act as teachers and instructors in the different branches of school learning, or in the mechanic arts and agriculture." Only Friends could be members of the corporation, which appointed a Board of Managers of fifteen.
• Growth: another Friend's bequest of eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars raised the fund to thirty-four thousand seven hundred and ninety dollars, and further gifts to sixty-four thousand dollars. The buildings on Lombard Street went up in 1851.
• The school in 1864: four departments — a high school and a preparatory school for each sex — with six teachers, all colored, three of them graduates. The course matched a high school's, with Latin, Greek, geometry and trigonometry. A public reading room and library held more than two thousand volumes. Average attendance was a little over one hundred, and books and everything else were free.

The graduates

Twenty-seven students had graduated, and nine more received diplomas that night. Catto judged the school by "the positions the graduates hold in the sphere of usefulness to their fellow-men" — and by how they answered "the aspersions which have been cast upon the people with whom they are identified."

• J. E. Glasgow, Jr., of the class of 1856, studied at the University of Edinburgh, won a prize in every examination his class entered, and took second prize in mathematics shortly before his death, near graduation — "no light achievement in one of the best Universities in Europe."
• Two were studying at the Penn Medical University.
• Sixteen had taught, three in Philadelphia's public schools — one of whom had built, "without aid from any source," a school large enough to be taken into the public system.
• Three worked as office clerks in the city, and one was teaching freed children at Norfolk, Virginia.

Catto urged other school boards to follow the example of those that hired these teachers. It was "at least unjust," he said, to let "a blind and ignorant prejudice" disregard the choice of Black parents and taxpayers by appointing white teachers over their children.

A new building

About two years earlier, the managers had sought larger quarters in a quieter place. Two Friends offered five thousand dollars each if the Board raised twenty thousand more; the executors of Josiah Dawson, who had already given five thousand, promised five thousand more if the managers collected the rest. Friends' contributions soon brought in thirty thousand dollars, which, with six thousand already in hand, made a building fund of thirty-six thousand dollars. Ten thousand had bought a lot seventy-seven by one hundred and forty feet on Shippen Street, above Ninth, facing Ronaldson's Cemetery — room for fresh air, a gymnasium, a larger library and reading room, and a laboratory for practical science. The Board meant it to be "a first class Institute."

Looking ahead

Catto then turned to what schools like this would mean for "the future condition of the colored American." He hailed the ship bringing native-born Black citizens home from a West Indian island as "the purest act" of Lincoln's administration. Whatever the war's course, he said, the Black American's status must change completely — for the nation's own "political and industrial welfare."

"Those millions of human beings now scattered through the Southern country must eventually come forth into the sunlight of Freedom; and what a field will there then be opened for the benevolence of the wealthy, and the labors of the educated colored man!"

The four or five millions of freed laborers would need missionaries, teachers and guides, and it was the duty of everyone to help. The nation's good required every part of its people to understand republican government — and that could only be done "by properly educating the masses in the South," so that the Southern states would be "regenerated" and their people "made ministering agents for the profit of the whole Nation and the lasting security of the Government."

All the freedman asked, Catto said, was that there be "no unmanly quibbles" about opening to him the positions his attainments fit him for: "that which is committed to him as a man, he will perform as no other than a man could perform."

Sources

Based on "Our Alma Mater: An Address – May 10, 1864," Independence National Historical Park, National Park Service, with its transcript of Octavius V. Catto, Our Alma Mater: An Address Delivered at Concert Hall on the Occasion of the Twelfth Annual Commencement of the Institute for Colored Youth, May 10th, 1864 (Philadelphia: C. Sherman, Son & Co., 1864), in the Library of Congress; both in the public domain. The Park Service's description dates the Institute's founding to 1852; Catto gives 1842 for its charter and 1851 for its buildings.