During the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, public education was viewed as one of the more important sites of transformation, debate, and contestation. Public education was understood to be a means through which the Ottoman government nationalized/Ottomanized subjects throughout the empire and inculcated distinct Ottoman values. This paper provides an analytic description of one aspect of the late nineteenth-century Ottoman educational project: the curriculum. The paper seeks to accomplish two goals: re-construct the contours of morality as a separate subject of study and tease out the multiple sources of authority referenced in public school discussions on morality. This analysis is based on a late nineteenth-century Ottoman-Turkish secondary public school textbook: Cocuklara Talim-i Fazail-i Ahlak (hereafter Fazail-i Ahlak). In the past ten years, significant interventions have been made in the historiography of late Ottoman education by arguing that morality as a subject of study exemplifies the traditional and "Islamic" characteristics of the Hamidian educational project. This paper presents an alternative analysis that problematizes the "Islamic" categorization and attempts to recover the significance of the emergence of morality as a separate subject of study in Ottoman public schools. Through a close reading of Fazail-i Ahlak, this paper explores and identifies the multiple sources of authority that the author of the textbook pulled from a nineteen-century Ottoman cultural toolbox. My reading of Hamidian public school morality vis-a-vis Fazail-i Ahlak identifies and engages the implications of juxtaposing disparate and seemingly contradictory authoritative sources like God, the Prophet(s), the Sultan, reason (akil), religious leaders (ulema), everyone (herkes), wise people (aklan), social utility (faideh), Islamic law (seriat), human laws (kavanin-i insanieh), individual conscience (vicdan), and social acceptance. In so doing, this paper attempts to connect the reasoning and argumentation of the morality text to the historical specificity of the nineteenth-century interconnected and transitional Ottoman world in which it was produced.