Memoirs of North Carolina native's slave days republished

Monday, March 20th 2000, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan were on the rise when William Henry Singleton wrote in 1922 about his slave days in North Carolina and Georgia and gave heartfelt thanks to the government for allowing him to vote.

Perhaps timing is why his memoir had such a brief shelf life. It appeared in a weekly newspaper and as a pamphlet, then vanished into obscurity for decades.

Singleton had plenty to tell. Born into bondage and sold twice before reaching manhood, he organized a black Civil War regiment in the coastal town of New Bern before black units were used by the Union Army. He met Abraham Lincoln.

Later, he was wounded in battle. After the war, he learned to read, moved North and prospered. He died at 95, outliving two of his three wives.

Despite all his successes, Singleton's plain narrative is tinged with bitterness over how he once was regarded as "but a thing." "I was bought and sold. I was whipped. Once I was whipped simply because it was thought I had opened a book," he wrote in "Recollections of My Slavery Days."

Long overlooked by scholars, Singleton's memoir was rediscovered by historians Katherine Mellen Charron, a Yale University graduate student, and David S. Cecelski, a University of North Carolina historian who grew up near Singleton's birthplace.

The North Carolina Division of Archives and History recently republished the memoirs with annotations by Charron and Cecelski.

Cecelski said they found one of the two extant Singleton pamphlets at the New York Public Library while researching maritime history in the antebellum South and realized Singleton grew up only a few miles from Cecelski's childhood home.

Struck by the place names' authenticity and by Singleton's determination to create a black fighting unit against all odds, he and Charron decided to research Singleton and his unique memoir.

"It is the only slave narrative that gives any firsthand insight into organizing former slaves into African-American regiments," Cecelski said.

Singleton took his last name from the man he called his father, but his paternity remained a mystery. He grew up on John Handcock Nelson's plantation in Craven County along the lower Neuse River.

Singleton, his mother and two brothers were among the plantation's 26 slaves. One day Singleton was sold upon reaching maturity. "That night when my mother came to get me and my brothers I was not there," he wrote. "I had been sold off the plantation away from my mother and my brothers with as little formality as they would have sold a calf or a mule."

His new mistress whipped him, and his bed was the dirt floor by the fireplace. When he was 7, Singleton ran away and made his way back to his family 600 miles away, a monumental feat for a child, but things there weren't much better. He ran away again and was sold again.

He was a servant to a young Confederate officer early in the Civil War, but switched sides after Union Gen. Ambrose Burnside captured New Bern in 1862.

Employing the martial skills he had learned, Singleton raised and trained his own all-black Union regiment. But the Union Army wasn't ready for blacks.

Burnside, however, was so impressed with Singleton's efforts that he took him along to Fort Monroe, Va., to meet President Lincoln. According to Singleton, the "great emancipator" assured him black soldiers would fight one day.

The time came in 1863, and Singleton's regiment became the 35th U.S. Colored Troops, seeing action in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, where Singleton was wounded in the leg at the Battle of Olustee.

After mustering out in Charleston, S.C., he learned to read. Then he went home to his family in North Carolina, but found himself an object of hatred because of his Union Army service. "The Ku Klux Klan said they would shoot me," he said.

He moved North -- to New Haven, Conn., and later Peekskill, N.Y. He was a coachman, gardener, caretaker and an itinerant minister for the AME Zion Church.

Singleton died at the Grand Army of the Republic's 72nd encampment in Des Moines, Iowa, in September 1938 after participating in a 15-block parade in 90-degree heat.

In "Recollections," he takes a veteran's pride in the participation of black American soldiers in World War I, which had ended just four years earlier: "I saw the boys of my race take their place in the armies of the Republic and help save freedom for the world."

Singleton marveled at the strides blacks had made during his lifetime and at being permitted to vote.

"Think of it! I, who was once bought and sold, and whipped simply because it was thought I had opened a book...," he wrote. "It is a great thing to have lived to see this day come."