William Henry Singleton

William Henry Singleton. From Slavery to Freedom. During the Civil War, thousands of enslaved blacks freed themselves by escaping to Union lines. Craven County native William Henry Singleton (1843-1938) was one of them. According to his biography, Recollections of My Slavery Days (1922), as a child he was sold south to Atlanta but later escaped and returned to Craven County, where his mother concealed him. Finally caught, he remained on a local plantation until the war, when he accompanied a local officer as his body servant. He escaped from slavery during the March 1862 engagement at Wyse Fork in Lenoir County and fled to the Federal army in New Bern. Singleton asserted that he helped raise black troops for the Union, probably African-American “pioneers” who cleared roads and built fortifications, and “drilled” them at Andrew Chapel, the forerunner of St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, on Hancock Street. He also wrote that he met President Abraham Lincoln, likely at a meeting between Burnside and Lincoln at Fort Monroe in Virginia in July 1862. After the Emancipation Proclamation authorized the enlistment of black troops in 1863, Singleton served as a sergeant in the 35th U.S. Colored Troops in Georgia, Florida (where he was wounded in the leg in the Battle of Olustee), and South Carolina. He was mustered out in Charleston, S.C., on June 1, 1866. He later became a Methodist minister and resided in Connecticut and New York. During the Civil War, thousands of enslaved blacks freed themselves by escaping to Union lines. Craven County native William Henry Singleton (1843-1938) was one of them. According to his biography, Recollections of My Slavery Days (1922), as a child he was sold south to Atlanta but later escaped and returned to Craven County, where his mother concealed him. Finally caught, he remained on a local plantation until the war, when he accompanied a local officer as his body servant. He escaped from slavery during the March 1862 engagement at Wyse Fork in Lenoir County and fled to the Federal army in New Bern. Singleton asserted that he helped raise black troops for the Union, probably African-American “pioneers” who cleared roads and built fortifications, and “drilled” them at Andrew Chapel, the forerunner of St. Peter’s African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, on Hancock Street. He also wrote that he met President Abraham Lincoln, likely at a meeting between Burnside and Lincoln at Fort Monroe in Virginia in July 1862. After the Emancipation Proclamation authorized the enlistment of black troops in 1863, Singleton served as a sergeant in the 35th U.S. Colored Troops in Georgia, Florida (where he was wounded in the leg in the Battle of Olustee), and South Carolina. He was mustered out in Charleston, S.C., on June 1, 1866. He later became a Methodist minister and resided in Connecticut and New York., The yellow sidebar gives a brief history of the church you see behind the marker. It reads: , In 1863, the African Methodist Episcopal Zion missionary James Walker Hood came to New Bern and Beaufort, where large numbers of black Methodists lived. Here in New Bern, the congregation of Andrew Chapel, constructed as a white Methodist church about 1802 on Hancock Street, affiliated with the A.M.E. Zion Church in 1864. The congregation changed its name to St. Peter’s in 1879 and built a frame Gothic Revival-style church here. A brick building in the same style replaced it in 1914. After it was destroyed in the great fire of December 1, 1922, the congregation slowly rebuilt, completing the present building in 1942.