“Our young Brother Singleton,” identified as a theology student at Mercer University, gave “an interesting discourse” to the congregation at Bethesda Baptist Church in Greene County, GA, on 19 April 1862.
He was sponsored, one would surmise, by Pastor Henry Holcomb Tucker, who doubled as university professor of metaphysics and belles-lettres. Besides a letter granted to member Sarah Jones, no other business was brought before the assembled and they left, going about their own business, according to clerk William A. Overton who recorded minutes at the church’s monthly meeting.
Singleton wasn’t the average student in the small university community of Penfield and was newly established there if in fact he was officially a student or resident at all. Why he was described as “our” remains a mystery.
Born in Northampton, England, in 1830, Singleton was a skillful cabinet maker with “ordinary” education who immigrated to this country at age twenty with a chest of tools for his trade. The 1841 England Census shows a 10-year-old William Singleton living in Kettering, Northamptonshire, with parents Thomas and Percy Singleton and two brothers and two sisters ranging in age from 16 to 3. We can't be positive this is "our" William, but it could be.
Singleton's cabinetry proficiency eventually landed him in Augusta, GA, after years of big city life northward, beginning in New York. “His life for several years was a mixture of business and pleasure,” wrote Baptist biographer Jesse Campbell, who was Singleton’s contemporary in Georgia Baptist service. “His wages were good, but he spent them freely and saved but little.”
In due time, Singleton married and had two children. In the midst of that life evolved for him the accepting of a call to baptism and preaching in the Baptist church. Under spiritual conviction, Singleton professed “a change of heart” that seemed “real and radical” to everyone, it was said, who knew him. Alas, metamorphosis was followed by the death of his dear family, beginning with his wife. In the 1860 U.S. Census, on 6 July Singleton was caring for a son, Thomas B., aged 2, and a daughter, Margaret K., three months. His wife may have died from the common experience of complications related to childbirth. Sometime between the day the census enumerator arrived at his Ward 2 home and the day he preached the sermon at Bethesda, Singleton’s children died. Rather than devastating him to despair, these bereavements “deepened the impressions of his call to the ministry, and removed the earthly obstacles to his consecration to the work,” observed Campbell.
Singleton was licensed to preach by Greene Street Church in Augusta before moving to Penfield for theological training, a change of venue Campbell said happened in June 1862—six weeks or more after this sermon. Whenever it was he arrived on his new field of endeavor, from all appearances it was a removal with bright expectations for Singleton and those he intended to serve. Many, it seems, recognized in him an unusually prayerful young man. Then-Mercer President Nathaniel Macon Crawford described his new friend: “His feelings were tender, his sympathies easily flowing, and, at the same time, deep, his faith strong, his hope firm, and his consecration unaffected and unfaltering. He was remarkable for what was called ‘a gift in prayer.’”
Prayer is always a desired commodity in a religious community and was particularly so at this juncture since the United States had just passed the one year marker for the beginning of the nation-rending 1860s war between the states. Soldiers aligned with the Union/North/Federal side faced off against their brethren—sometimes literally—on the Confederate/Rebel/Southern side. Six days after the sermon at Bethesda, New Orleans, that jewel of the South, was captured by forces under Union Adm. David Farragut. In quick succession the Confederate garrison at Fort Macon, NC, surrendered on 26 April; the ironclad CSS Virginia was scuttled in James River north of Norfolk, VA, on 11 May; and Georgians fought with abandon among the 40,000 Confederates assembled to face an equal number of federals in the Battle of Fair Oaks on 31 May to 1 June. Subsequent battles proliferated across the land that spring and early summer—the Battle of Memphis on 6 June, Battle of Cross Keys on 8 June, and Battle of Mechanicsville on 26 June.
Every conflict was accompanied with injury, death, and privation, and the gift of prayer was a welcomed tool in the hands of those skillfully and thoughtfully fashioning and shoring up the spiritual lives of believers in states North and South. Singleton stepped in wherever he could to lift loads and smooth broken edges of hearts and minds as life—and war—rocked on the remainder of that year and into the next. Green Street Church ordained him in January 1863, and more than ever Singleton found his ministerial service in demand as the ranks of ministering folk were reduced by those headed to or serving in the killing fields.
During his time at Mercer, Singleton lived with respected Baptist deacon, Mercer trustee, and distinguished Greene Countian Thomas Stocks and his wife. For a couple of years the tender and spiritually-minded young Brit studied and preached and ministered to that corner of the Confederacy not yet invaded or touched by the feet of an invading army. Despite that “blessing,” his realm of parishioners engulfed those who mourned and many, no doubt, with high fears of the future as Singleton went about his duties at neighboring Friendship, Macedonia, and Shiloh churches.
When the Georgia Baptist Convention met on 24 April 1863 at Griffin, Singleton was one of few still studying theology—or anything—at Mercer. Full-fledged war mode gripped the nation as the second anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter came and went, and most 30-ish young Southern men were conscripted to or had volunteered for service on battlefields or in some camp attached to them. Ministerial student Joseph Blitch was still at Mercer with Singleton though theology student J. K. Cowan had left to become a minister and students Thomas J. Beck and James A. Garrison had enlisted as chaplains in Georgia regiments fighting in Virginia.
Newspaper accounts kept Greene County residents aware of war developments, albeit sometimes it took a while to disseminate news. Soon they would have learned that just after the Griffin meeting Union Col. Abel Streight moved from Tennessee across Alabama to northwest Georgia on a course that lead to a raid on Rome, GA, on May Day. True, the famed Confederate cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forest drove Streight out a few days later, but it was unnerving to most Georgians to realize the war was closing in on them. Prayer services were surely called when news of that and of the massing troops around Chancellorsville, VA, came in and of course when the sad reports from Gettysburg drifted South, Greene County, like Georgia as a whole, had sons fighting and dying in far off places which in itself brought the war so much closer to home than most wanted it to be.
Through it all, Singleton, it seems now, drew best responses from those who knew him, and we can only think that surely he was a mainstay for agitated, dismayed, and worried parishioners. A contemporary called him “the most spiritual member of the church” and a person with a “good, rather solid” mind. President Crawford said Singleton developed his prayer life after reading the Apostle Paul’s remonstrance to “covet the best gifts” and follow the “more excellent way” that leads to “nearness of approach to the mercy seat in prayer.” Added Crawford, “(Singleton decided to) covet that, and ask God to give me the grace of prayer.”
Since Crawford was also Mercer’s professor of systematic theology and Hebrew, we can surmise that he, Tucker, and their favorable student spoke earnestly and regularly on many subjects. It’s easy to imagine them seeking quite spots to converse on what in other years would have been hailed as balmy spring days or sitting on the front porch of the president’s home on warm moonlit nights studying academic exercises. By a stroke of luck, the ledger Singleton used to work out mathematical equations survives today and his elaborate algebraic forms provide proof of studious diligence. With elegant handwriting Singleton manipulated numbers and letters to find answers to problems on amounts of pears and apples, on barrels of port, sherry, and Madeira, on how much hourly progress was made by a worker, or on how many copper or silver coins were used in a transaction. He made determinations about gallons in a “small cask,” yards of cloth obtained, and days required for travel, and without doubt he was as meticulous in his academic preparations as he was in deepening his prayer life.
The significance of the worn leather ledger is tri-fold, and we know it was treasured then as now. Thomas Stocks purchased the 8-by-14-by-2-inch volume, inscribed “Office Greensboro” on the spine, around 1829. He used seven pages for recording “discounted notes” falling due on certain dates and the names thereon are a who’s who of the financially affluent around him. Surnames of Abercrombie, Alford, Askew, Beman, Binion, Boswell, Burke, Butler, Campbell, Cobb, Colquitt, Dawson, Duggan, Foster, Gordon, Green, Grimes, Hall, Hart, Heard, Hunt, Longstreet, Lumpkin, Macon, Mallory, Pierce, Porter, Redd, Seymour, Southerland, Stewart, Stokes, Weaver, West, Williams, and Wright reside there amongst others.
More than three decades passed while the book presumably sat idle in Stocks’ home or office before he made it a gift to Singleton whose gratitude was obvious. He wrote with a flourish: “Hon. Thos Stocks gave me this book,--and it was brought to me by Dr. Crawford. W. Singleton.” On the next page he wrote, “Principle weighs men she does not count them. Wm. Singleton Penfield 1863.” More than an inch of pages follow filled with math equations. Intermingled with mathematical sentences Singleton interjected quotes and philosophic observations, made notes of assistance from Tucker and Crawford, and reminded himself of mistakes made and corrected.
Suddenly the discharge of academic duties ended. In the midst of academic rigour, William Singleton was taken with an attack of “malignant bilious fever” for which there was no recovery. His dear friends gave Singleton every comfort possible to a dying man in a war-depleted land depleted. The childless older couple attended their young boarder and friend assiduously and probably with some apprehension for in the last weeks of Singleton's life fears of “Yankees—in Georgia!”came true. The forests of Greene County shielding Singleton were skirted by the 60,000 marching troops of William Tecumseh Sherman though residents knew the anguish of waiting for the sound of horses’ hooves and the mostly inevitable destruction that followed.
In that uncertainty sometime in the month of November 1864 Singleton’s earthly endeavors ceased. Though we are left without an exact date of death and no obituary, we can confidently assume William Singleton was mourned widely. His name was called by friends in memorial on 9 October 1865 at the Georgia Association annual meeting at Bairds Church in Oglethorpe County and in the April 1866 convening of the Georgia Baptist Convention (the 1865 meeting was cancelled).
When Singleton’s charitable, empathetic heart stopped beating, undoubtedly someone noted that not all sadness and loss of young lives in war is due the battlefield for war or not life—and death—continue a steady course. The 34-year-old English-born cabinet builder who had come to this country to seek his fortune had become an earnest, self-giving, and needed prayer warrior. His status as such was exercised we imagine by the concerns of those who knew and depended on him while the people in and around Penfield, GA, lived out their lives in days of national uncertainty with immediate and important issues ever before them.
Inside of six months, the destructive war was over and proponents of education turned their eyes again to empty classrooms with hopes and dreams of filling them with a new generation of learners. Mercer’s advocates joined that bandwagon and thus the third use for the beloved volume of mathematical equations was born when the university’s new president, Henry Holcomb Tucker, took it in hand to record matriculation information on students making their way to the school Singleton held precious. With the South in Reconstruction and supplies of everything diminished, Tucker at some point wrote, “The following is a list of the students who have entered since my administration” and then in pen and pencil memorialized those students by term, name, age, parents’ name, and place of residence from Spring Term 1867 through Fall 1870. The value of these pages goes beyond usual means of communicating worth. The university had no printed Catalogue from 1860-1861 until 1869-1870 so without Tucker’s enumeration a fairly accurate roster was unavailable.
Lastly, Tucker’s inventory has immeasurable meaning as it extends through some of the last days of Mercer’s existence in Penfield. In 1871 the school moved to its present location in Macon, GA. Fortunately when that transposition occurred someone packed up this glimpse into the past so that now—140 years later—we know a man named Thomas Stocks recycled a book he could no longer use by giving it to a hopeful young student named William Singleton who apparently left it to an esteemed educator and mentor named Henry Tucker.
And the ability to preserve and pass along to forthcoming generations of scholars this kind of inspirational bit of history is the reason there exists university archives and people who gladly protect the past and make it available to the future. At Mercer we are thankful every day for those who went before us who looked out for us, making it possible today to piece together the tale of our two locations and the people who made it happen.
-- Arlette Camp Copeland Singleton wasn’t the average student in the small university community of Penfield and was newly established there if in fact he was officially a student or resident at all. Why he was described as “our” remains a mystery.
Born in Northampton, England, in 1830, Singleton was a skillful cabinet maker with “ordinary” education who immigrated to this country at age twenty with a chest of tools for his trade. The 1841 England Census shows a 10-year-old William Singleton living in Kettering, Northamptonshire, with parents Thomas and Percy Singleton and two brothers and two sisters ranging in age from 16 to 3. We can't be positive this is "our" William, but it could be.
Singleton's cabinetry proficiency eventually landed him in Augusta, GA, after years of big city life northward, beginning in New York. “His life for several years was a mixture of business and pleasure,” wrote Baptist biographer Jesse Campbell, who was Singleton’s contemporary in Georgia Baptist service. “His wages were good, but he spent them freely and saved but little.”
In due time, Singleton married and had two children. In the midst of that life evolved for him the accepting of a call to baptism and preaching in the Baptist church. Under spiritual conviction, Singleton professed “a change of heart” that seemed “real and radical” to everyone, it was said, who knew him. Alas, metamorphosis was followed by the death of his dear family, beginning with his wife. In the 1860 U.S. Census, on 6 July Singleton was caring for a son, Thomas B., aged 2, and a daughter, Margaret K., three months. His wife may have died from the common experience of complications related to childbirth. Sometime between the day the census enumerator arrived at his Ward 2 home and the day he preached the sermon at Bethesda, Singleton’s children died. Rather than devastating him to despair, these bereavements “deepened the impressions of his call to the ministry, and removed the earthly obstacles to his consecration to the work,” observed Campbell.
Singleton was licensed to preach by Greene Street Church in Augusta before moving to Penfield for theological training, a change of venue Campbell said happened in June 1862—six weeks or more after this sermon. Whenever it was he arrived on his new field of endeavor, from all appearances it was a removal with bright expectations for Singleton and those he intended to serve. Many, it seems, recognized in him an unusually prayerful young man. Then-Mercer President Nathaniel Macon Crawford described his new friend: “His feelings were tender, his sympathies easily flowing, and, at the same time, deep, his faith strong, his hope firm, and his consecration unaffected and unfaltering. He was remarkable for what was called ‘a gift in prayer.’”
Prayer is always a desired commodity in a religious community and was particularly so at this juncture since the United States had just passed the one year marker for the beginning of the nation-rending 1860s war between the states. Soldiers aligned with the Union/North/Federal side faced off against their brethren—sometimes literally—on the Confederate/Rebel/Southern side. Six days after the sermon at Bethesda, New Orleans, that jewel of the South, was captured by forces under Union Adm. David Farragut. In quick succession the Confederate garrison at Fort Macon, NC, surrendered on 26 April; the ironclad CSS Virginia was scuttled in James River north of Norfolk, VA, on 11 May; and Georgians fought with abandon among the 40,000 Confederates assembled to face an equal number of federals in the Battle of Fair Oaks on 31 May to 1 June. Subsequent battles proliferated across the land that spring and early summer—the Battle of Memphis on 6 June, Battle of Cross Keys on 8 June, and Battle of Mechanicsville on 26 June.
Every conflict was accompanied with injury, death, and privation, and the gift of prayer was a welcomed tool in the hands of those skillfully and thoughtfully fashioning and shoring up the spiritual lives of believers in states North and South. Singleton stepped in wherever he could to lift loads and smooth broken edges of hearts and minds as life—and war—rocked on the remainder of that year and into the next. Green Street Church ordained him in January 1863, and more than ever Singleton found his ministerial service in demand as the ranks of ministering folk were reduced by those headed to or serving in the killing fields.
During his time at Mercer, Singleton lived with respected Baptist deacon, Mercer trustee, and distinguished Greene Countian Thomas Stocks and his wife. For a couple of years the tender and spiritually-minded young Brit studied and preached and ministered to that corner of the Confederacy not yet invaded or touched by the feet of an invading army. Despite that “blessing,” his realm of parishioners engulfed those who mourned and many, no doubt, with high fears of the future as Singleton went about his duties at neighboring Friendship, Macedonia, and Shiloh churches.
When the Georgia Baptist Convention met on 24 April 1863 at Griffin, Singleton was one of few still studying theology—or anything—at Mercer. Full-fledged war mode gripped the nation as the second anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter came and went, and most 30-ish young Southern men were conscripted to or had volunteered for service on battlefields or in some camp attached to them. Ministerial student Joseph Blitch was still at Mercer with Singleton though theology student J. K. Cowan had left to become a minister and students Thomas J. Beck and James A. Garrison had enlisted as chaplains in Georgia regiments fighting in Virginia.
Newspaper accounts kept Greene County residents aware of war developments, albeit sometimes it took a while to disseminate news. Soon they would have learned that just after the Griffin meeting Union Col. Abel Streight moved from Tennessee across Alabama to northwest Georgia on a course that lead to a raid on Rome, GA, on May Day. True, the famed Confederate cavalry of Nathan Bedford Forest drove Streight out a few days later, but it was unnerving to most Georgians to realize the war was closing in on them. Prayer services were surely called when news of that and of the massing troops around Chancellorsville, VA, came in and of course when the sad reports from Gettysburg drifted South, Greene County, like Georgia as a whole, had sons fighting and dying in far off places which in itself brought the war so much closer to home than most wanted it to be.
Through it all, Singleton, it seems now, drew best responses from those who knew him, and we can only think that surely he was a mainstay for agitated, dismayed, and worried parishioners. A contemporary called him “the most spiritual member of the church” and a person with a “good, rather solid” mind. President Crawford said Singleton developed his prayer life after reading the Apostle Paul’s remonstrance to “covet the best gifts” and follow the “more excellent way” that leads to “nearness of approach to the mercy seat in prayer.” Added Crawford, “(Singleton decided to) covet that, and ask God to give me the grace of prayer.”
Since Crawford was also Mercer’s professor of systematic theology and Hebrew, we can surmise that he, Tucker, and their favorable student spoke earnestly and regularly on many subjects. It’s easy to imagine them seeking quite spots to converse on what in other years would have been hailed as balmy spring days or sitting on the front porch of the president’s home on warm moonlit nights studying academic exercises. By a stroke of luck, the ledger Singleton used to work out mathematical equations survives today and his elaborate algebraic forms provide proof of studious diligence. With elegant handwriting Singleton manipulated numbers and letters to find answers to problems on amounts of pears and apples, on barrels of port, sherry, and Madeira, on how much hourly progress was made by a worker, or on how many copper or silver coins were used in a transaction. He made determinations about gallons in a “small cask,” yards of cloth obtained, and days required for travel, and without doubt he was as meticulous in his academic preparations as he was in deepening his prayer life.
The significance of the worn leather ledger is tri-fold, and we know it was treasured then as now. Thomas Stocks purchased the 8-by-14-by-2-inch volume, inscribed “Office Greensboro” on the spine, around 1829. He used seven pages for recording “discounted notes” falling due on certain dates and the names thereon are a who’s who of the financially affluent around him. Surnames of Abercrombie, Alford, Askew, Beman, Binion, Boswell, Burke, Butler, Campbell, Cobb, Colquitt, Dawson, Duggan, Foster, Gordon, Green, Grimes, Hall, Hart, Heard, Hunt, Longstreet, Lumpkin, Macon, Mallory, Pierce, Porter, Redd, Seymour, Southerland, Stewart, Stokes, Weaver, West, Williams, and Wright reside there amongst others.
More than three decades passed while the book presumably sat idle in Stocks’ home or office before he made it a gift to Singleton whose gratitude was obvious. He wrote with a flourish: “Hon. Thos Stocks gave me this book,--and it was brought to me by Dr. Crawford. W. Singleton.” On the next page he wrote, “Principle weighs men she does not count them. Wm. Singleton Penfield 1863.” More than an inch of pages follow filled with math equations. Intermingled with mathematical sentences Singleton interjected quotes and philosophic observations, made notes of assistance from Tucker and Crawford, and reminded himself of mistakes made and corrected.
Suddenly the discharge of academic duties ended. In the midst of academic rigour, William Singleton was taken with an attack of “malignant bilious fever” for which there was no recovery. His dear friends gave Singleton every comfort possible to a dying man in a war-depleted land depleted. The childless older couple attended their young boarder and friend assiduously and probably with some apprehension for in the last weeks of Singleton's life fears of “Yankees—in Georgia!”came true. The forests of Greene County shielding Singleton were skirted by the 60,000 marching troops of William Tecumseh Sherman though residents knew the anguish of waiting for the sound of horses’ hooves and the mostly inevitable destruction that followed.
In that uncertainty sometime in the month of November 1864 Singleton’s earthly endeavors ceased. Though we are left without an exact date of death and no obituary, we can confidently assume William Singleton was mourned widely. His name was called by friends in memorial on 9 October 1865 at the Georgia Association annual meeting at Bairds Church in Oglethorpe County and in the April 1866 convening of the Georgia Baptist Convention (the 1865 meeting was cancelled).
When Singleton’s charitable, empathetic heart stopped beating, undoubtedly someone noted that not all sadness and loss of young lives in war is due the battlefield for war or not life—and death—continue a steady course. The 34-year-old English-born cabinet builder who had come to this country to seek his fortune had become an earnest, self-giving, and needed prayer warrior. His status as such was exercised we imagine by the concerns of those who knew and depended on him while the people in and around Penfield, GA, lived out their lives in days of national uncertainty with immediate and important issues ever before them.
Inside of six months, the destructive war was over and proponents of education turned their eyes again to empty classrooms with hopes and dreams of filling them with a new generation of learners. Mercer’s advocates joined that bandwagon and thus the third use for the beloved volume of mathematical equations was born when the university’s new president, Henry Holcomb Tucker, took it in hand to record matriculation information on students making their way to the school Singleton held precious. With the South in Reconstruction and supplies of everything diminished, Tucker at some point wrote, “The following is a list of the students who have entered since my administration” and then in pen and pencil memorialized those students by term, name, age, parents’ name, and place of residence from Spring Term 1867 through Fall 1870. The value of these pages goes beyond usual means of communicating worth. The university had no printed Catalogue from 1860-1861 until 1869-1870 so without Tucker’s enumeration a fairly accurate roster was unavailable.
Lastly, Tucker’s inventory has immeasurable meaning as it extends through some of the last days of Mercer’s existence in Penfield. In 1871 the school moved to its present location in Macon, GA. Fortunately when that transposition occurred someone packed up this glimpse into the past so that now—140 years later—we know a man named Thomas Stocks recycled a book he could no longer use by giving it to a hopeful young student named William Singleton who apparently left it to an esteemed educator and mentor named Henry Tucker.
And the ability to preserve and pass along to forthcoming generations of scholars this kind of inspirational bit of history is the reason there exists university archives and people who gladly protect the past and make it available to the future. At Mercer we are thankful every day for those who went before us who looked out for us, making it possible today to piece together the tale of our two locations and the people who made it happen.
(Sources: Conference Minutes of Bethesda Baptist Church Union Point (Greene County) Georgia August 1817 to December 1866, Transcribed and Indexed by Vivian Toole Cates, 238; Jesse H. Campbell, Georgia Baptist Historical and Biographical (1874), 398-399; Robert L. Robinson, History of the Georgia Baptist Association, 1928, 236; 1850 U.S. Federal Census Ward 1 Eastern Division New York, New York; 1860 U.S. Federal Census, Augusta, GA, Ward 2; 1862-1865 Georgia Baptist Association Minutes; 1866 Georgia Baptist Convention Minutes, 18; William Singleton Personal Papers, Mercer University Tarver Library Special Collections, Macon, GA; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1862.)
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