In the years after the Civil War, the Methodist minister Henry J. Fox worked with New York City-based financiers to develop land in the area that is now the town of Pageland, South Carolina. His plan was to purchase plantations, ideally cheaply from debt-ridden planter, and then subdivide the land into plots that would be sold to small farmers. This was a popular idea among northerners. Many believed that small farming would be a more productive use of the land than maintaining large plantations as had been done under slavery. An additional benefit was that it would uplift the poor who otherwise would be landless and living idle in poverty.
Rev. Fox was originally from England, and he appears to have drawn heavily on his connections to the county in promoting his land development. He began selling land in 1868, and all of the buyers appear to have been from England.
Rev. Fox's project proved to be short-lived. Farming in northwestern Chesterfield County had always been difficult, and the crops failed in the late 1860s. Farm problems were eclipsed by the problems from white farmers in the area. Rev. Fox and the Englishmen he brought to the area became figures of hatred. What began as petty harassment escalated to death threats and then, in August 1871, an actual murder.
Only a small number of families, perhaps ten, had tried to set-up farms on the Fox land. By the summer of 1870, all but two – the family of fifty-year old John Woodcock and the family of twenty-seven year old Robert Singleton – were gone. Woodcock had fled by the time of the murder, but Singleton displayed remarkable bravery and remained for several more years. In this blogpost, I will explore what we can find out about Singleton's experience.
Singleton in 1870
Robert Singleton and his wife Sarah first appears in the 1870 census where they are recorded as small farmers in Chesterfield County. They likely had recently moved to South Carolina as the census indicated that they had not planted any crops the previous year. John Woodcock also appears to have been a new arrival as he too is recorded as not having planted crops the previous year.
Singleton had little more than proverbial 40-acres and a mule. He was farming on approximately fifty acres of land, all of which needed to be cleared, and the only help he and his wife had was that offered by the lone ox they owned.
In a deed, the farm is described as lying on the headwaters of Hills Creek, west of the Charlotte and Camden Road, and adjacent to "the Crossly place." I haven not been able to identify the Crossly place, but Hills Creek still exists, and the Charlotte and Camden road appears to have been approximately at the location of highway Route 601. This puts it somewhere to the northwest of the modern town of Pageland. The plot was probably part of two large farms that Fox had purchased from two planter families (Edgeworths and the Blakeneys).
Biographical details about Singleton are hard to come by. The only information comes from the 1870 census, and there he was recorded twice by two different census-takers. The two records are contradictory, but the more accurate one is likely the one written by a neighbor, Rev. Fox's son Gil Dixon Fox. That record describes Singleton and his wife as newlyweds from England who gotten married in August 1869. Intriguingly, Singleton is listed as a US citizen, but his wife is not.
For Singleton and his wife, life in Chesterfield became especially difficult in the fall of 1870 because it was an election year. The 1868 enfranchisement of formerly enslaved men had swept into power a Republican government, and the 1870 election was conservatives' first chance to regain control. The outcome of the election was disputed with conservatives credibly alleging that the state senator, R. J. Donaldson, had engaged in election fraud. Seen as part of Donaldson's political machine, Singleton and other recent arrivals were targeted for harassment which culminated with the murder of the Republican official Robert Melton in August 1871. By the time of Melton's murder, Singleton's neighbor John Woodcock had left the area. Henry J. Fox left a few years later, and by 1874, Singleton was the only one remaining the area.
In 1870, Singleton was likely renting his farm from Henry J. Fox or the company that he was representing (the South Carolina Plantation Company), but he became a homeowner in December 1871. That month, Fox sold the land to him for $1, probably token payment to make the land transfer valid. This was a time when Rev. Fox would have been desperate to unload the land he had purchased. He was moving to the state capital of Columbia, and the longer he delayed the move, the greater the risk of the suffering a fate similar to that of the murdered Robert Melton.
Robert Singleton must have been made of sterner stuff because he remained on his farm for all of Reconstruction, the only one of the new arrivals to do so. He finally sold the land in April 1876. The timing was fortunate as only a few months later the state descended into chaos and political violence.
Singleton made a good profit off the sale. The farm sold for $475, approximately the farm's estimated value in 1870. The land was bought by William Augustus Evans. Evans was a member of the county's traditional elite. His father had been one of the wealthiest planters in the area before the war, and he had recently been elected to state senate. It would be fascinating to know the details of the negotiations over the sale. Did W. A. Evans purchase the land as a magnanimously gesture to a fallen political opponent? Or was the act a final way of humiliating a hated foe?
Whatever it was, the sale brought an end to efforts to reconstruct Chesterfield County. Robert Singleton and his wife Sarah had left the county by 1880, and they were the last of the immigrants who had moved to Chesterfield to start a new life. For generations, political and economic power would remain in the hands of the descendants of the planter elite, men like W. Augustus Evans, and life in Chesterfield would continue largely as it had before the Civil War only under diminished conditions.
