Tuesday Forgotten American Blogging: Benjamin "Pap" Singleton

When the Civil War ended, many ex-slaves didn't really know what to do. They had no education, no land, no money, no possessions. But they wanted their freedom. They wanted land of their own. They wanted to labor for themselves and not their ex-masters. If possible, they wanted to live as far from whites as possible. But most blacks did not have these opportunities. Whites dominated the entire country. Blacks were no more welcome in the North than the South. They could not buy land. Despite the temporary respite of Reconstruction, most blacks had to resort to sharecropping by the 1880s and lived only a marginally better existence than they 25 years before, though it is impossible to overestimate the importance erasing slavery. At least black families could live together without fear of separation.

African-Americans constantly worked to gain increased freedoms. In 1879, hundreds of ex-slaves from North Carolina moved to Texas to try and claim public lands. Denied by provisions of the Texas Homestead Act, most ended up working as sharecroppers as they would have done back home. But where many thousands of blacks envisioned moving was Kansas. Much of Kansas remained to be settled by non-Indians. The federal Homestead Act did not discriminate by race and the Republican Party dominated Kansas politics. During the 1870s and early 1880s, 25,000 black emigrants moved to Kansas.

The most successful group to make this move was the Tennessee Real Estate and Home Association, founded by Benjamin "Pap" Singleton. Born a slave near Nashville in 1809, Singleton was trained as a cabinetmaker. He had escaped slavery and moved to Detroit, where he operated a boarding house that became a key stop on the Underground Railroad. After the war, he returned to Nashville to resume his life as a carpenter. Believing that the salvation of southern blacks rested in owning farms rather than working for others, Singleton began to plan moving ex-slaves to Kansas. He visited Kansas in 1873 and was impressed by its potential. He led his first party west in 1878, at the age of 69, where he established a settlement at Dunlop. Whites controlled much of the best land in this area, but colonists still bought 7500 acres to grow crops.

Ultimately, Dunlop wasn't so successful. The colony peaked at 1000 people in the early 1880s and declined to less than 500 by 1900 as many blacks moved to the city. Much of the reason for the decline of the colony rests with the good intentions of Kansas Governor John St. John, who established the Kansas Freedmen's Relief Association (KRFA) to help out the Exodusters, as these blacks settlers became known. But KRFA gave blacks very small plots of land, too small to make it on the Kansas prairie. Most of these farms failed and blacks moved to the cities in order to make a better living.

Singleton continued to work in the 1880s for his people, although he wrote in 1880, "I am now getting too old, and I think it would be better to send some one more competent that is identified with the emigration and has the interest of the race at heart, and not his own pocket; some one that has heretofore directed and established colonies and is known in the South." He became head of the United Colored Links, a black labor group in Kansas that wanted to unite all black people to improve the lot of the entire race. They tried to work with white labor organizations, though these white organizations accused blacks of undercutting wages. He continued to work to get African-Americans to move to Kansas. At the end of his life, his work for his race combined with increasingly transcendental ideas about spirituality and the upcoming end of the world before dying in 1892.

Although the story of the Exodusters is far more complicated than this, Pap Singleton is a great example how ex-slaves fought for freedom until the day they died. They are almost entirely forgotten about today and that is a shame.

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