William Henry Singleton was born into slavery in New Bern, North Carolina. His mother was a slave and his father a white man, thought to be William G Singleton, the brother of the plantation owner, John Singleton. His master tried to sell him multiple times while William was a child, but William always escaped and returned to his mother. As he wrote later in life “my presence on the plantation was continually reminding them of something they wanted to forget” – the rape of his mother by a relative of the plantation owner. For three years he hid under the floor of his mother’s cabin to escape detection. 

When the war broke out William volunteered as an aide for a confederate officer and when the opportunity presented itself, he escaped to the Union army in New Bern. He then helped raise and train a regiment of 1,000 freed slaves after the Emancipation Proclamation, which became the 35th United States Colored Troops, and was promoted to sergeant serving in South Carolina and Florida. His story is told on a Civil Wars Trails Marker in his hometown, New Bern, NC in front of the St. Peter’s AME Zion Church (615 Queen Street). 

After the war he taught himself to read and write. In 1922 he wrote an autobiography called Recollections of My Slavery Days, one of the few written by a former slave who served in the Union army. He relocated to New Haven, Connecticut and served as a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, one of the oldest Black churches in the nation. He died of a heart attack in 1938 at the age of 95 while marching in a parade with other Union Civil War veterans and is buried in Evergreen Cemetery (769 Ella Grasso Boulevard) in New Haven, CT.