An Interesting Link to O.R. Singleton

Note: This is a follow-up to my piece here.

AI Search Leads to a Mention of the Mississippi Congressman

I have trepidatiously been dipping my toes into the realm of conducting research with ChatGPT and Perplexidy.ai. What I've found is that this type of AI, so far, is to be embraced rather than feared. I say this because I have very strong misgivings about the AI that may come that will be feared. But, I digress.

Samuel Bradley Wiggin, 1854-1889. The Rauner Special Collections Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.

A recent Perplexity.ai search led me to find letters written by one Samuel Bradley Wiggin, who had mentioed in one or more of the letters O.R. Singleton, the Mississippi lawyer, politician, plantation owner and slaveholder who signed Robert Jefferson’s freedom papers. A man who, despite serving in both the U.S. Congress and in the Confederate Congress, there seems to be little out there to find.

Wiggin was born on 22 November 1854 to Thomas Edwin Alphonso Ruthven and Sarah Jane (Bradley) Wiggin in Saco, York County, Maine. His father, who went by Edwin, was an attorney in York County and served in the Maine State Senate before moving to Boston, Massachusetts, where he had a successful law practice.

While a student at Dartmouth College, Samuel, or “Sam,” took a year’s leave of absence to take a job teaching in Lexington, Holmes County, Mississippi, from 1873 to 1874. While there, he wrote many letters back home to his mother, as well as some to his father and siblings, Elizabeth Evelyn “Lizzie” Wiggin and Robert Charles Wiggin.

Sadly, Sam Wiggin died suddenly at age 35 of a cerebral hemmorrhage. I wonder if this may have been a belated complication from having been knocked unconscious after a near collision by him and the stallion he was riding and a farm wagon that appeared as he rounded a turn; an incident he described in one of the letters.

It seems his family donated all of the letters he wrote during this his time in Mississippi and from other periods of his short life to his alma mater; they are held at Dartmouth’s Rauer Special Collections Library.

Librarian Scout Noffke graciously scanned all of Samuel’s letters and sent them to me, saying it was be more efficient than trying to find only the ones I was asking about. I’m glad he did, because Wiggin had a interesting story and, dying so young, is mostly forgotten to history. I like writing about such people.

Wiggin taught a negro school in Mississippi

Sam Wiggin’s time in Lexington was spent teaching at a school for black children located just out of town. He had been offered a job teaching at the white school in town, but told his mother, “I don’t like it.” The page about Wiggin on the Dartmouth website suggests he may have been recruited by the Freedman's Bureau, but I have found no documentation yet to support that premise. He may simply have been enticed there by one of his friends, Jordan, who had already been living in Lexington for a couple of years, as mentioned in one of the letters.

Suffice it to say that Sam Wiggin wasn’t much impressed with Lexington residents of either race. Though he wrote with a bit more compassion about his black students in some letters, in another he was brutally honest about his observations, writing:

“A negro is and never can be the equal of the white. My scholars have not one third that power of the mind of white children a the same age. Nor do they have that desire to learn,” Wiggin writes. “They are like their parents thick-sculled, dull of comprehension and slow to learn.”

But he was none too impressed with the whites in the area, whom he saw as nearly as “ignorant” as he viewed their recently freed counterparts. But he said he felt safer around the “darkies” than the whites, who hated him because he was a Yankee and simply put him in the same category as the hated carpet-baggers. In fact, he refers to the hotel where he and other northern teachers were staying as “Carpet Bag Headquarters” at the beginning of one letter.

In a subsequent paragraph to the above quote, Wiggin continues:

“In fact, in this part of the country white and black alike are going down the hill. The South, for the next centery, is doomed. I see no hope for it. The Devil has a mortgage on it and he means to foreclose. …”

In a later letter, he writes:

“I have as yet met no high-toned southern gentlemen, but have found some decidedly low-toned ones. I find that southern chivalry consists in cursing Yankees and ‘niggers’ and drinking whiskey. Give me the thieving carpet bagger; I admit that he steals, that he plunders, that he is running every southern state into bankruptcy, but after all his rascality, it is not so disgusting …"  [Sadly, the rest of letter is missing.]

A Meeting with the Hon. O.R. Singleton

Wiggin apparently made an appointment to meet Singleton in Canton, Mississippi, about 40 miles north of Lexington, on a mission to scope out a potential business deal for his father. He describes that visit briefly in separate letters to his mother and father, both dated 2 January 1874.

To his mother, he wrote:

“Sunday I went to Canton to look up father’s business and had a pleasant time. I met the only gentleman whom I have thus far in the South. Col. O.R. Singleton, an ex-federal and confederate congessman. He received me very courteously, but I took mighty good care not to let him know that I was teaching niggers. In that case I fear that my reception would have been very different. Such men as he are very rarely met in this state. The Colonels courtesy was only on the surface however, and because he thought that he could make something out of me.”

To his father:

“I take the first opportunity to inform you of the results of my Canton trip. I went to Canton last Sunday evening in company with Jordan. The town is quite a considerable one, the shire town of Madison Co., and the best looking place that I’ve yet seen in the state. Soon after reaching Canton I was introduced to the Hon. O.R. Singleton, the resident of the company, and thro’ him and by personal inspection I think I have found out the status of the concern. It is as follows: a company was organized, the stock being mostly held by Canton parties, with a capital of eighty thousand dollars. Sixty-five thousand [was] paid in, and the company engaged one J.H. Hintermister to superintend the construction of the mill and put it in operation. According to Singleton’s representation he spent needlessly or stole about twenty thousand dollars.

“All of the sixty-five thousand being gone Hintermister persuaded the directors to mortgage the property for twenty-three thousand dollars, which would complete the mill, as he said, and put it in operation. This was done and a deed of trust on the property given the holders of the mortgage. Under this deed of trust the property is advertised to be sold on the twenty-sixth of January next. At the time it was given Hintermister was sent north with ten thousand dollars of the [company’s] bonds which he was to place while there. He has appropriated them and has never returned to the south. Singleton represents him as trying to get control of the entire concern, through a firm called Alfred Marion & Co of New York City. This, then, is the conviction of the company. The stock is worth absolutely nothing.” (Emphasis by the writer.)

Indeed, young Wiggin’s information from his meeting with Singleton must have been dead on. Even using the above-mentioned AI program, I couldn’t find anything about the “Canton Cotton Mill Co.” except a front-page newspaper story from when it was incorporated on the front page of the 5 August 1870, issue of The Weekly Mississippi Pilot of Jackson, Mississippi.

I found advertisements in the Canton American Citizen alerting area cotton planters about the mill’s services that had been placed by Hintermister throughout 1872, but nothing after. An Ancestry.com search, so far, has provided no leads for this person. I have found a person by that name, but he was an artist born in Switzerland. Nothing has turned up in Ancestry or using AI. I wonder if that was even his real name?

So now, of course, I am dying to know what happened to the money and the alleged scoundrel who allegedly absconded with it, and how much, if any, Singleton may have suffered from the losses.

But this will have to be a rabbit hole for another day.