A month ago, South Carolina's governor signed legislation requiring inmates on death row to choose between the electric chair and the firing squad as the means of their executions. In the 1880s, those found guilty of a capital crime were likely sentenced to "hang by the neck until dead." Exactly 139 years ago today, on June 23, 1882, Williamsburg County witnessed perhaps its most publicized hangings, when Lucinda Tisdale, Anderson Singleton, Boston Singletary, and Abram Anderson were all hanged simultaneously on one scaffold.
Four-and-a-half months earlier, a small article had appeared in many newspapers across the country, announcing the arrest of Lucinda Tisdale, age 25, and Anderson Singleton, 35, charged with the murder of Lucinda's sister, Phoebie, 26. Some of the stories described a brutal altercation, which apparently took place on January 31, 1882, in which Singleton had crushed Phoebie Tisdale's head with a shovel, while Lucinda stabbed her sister in the heart. They then allegedly disposed of the body in a deep ditch. They were awaiting trial in the Williamsburg County Jail.
Then, on March 9, 1882, a store in downtown Kingstree, owned by Sheriff S.P. Brockinton, burned to the ground. Arson was suspected, and after some investigation, five men, Titus Pendergrass, William Wilson, Boston Eaddy, Boston Singletary, and Abram Anderson were arrested and charged with burglary and arson.
All of the defendants were tried at the June term of General Sessions Court. Because of the notoriety of these two cases, the courtroom was filled to overflowing.
In the arson case, Pendergrass and Wilson, in an attempt to save their own necks, turned state's evidence against the other three. Testimony indicated that all of these defendants were active in the local Methodist Church, with at least three of them serving as Class Leaders. It was also divulged that the plot to break into the store was hatched at a church meeting.
They decided, the story went, that they would break in at midnight when everyone in the village should be asleep. According to testimony, the five met behind the store. There Pendergrass and Wilson announced that they had decided that once they had taken what they wanted from the store, they should set it on fire. The others were opposed to this plan, but after some argument, Pendergrass and Wilson wore them down. Three of them entered the back of the store through a window they had jimmied open while the other two stood guard. All were reportedly heavily armed. After filling several large bags with merchandise and rifling the till for any money they could find, they lit the fire and fled the scene.
Two young attorneys, J.F. Dargan and J.R. Lambson represented the five at trial. William Wilson was acquitted by the jury, while Pendergrass and Eaddy were sentenced to life imprisonment. Although Anderson and Singletary pleaded "not guilty," the jury was not convinced, and the judge sentenced was them to death. South Carolina law had recently changed to make arson a capital offense, and this were only the second case in which defendants were sentenced to death for arson. Both Anderson and Singletary appeared not to have realized they could be sentenced to death, but showed no remorse. In fact, in the days between their sentence and their execution, they tried several times to break out of jail, and not succeeding, became "troublesome prisoners."
In the murder trial, Capt. John A. Kelley, representing the defendants, moved that Lucinda Tisdale and Anderson Singleton be arraigned and tried separately, a request the judge granted. Singleton was tried first, pleading "not guilty." The jury was composed of 12 white men. Several black men had been drawn, but the defendant rejected all of them. Singleton wept openly during the trial, and completely broke down when the jury returned a guilty verdict after only 10 minutes' deliberation.
On the other hand, Lucinda Tisdale pleaded guilty, but took the opportunity when making her plea to inform the judge and jury that they should not punish her as she had killed her sister in self defense. Her story was that both she and her sister worked for a family whose home was a mile from Anderson Singleton's, Phoebie's common-law husband. Lucinda and Phoebie walked to and from work together each day and, Lucinda said, on the evening of January 31, while on the way home, they had quarreled resulting in Phoebie pulling a knife on her. Lucinda maintained that in order to save her life, she picked up what she thought was a piece of wood, but in reality was a hunk of iron, and bashed Phoebie in the head three times. She said Phoebie did not seem to be hurt badly, however, and wandered off into the woods, where she afterwards died.
Other testimony, however, painted a different story. Anderson Singleton had taken Phoebie Tisdale as his common-law wife. (The 1880 census shows Phoebie (Phiby) Tisdale, occupation cook, living with James Singleton, a divorced laborer. James could have been Anderson's first or middle name.) They appeared to get along well until Phoebie's sister, Lucinda, started hanging around the house. Anderson was attracted to her as she was younger and prettier than Phoebie, so he and Lucinda began plotting ways to get rid of Phoebie. They hid an iron pipe on the route Lucinda and Phoebie took coming home from work, and that afternoon, Lucinda started an argument, reached for the pipe and smashed her sister's head in. The physician who performed the autopsy testified that any one of the three blows could have killed her.
Anderson then appeared, and he and Lucinda carried the body to Anderson's house where they stashed it in the crawl space until after dark. Then they carried it into the woods where they buried it in a shallow grave beneath a pine tree. They obviously assumed no one would find the body, but the next day a laborer walking through the woods, stepped on the grave and his foot sank into the earth. He and three friends exhumed the body and carried it to Kingstree. The coroner quickly empaneled a jury which was about to return a verdict of murder by person or persons unknown when Lucinda arrived and asked for permission to make a statement. She confessed to killing her sister and also implicated Singleton. The jury also found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to death, the first woman in Williamsburg County to be hanged. The evidence presented against the two was so convincing that no attempt was made to get the governor to stay their execution.
Friday, June 23, the day of their executions dawned clear and hot. Although the hanging was to take place on the jail grounds behind a high fence at noon, crowds began streaming into Kingstree early that morning. The New York Herald sent a reporter to cover the hanging. He began his story, "Early this morning while the residents of this peaceful little town were in their sweetest slumbers, I made a visit to the County Jail for the purpose of interviewing the four criminals who were sentenced to die on the gallows today."
He wrote that the four were confined in separate cells on the second floor of the jail. He first talked to Lucinda Tisdale who he said appeared happy, laughing flippantly as she continued to assert that she had killed her sister in self-defense. Anderson Singleton, however, was found lying on the floor of his cell while his mother, outside the cell, tried to console him. The reporter noted that Singleton was emaciated, saying he had neither eaten nor slept in four days. He told the reporter that the jailers had been kind to him, but that knowing he was to be killed for a crime he didn't commit was driving him mad. But he knew his sins had been forgiven and that he was going to his God.
Both Singletary and Anderson also spoke to the reporter, saying that one of their fellow defendants had given false testimony against them at the trial in order to save himself. They both felt that God would intervene at the last moment, and they would be freed.
At 11 a.m., dressed in new clothes provided by the sheriff, they were led out of their cells where three African-American ministers counseled them. The reporter wrote, "All knelt down and one of the most fervent, eloquent and powerful prayers I have ever heard from mortal lips was offered by a young mulatto preacher named Beaman." A psalm was read and the whole group sang "Come let us join our friends above..." with Anderson Singleton and Lucinda Tisdale singing in loud, shrill voices.
At 11:30, they marched down the stairs and out to the back of the jail where the gallows stood. It was surrounded by a high fence to conceal it from the crowds. Members of the Kingstree Light Infantry were drawn up in a line around the inner circle of the enclosure.
At noon, after the sheriff had secured their arms and legs, settled the nooses around their necks, and adjusted the black caps above their heads, the signal was given, and the hatchet descended "with force and precision, severing the stout rope which held up the platform." When the platform dropped away, the four fell five feet. "The woman's neck snapped like a whipcord," and she died without a struggle. All three of the men, however, strangled, suffering violently before death. Anderson Singleton, in particular, died a very hard death. Twenty-five minutes after the rope was severed, the four were cut down from the gallows.
The Herald reporter wrote "During the execution, an immense crowd of men, women, and children were gathered in the streets near the jail, and the houses, fences, and trees on every side were filled with spectators." The Chicago Daily News noted, "Fifty persons witnessed the execution, but thousands were in the streets near the jail."
In the aftermath of the hangings, many newspapers portrayed Lucinda Tisdale as a brazen, hard-bitten killer, while others believed she had more courage than any of the three men executed with her. She remains the only woman ever hanged in Williamsburg County.
In Ghosts and Legends of Charleston, South Carolina, Denise Roffe includes the story of Lucinda Tisdale. While I am not sure of the exact location of the County Jail in 1882, Roffe believes it was located on the corner of Jackson and Short (then Jail and Nelson) streets, where the jail constructed in 1953 was also located. She writes, "An officer who once worked at the detention center said that many of the inmates have reported hearing a mumbling woman's voice on late, quiet nights. Others have reported being awakened by a feeling of someone being in the cell with them, only to see a glowing apparition of a young black woman mumbling and wringing her hands as she passes through the walls from cell to cell."
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