John Ker (planter)

The MCS modeled itself after the American Colonization Society, the national organization for which Ker later served as a vice president.

His father, David Ker (1758–1805), born in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland and of Scottish ancestry, immigrated with his wife Mary to the United States in the 1780s.

He served as the first President of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which was chartered in 1789 and opened for students in 1795.

President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) appointed Ker's father to the Supreme Court of Mississippi.

[3] Ker also became a planter, owning the Good Hope Plantation in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, which produced cotton as a commodity crop, based on slave labor.

[2][10] They had four sons and two daughters: Ker and his family summered at Linden, a mansion on the bluffs above the river in Natchez, Mississippi.