Zephaniah Kingsley
Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (December 4, 1765 – September 14, 1843) was an English-born planter, merchant and slave trader who moved as a child with his family to the Province of South Carolina and enjoyed a successful mercantile career.
Finding his large and complicated family progressively more insecure in Florida, he moved them to a vanished plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in what was then Haiti but soon became part of the Dominican Republic.
Kingsley's main business in Spanish Florida was providing a ready supply of well-trained slaves, who were smuggled by or to planters of Georgia and South Carolina.
As in the French colonies, certain rights were provided to a class of free people of color, and children of female slaves were allowed to inherit property from their white fathers.
"In the Spanish Floridas free people of color...enjoyed tremendously elevated status when compared to virtually any other person of African descent in North America.
[1]: 1–2 At the age of 15 he was sent to London for his education, although details are lacking;[4]: 146 Zephaniah Kingsley Sr. purchased a rice plantation near Savannah, Georgia, and several other properties throughout the colonies and Caribbean islands.
[1]: 2 [4][13]: 23 His son Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. returned to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1793, swore his allegiance to the United States, and began a career as a shipping merchant.
He followed his own advice, and took four enslaved African women as concubines or common-law wives, practicing polygamy, as was common in the Muslim culture they came from,[18]: 42 [2]: 32–33 and eventually manumitting all of them.
Development of new cotton plantations in the Deep South in the United States, especially after Indian Removal, sharply increased the domestic demand for slaves.
"[22]: 105 [23]: 126 My object in this long digression is to show the danger...of superstition (by some called religion) among Negroes whose ignorance and want of rationality render them fit subjects.
[23]: 124 According to Kingsley, "I encouraged dancing, merriment, and dress, for which Saturday afternoon and Sunday were dedicated, and after allowance their time was usually employed in hoeing their corn and getting a supply of fish for the week.
[28]: 106–107 In 1806, Kingsley, called "one of Florida's most flamboyent slaveholders",[22]: 105 took a trip to Cuba, where he purchased Anna Madgigine Jai (born as Anta Majigeen Ndiaye), a 13-year-old Wolof girl from what is now Senegal.
The accusation was likely politically motivated, as Kingsley suddenly resigned his position on the Territorial Council, and McIntosh was angry about the public treatment he had received since the war for his role in it.
[28]: 306 Abandoning Laurel Grove, in 1814 Kingsley and Anna moved to a plantation on Fort George Island at the mouth of the St. Johns River; they lived there for 25 years.
[13]: 133 When he entertained visitors at his Fort George plantation, Anna sat "at the head of the table"; they were "surrounded by healthy and handsome children" in a parlor decorated with portraits of African women.
I encouraged as much as possible dancing, merriment and dress, for which Saturday afternoon and night, and Sunday morning were dedicated; and, after allowance, their time was usually employed in hoeing their corn, and getting a supply of fish for the week.
This system contrasted with the standing practice in which Kingsley was invested, which, based on Spanish law as implemented in Florida, supported three social tiers: whites, free people of color, and slaves.
[14]: 12 To address these issues, in 1828 Kingsley published a pamphlet, titled A Treatise on the Patriarchal or Co-operative System of Society as it Exists in some Governments and Colonies in America, and in the United States, under the Name of Slavery, with its Necessity and Advantages.
His name was added in the 2nd edition, with the note that he is a "slave owner", who has lived "by planting in Florida for the last twenty-five years, disavow[ing] all other motives but that of increasing the value of his property."
[4][13]: 148 He wrote that Africans were better suited than Europeans for labor in hot climates (a shared stereotype), and that their happiness was maximized when they were rigidly controlled; their contentment was greater than whites of a similar class.
The governor was quoted in newspapers making scathingly critical remarks about Kingsley's motives and his mixed-race family after the planter petitioned to have Duval removed from his office for corruption.
Florida's congressional delegate, Joseph M. White, called Kingsley a "respectful gentleman" and a "classical scholar", "who would consider it a degradation to be put on a footing with Governor Duval in point of intellect, or education.
[14]: 19 Kingsley highlighted its successes as a nation of free Blacks in his treatise, writing: [U]nder a just and prudent system of management, negroes are safe, permanent, productive and growing property, and easily governed; that they are not naturally desirous of changes, but are sober, discreet, honest and obliging, are less troublesome, and possess a much better moral character than the ordinary class of corrupted whites of a similar condition.
Kingsley was progressively more concerned that his marriage to Anna might not be recognized in the United States, and, in the event of his death, his concubines Flora, Sarah, Munsilna McGundo, and their mixed-race children might be confiscated and sold as slaves.
Because of Haitian law at the time, which prohibited non-citizen whites from owning land, Zephaniah held Mayorasgo de Koka in the name of his mixed-race eldest son George Kingsley.
Anna Madgigine Jai, who kept her African name through the marriage, returned to Florida in 1846 to oppose Kingsley's white relatives in court in Duval County.
Arguing her case within the dictates of the Adams–Onís Treaty, she was successful; it was an extraordinary achievement in light of the state and local policy that was hostile toward freed slaves or blacks of any status.
The National Park Service established the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve in 1988 and acquired 60 acres (0.24 km2) of land surrounding the Kingsley Plantation buildings in 1991.
[43] Kingsley's writings, called "eloquent" by a modern scholar,[6]: 46 were mainly on the topic of slavery: its inevitability; how it should be governed; and how free Blacks, in his view, made a country more secure.
They have been collected, edited, and thoroughly annotated by Daniel W. Stowell in Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley (University Press of Florida, 2000), a volume called "deeply researched" and "gracefully presented" in a review.
