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. He built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. 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.
In his will, Kingsley called himself a planter, but he was in his younger years first and foremost a slave merchant, and proud to be one: a "very respectful business", in his words. He owned and captained slave ships, and was actively involved in the Atlantic slave trade. A document of 1802 records his arrival at Havana as First Officer of the Superior with 250 Africans, and another of 1808, 60 slaves to a Spanish land grant. He was also pro-slavery, but by the standards of the day, he was a liberal slave owner. He has been called "a man ahead of his time." He was a relatively lenient slaveholder who respected slave families and allowed his enslaved a freedom not routine: the opportunity to hire themselves out when their work was completed, and eventually purchase their freedom for 50% of their market value.
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. This, plus his "interracial" family, resulted in Kingsley's being deeply invested in the Spanish system of slavery and society. 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."
Kingsley changed nationalities based on which would most help his slave trading enterprises. Born British, in 1793 he took an oath of naturalization to the United States. In 1798 he swore allegiance to Denmark, and in 1803 to Spain (Spanish Florida), All residents of Spanish Florida who did not leave automatically became American citizens, as is also seen in Kingsley's appointment to the Florida Territorial Legislature in 1822 (in appointing him, President James Monroe called him "one of the most fit and discreet persons in our territory.") At his death his nationality was Haitian, acquired in 1836.
Early life and education
Kingsley was born in Bristol, England, the second of eight children, to Zephaniah Kingsley Sr., a Quaker from London, and Isabella Johnstone of Scotland. The elder Kingsley moved his family to the Colony of South Carolina in 1770. His son grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where the father became a successful merchant. At the age of 15 he was sent to London for his education, although details are lacking; Zephaniah Kingsley Sr. purchased a rice plantation near Savannah, Georgia, and several other properties throughout the colonies and Caribbean islands. In total, he owned probably around 200 slaves in all, and thousands of acres of land. Like other British Loyalists, Kingsley Sr. was forced to leave South Carolina with his family, and his properties and business were confiscated by the new government. He relocated to New Brunswick, Canada, in 1782 following the American Revolutionary War, where the Crown provided him some land in compensation for his losses, and he again became a successful merchant.
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. His first ventures were in Saint-Domingue, during the Haitian Revolution, where coffee was his main interest as an export crop. He lived in Haiti for a brief period while the fledgling nation was working to create a society based on former slaves transitioning into free citizens. Kingsley traveled frequently, prompted by recurring political unrest among the Caribbean islands.
Kingsley and Blacks
Kingsley stood alone among Southern statesmen in maintaining that Blacks were just as intelligent as Whites. He ridiculed racism, observing that "color ought not to be the base of degradation." In Kingsley's opinion, "the colored race" was "superior to us, physically and morally. They are more healthy, have more graceful forms, softer skin, and sweeter voices. They are more docile and affectionate, more faithful in their attachments, and less prone to mischief, than the white race. If it were not so, they could not have been kept in slavery."
Kingsley himself reports that he spoke "several African dialects". When he was in command of a slaving ship, his crew of sailors were all Black men, most of them enslaved. His farm at Laurel Grove, staffed by Africans without white people present, has been called "a transplanted African village". He supported following African customs. He was in favor of "interracial" marriage, called "amalgamation" at the time, which produced, he explained in a pamphlet Treatise, healthy, beautiful children. 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, and eventually manumitting all of them. He claimed to have married one of them, and the marital status of the others does not seem to have ever been an issue. (Kingsley was not alone in this, as several other prominent Florida men had Black mistresses/common-law wives, during the second Spanish period [1783–1821].) Certainly they could not marry under Territorial Florida law, but since the women were enslaved, what Kingsley did with them did not concern anyone else. He had nine mixed-race children with these wives, and no white children. He educated his children to high standards and worked to ensure he could settle his estate on them and his wives. He encouraged his children to marry whites, his daughters to marry wealthy white men from the East.
His first wife, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, was 13 years old when Kingsley purchased her in Havana in 1806; he remarked on the convenience of buying a wife. He said that he had married her, which he never said of his three other concubines or common-law wives: "celebrated and solemnized by her native African customs altho' never celebrated according to the forms of Christian usage". (Another source says that Kingsley married Anna in Africa, before she was sent or taken to Havana, and that his false testimony of having purchased her in Havana was part of a strategy to make Anna definitively free; he first had to demonstrate that she had been enslaved, before he could free her.) He emancipated Anna Jai when she turned 18, and trusted her with running his plantation when he was away on business. His children with Anna were his favorites; they were brought up in luxury, in his own home, and received excellent European educations.: 154
The instability affected his business interests. Development of new cotton plantations in the Deep South in the United States, especially after Indian Removal, sharply increased the domestic demand for slaves. By 1801, Kingsley was involved in the slave trade. Kingsley began to travel to West Africa to purchase Africans to be traded as slaves between America, Brazil, and the West Indies. In 1798 he became a Danish citizen in the Danish West Indies. He continued to make his living trading slaves and shipping other goods into the 19th century, although the US prohibited the African slave trade in 1807, effective in 1808. Kingsley became a Spanish citizen in Spanish Florida in 1803, and many African slaves were smuggled into the U.S. via Florida.Stowell, p. 2.
As free Blacks became progressively more unwelcome in Florida, and Kingsley was unable to prevent this, for their security he moved his family to the new Black country, Haiti.
Kingsley and Christianity Although born a Quaker, Kingsley made many negative comments on the Christian religion. In his will, he asked that his body be buried "in the nearest, or most convenient place, without any religious ceremony whatsoever, and that it may be excused from the usual indiscreet formalities and parade of washing, dressing, &c., or exposure in any way, but removed just as it died to the common burying ground."
Kingsley opposed allowing the enslaved to participate in Christian religious worship. "All the late insurrections of slaves, he claimed, are to be traced to influential preachers of the gospel."
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."
He made a point of remarking that his marriage to Anna, "celebrated and solemnized by her native African customs," was not Christian. Many of Kingsley's slaves were Muslims; this is also suggested in the semi-circular, crescent arrangement of the cabins, and by Kingsley's four wives. "He seems to have shared some of her [Anna's] Mohammedan principles."
Kingsley's slaving expeditions According to Kingsley, interviewed by Lydia Maria Child, he "carried on the slave trade several years" before settling. Some of his slaves were bought "on the coast of Africa"; that is where he says he bought his wife Anna, although he also said he purchased her in Havana, Cuba (see above).
Laurel Grove Spain was offering land to settlers in order to populate Florida, so Kingsley petitioned the governor for land but was turned down. After waiting, he purchased in 1803 a farm for $5,300 (). It was named Laurel Grove, and its main entrance was a dock on Doctors Lake. Enlarged several times, it occupied two miles along the river and lake, in its entirety where the city of Orange Park is today. (Kingsley eventually owned some in Florida, and was one of the wealthiest men in the Territory.)
Kingsley arrived with 10 slaves and began to cultivate the property immediately. Another source stated he received a substantial land grant because he brought 74 slaves to Florida; the Spaniards distributed land according to the number of slaves brought to work it. The plantation grew oranges, sea island cotton, corn, potatoes, and peas.
Kingsley's first slaves were brought from his family's plantation in South Carolina. By 1811, he had acquired a total of 100 slaves at Laurel Grove, obtained from Africa via Cuba, as Spain continued with the slave trade in its colonies.Stowell, p. 3. Kingsley trained the slaves at Laurel Grove in agricultural vocations to prepare them for future sale; he provided slave buyers from Georgia with skilled artisans, which allowed him to charge 50 percent more than the usual market price per slave. At Laurel Grove, there was a blacksmith shop and a carpenter's shop. Slaves were trained in blacksmithing, carpentry, and cotton ginning, as well as field work.McTammany, Mary Jo (May 26, 1999). "Laurel Grove Was 'Real' Orange Park", Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL), p. 4. Many of Kingsley's slaves were sold to Georgians and other planters in the Southeast; they took their purchases with them, illegally, back to the U.S., where importation of slaves was forbidden as of 1808. Kingsley is indicated with two other men as Floridians who accumulated great wealth from the Florida slave trade between 1808 and 1821.