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. 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 casually 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.

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 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.