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156 10 “Discreetly Restrained under the Patriarchal System” Life and Labor at Kingsley’s Plantations In early1815,ZephaniahKingsleymovedtoFortGeorgeIsland,hisprimary residence for the next twenty years. In the previous decade he had been an absentee owner and intermittent resident at Laurel Grove Plantation, observing and directing, but his attention was primarily focused on maritime enterprise. Beginning in 1815, he became involved in the day-to-day operations of Fort George Island and his other properties. Eventually,Kingsleyexpandedhispropertyholdingstomorethan17,000 acres in five of today’s northeast Florida counties: Nassau, Duval, Clay, St. Johns, and Putnam. Other than 2,500 acres at White Oak Plantation on the south bank of the St. Marys River in Nassau County, Kingsley’s properties were primarily located along the St. Johns River. They included Fort George Island and neighboring Batten Island, St. Johns Bluff and Sawmill Creek, Reddy’s Point and Baxter’s Bluff (aka St. Isabel), San Jose (aka Yellow Bluff), Little San Jose (aka Ashley’s Old Field), Naranjal de San Jose, Goodbys Creek, and Beauclerc Bluff, all in Duval County; Laurel Grove, in Clay County; Pivot Swamp, Twelve-Mile Swamp, Six-Mile Creek, Chancery , Wanton’s Island, Forrester Point, Deep Creek, Buena Vista, and Orange Grove (also known as Buena Vista Point) in St. Johns County; and Drayton Island and a 400-acre tract on the east shore of Lake George in Putnam County.1 Kingsley also became the owner of a large number of human properties. The numbers of enslaved men and women he owned varied from 250 to 300 in the 1820s and 1830s to the 84 who lived at his San Jose Plantation when he died in 1843. It was during the years that he personally managed Figure 5. Northeast Florida properties owned by Zephaniah Kingsley. With the exception of White Oak Plantation on the St. Marys River, Kingsley’s East Florida plantations and farms were located along the St. Johns River. Kingsley also owned properties that adjoined or were nearby those identified on this map. Some of his properties were sold by the time of his death in 1843, but titles to most of the tracts were transferred to members of his family. Map drawn by Jerome Humery of Cranberry Point Computers, Corea, Maine. 158 | Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World hisFloridaplantationsthatKingsleydevelopedtheviewsonraceandcaste, and the managerial practices regarding slave labor that became the basis for his proslavery booklet, A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society.2 Kingsley would no doubt have chosen his former career as an Atlantic maritime trader over day-to-day supervision of planting operations at his slave plantations. But to have done so in the aftermath of the Patriot insurgency , the British coastal blockade, and the invasions of East Florida between 1812 and 1814 would have required moving to another Spanish colony . Kingsley had learned from repeated personal tragedies how precarious life and fortune could be in the Age of Revolution. Kingsley was the fourth Anglo-American planter to acquire title to Fort George Island, and the third to occupy the owner’s wood-frame dwelling built for John McQueen in 1798. The dwelling’s foundation of coquina rock came from a quarry at Anastasia Island, across the Matanzas River from St. Augustine. The building had a full-size basement with cooking facilities and numerous ventilation openings. On the first floor a rectangular “great room” in the center of the house was divided by large folding doors and flanked by six-foot fireplaces on the east and west walls. Doors from the great room opened to attached piazzas on the north and south that were enclosed by wooden blinds. Access to the bedrooms at each of the four corners was gained via the piazzas. The second floor of the dwelling was divided into two large bedrooms above the great room and was accessed by stairs that led upward from the south piazza. The observation deck on the peak of the roof was reached through the attic.3 Construction of permanent housing for Kingsley’s slaves began as soon astheymovedintothetemporarydwellingserectedonarrivalinDecember 1813. The labor force was tasked with a variety of work assignments: some shouldered axes and machetes and cleared fields of weeds and brush for corn, peas, and beans, while others entered the nearby forest to fell trees and split and saw logs. A small detail of men loaded oyster shells from the huge shellfish refuse mounds found on the island onto mule-drawn wagons to carry back to the residential complex. A...

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