Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World: Slave Trader, Plantation Owner, Emancipator

Introduction

1 Introduction Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, was reared in Charleston, South Carolina, and resided in New Brunswick in Canada after his father’s exile at the end of the American Revolution. He became a West Indies merchant, African slave trader, ship captain, plantation owner, slave master, polygamist, father of mixed-race children, and, late in life, the founder of a vast agricultural settlement in Haiti as a refuge for his free colored children and wives. A controversial figure for his views on manumission and his unorthodox marital arrangements, Kingsley is known today for his 1820s publication, A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society, and for his plantation at Fort George Island in Duval County, Florida. The plantation site is now a featured attraction of the Timucuan Ecological and HistoricalPreserve,aNationalParkServicesitethatisvisitedbythousands of tourists each year. Anta Majigeen Ndiaye, the African woman Kingsley acknowledged as his wife but never legally married, is also remembered in Florida. Anta was of Wolof ethnicity born in 1793 in Jolof, in today’s Senegal. Her father was a member of the ruling lineage of Jolof, which explains the persistent legend that Anta was an “African Princess.” Her privileged status ended in her thirteenth year, when slave raiders attacked her village and marched her in shackles to the coast of Senegal. Sent to a holding pen on the Island of Gorée, Anta was sold to a slave trader and carried in the hold of a slave ship across the Atlantic Ocean to Havana, Cuba. In September 1806, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. purchased Anta there and transported her to his plantation in Spanish East Florida. In Florida, Anta was generally known as Anna 2 | Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World Kingsley, but also as Anna Madgigine or Anna Jai, commemorating the African name of her mother, Majigeen, and the family name of her father, Ndiaye. In March 1811, Anna was emancipated, along with three children fathered by Kingsley. She was eighteen years old at the time. Anna Kingsley became a planter and a slave owner in her own right. Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. was born in Bristol, England, in December 1765. His mother, Isabella Johnstone, was a native of Scotland. His father, Zephaniah Kingsley Sr., was a native of Lincolnshire, England, and a third-generation Quaker. Kingsley Sr. moved his family to Charleston, South Carolina, in 1770 and became a successful merchant. As a child, Zephaniah Jr. witnessedtheexcitementofrevolutionaryfermentthatwastransformedintoa war for independence. When the war ended, Kingsley Sr. was banished for loyal support of King George III. The Kingsley home and rural properties were confiscated, the mercantile business and accumulated savings lost. The family relocated to the British province of New Brunswick, Canada, where Kingsley Sr. again became a successful merchant. He also became the owner of ships engaged in the Atlantic and Caribbean trade that provided the training and opportunity for his eldest son to launch a career as a ship captain and maritime merchant. By 1793, Kingsley Jr. was trading for sugar and coffee at Jamaica, SaintDomingue , and other Caribbean islands to St. John, New Brunswick, as well as at Savannah and Charleston in the United States. His ship, the Argo, was seized by a privateer that year and sold at an admiralty court auction held at Charleston. With France and Britain at war, privateers licensed by each nation captured and confiscated commercial vessels owned by citizens of their enemy. Kingsley swore to an oath of loyalty and became a citizen of the United States in 1793, thus minimizing his danger at sea by sailingundertheflagofaneutralnation.Shipsflyingflagsofneutralnations were not immune from danger in the Caribbean while the international warfare stemming from the French Revolution was under way. In 1794, British Royal Navy vessels seized another ship under Kingsley’s command at Martinique. Kingsley also became involved in the international trade in enslaved Africans . Looking back on his early life, he said in 1826 that he had “travelled in the early years of his life to Africa, and even been concerned in the hideous traffic of slaves.” He resided in “all the West India colonies,” including Introduction | 3 several years in “Cuba and Saint Domingo, as well as the mainland of South America.” Between 1793 and 1797, when the southern region of SaintDomingue was occupied by Britain while a massive slave rebellion was under way, Kingsley lived at Jeremie, in Grand Anse, from where he rode out on horseback through “the south and west of St. Domingo . . . through woods and over mountains, with...