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7 1 The Kingsley Family, Charleston, and the American Revolution After eight weeks crossing the Atlantic from England, Zephaniah and Isabella Johnston Kingsley arrived at a wharf on the Cooper River in Charleston Harbor in late December 1770. Standing at the ship’s rail with them were their children: Mary, age six, Zephaniah Jr., five, George, two, and Catherine, four months. Charleston would be home to the Kingsley children for the next fourteen years.1 Isabella’s brother Charles Johnston was undoubtedly waiting at the wharf to lead the Kingsleys over the sand streets of Charleston to their residence on Bedon’s Alley, south of Broad Street between Elliott and Tradd Streets. The rented structure was to be both family residence and retail store, with the living quarters situated above the ground-floor commercial space, a common practice for merchants in Charleston other than the very wealthy. Charles Johnston had migrated from Scotland to Charleston in 1763 and became a partner in a dry goods retail store with another Scot, John Simpson, a future attorney general of South Carolina. John Graham, Savannah’s leading merchant and a future lieutenant governor of Georgia, also became a partner of Johnston and Simpson. It is likely that Johnston encouraged Isabella and her husband to move to Charleston and extended a line of credit to a London merchant that enabled Kingsley to acquire the cloth and other dry goods he needed to start a new business.2 Like many Britons who migrated to the North American colonies in the decades prior to the American Revolution, Zephaniah and Isabella Kingsley arrived in Charleston after failing to achieve success in England. After marrying in London in 1763, they moved to Bristol, England, and settled 8 | Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World on Wine Street.3 Zephaniah was reared in the wool-growing region of Lincolnshire , where cloth merchants had prospered for centuries from exports to Europe. He moved to London after the wool and cloth trades shifted to that city and to ports on England’s west coast. A cloth merchant in London, Kingsley followed the same occupation in Bristol, and he achieved brief success at a store on Wine Street.4 Bristol, one hundred miles west of London, was England’s third-largest city in the 1760s and a thriving center for exports to the British colonies in North America and the West Indies. Large supplies of cotton cloth and woolen goods from the surrounding region were brought to wharves on the Avon River at Bristol, where merchants bundled them with products manufactured locally and dispatched them to American markets. Wholesale linen drapers were prominent among Bristol’s smaller exporters. A 1768 city directory for Bristol lists five linen drapers as well as cloth dyers (known then as “colour men”), cotton dealers, haberdashers, silk dyers, and several other mercantile establishments located near the Kingsley residence and business on Wine Street.5 Duringtheeighteenthcentury,Bristolmerchantsandshipcaptainswere also deeply involved in the Atlantic trade in enslaved Africans. From the Figure 1. “A View of Charles-Town, the capital of South Carolina in North America,” original painting by T. Melish, engraved by C. Canot, London, 1768. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington , D.C. The Kingsley Family, Charleston, and the American Revolution | 9 late seventeenth century to 1807, more than two thousand ships were fitted out for the African slave trade at Bristol’s wharves. The vessels returned with sugar, rum, tobacco, rice, cotton, and other produce from American plantations.6 Four children were born to Isabella and Zephaniah during the five years they lived in Bristol: Mary on August 24, 1764; Zephaniah Jr. on December 4, 1765; Johnston on May 5, 1767; and George on October 11, 1768. The birthsarerecordedintheregisteroftheSocietyofFriends,whichissurprising since the parents were married by a curate of the Church of England. Contemporary records of meetings of Friends at Bristol indicate that “marriagebyapriest ”wasconsideredaserioustransgressionofQuakerpractice. Members transferring from other meetings were expected to bring records and letters of introduction from their previous meeting houses, and both men and women were subjected to “careful inquiry” at the Bristol meeting regarding “clearness of marriage.” Records of the Bristol Meeting are mute on the specific case of Zephaniah and Isabella Kingsley, indicating that Isabella converted to the faith of her husband and the newlyweds were accepted at Bristol without punishment. Isabella, a native of Scotland and an Anglican before marriage, worshipped as a Quaker for the rest of her life.7 In early 1769, Zephaniah...

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