In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

ix Preface and Acknowledgments Zephaniah Kingsley Jr., 1765–1843, was born in England, reared in colonial South Carolina, and became British Canadian, American, Danish, Spanish, and again American. He was a ship captain, maritime merchant, Caribbean coffee trader, Atlantic trader in enslaved Africans, slave plantation owner in Florida, and patriarch of a large mixed-race extended family that functioned in a polygamous fashion. Nearing the end of life and alarmed by the increasingly discriminatory race policies that threatened his free black family , Kingsley established a massive agricultural colony in Haiti as a refuge for them and for more than fifty slaves he emancipated and carried to Haiti under indenture contracts. During a long and eventful life, Kingsley witnessed the violence of the American Revolution in Charleston, South Carolina, and exile in New Brunswick, Canada. As a ship captain, he traveled frequently to countries throughout the Atlantic world, witnessed the rebellion that ended slavery in French Saint-Domingue, and sailed to and from ports in North and South America, the Caribbean, and Africa while the violent overseas campaigns of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars were under way. Ships that Kingsley commanded were confiscated by French privateers and ships of the British Royal Navy; he was incarcerated in Martinique and in Florida, and his life was endangered on numerous occasions. During the War of 1812, when British troops captured Washington, D.C., and burned the White House and the U.S. Capitol, Seminole warriors allied with the governor of Spanish East Florida attacked and destroyed Kingsley’s St. Johns River plantation. Renegade bandits from Georgia later attempted to assassinate him. During the decades that historians label the Age of Revolution , Kingsley moved throughout the Atlantic world and accumulated a considerable fortune through the sale of enslaved Africans and the labor of slaves at his Florida plantations. My interest in Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. began in 1975. A friend drove me to Fort George Island in Jacksonville, Florida, for a guided tour of Kingsley x | Preface and Acknowledgments Plantation, then a property of the Florida Park Service (today a National Park Service site). After hearing a brief version of Kingsley’s life story, it came as a surprise to learn that no one had done a scholarly study. I began serious, although intermittent, research a few years later, intending to publish an article in a historical journal. The work went slowly. Credible evidence was hard to find, and when found it was located in distant archives. As I learned more about Kingsley’s involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, his life as a planter and slave owner in Florida, his theories on slavery and race policies, and his controversial interracial family life, I realized that instead of a journal article the product of the research merited a book-length biographical study. Consequently, I began to follow Kingsley’s historical footprints with a sometimes obsessive intensity. I visited archives and historical societies along the Atlantic coast from Florida to New Brunswick in Canada, as well as in England and Denmark in Europe, Senegal and Guinea in West Africa, and St. Thomas and the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. Fitting expensive lengthy research travel into a schedule dominated by teaching obligations and the need to publish on less demanding topics to meet tenure and promotion requirements meant that Kingsley’s tracks grew cold at times. When time was available and my budget permitted, tracking resumed. This biographical portrait is the result. Three goals have guided the research and writing: comprehensiveness, accuracy, and objectivity. I have searched for pertinent manuscripts and official documents regardless of where they were located, with the goal of writing a complete biographical portrait of Kingsley even though it meant delaying publication for several years. I also consulted a wide array of secondary sources to fulfill my second goal of accurately interpreting Kingsley in the context of the dramatic events of the revolutionary era in which he lived. That goal is perhaps less important for historians specializing in the era, but for a general readership more extensive interpretation and explanation is necessary. My intent throughout has been to write a manuscript for general readers and scholars alike. The third goal was to write an objective narrative about a controversial man whose main motivation was to amass a fortune to protect himself and his family against the uncertainties of life in the Age of Revolution. This has not been easy. Kingsley amassed a fortune , but it came from participation in the Atlantic...

Share