63 Facts About Zephaniah Kingsley

Zephaniah Kingsley built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is Jacksonville, Florida.

Zephaniah Kingsley served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821.

Zephaniah Kingsley owned and captained slave ships, and was actively involved in the Atlantic slave trade.

Zephaniah Kingsley was pro-slavery, but by the standards of the day, he was a liberal slave owner.

This, plus his "interracial" family, resulted in Zephaniah Kingsley's being deeply invested in the Spanish system of slavery and society.

Zephaniah Kingsley casually changed nationalities based on which would most help his slave trading enterprises.

The elder Zephaniah Kingsley moved his family to the Colony of South Carolina in 1770.

Zephaniah Kingsley's son grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, where the father became a successful merchant.

Zephaniah Kingsley 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.

Zephaniah Kingsley 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.

Zephaniah Kingsley traveled frequently, prompted by recurring political unrest among the Caribbean islands.

Zephaniah Kingsley stood alone among Southern statesmen in maintaining that Blacks were just as intelligent as whites.

Zephaniah Kingsley was in favor of "interracial" marriage, called "amalgamation" at the time, which produced, he explained in a pamphlet Treatise, healthy, beautiful children.

Zephaniah Kingsley 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.

Zephaniah Kingsley claimed to have married one of them, and the marital status of the others does not seem to have ever been an issue.

Zephaniah Kingsley had nine mixed-race children with these wives, and no white children.

Zephaniah Kingsley educated his children to high standards and worked to ensure he could settle his estate on them and his wives.

Zephaniah Kingsley encouraged his children to marry whites, his daughters to marry wealthy white men from the East.

Zephaniah Kingsley said that he had married her, which he never said of his three other concubines or common-law wives: "celebrated and solemnized by her native African customs altho' never celebrated according to the forms of Christian usage".

Zephaniah Kingsley began to travel to West Africa to purchase Africans to be traded as slaves between America, Brazil, and the West Indies.

Zephaniah Kingsley continued to make his living trading slaves and shipping other goods into the 19th century, although the US prohibited the African slave trade in 1807, effective in 1808.

Zephaniah Kingsley became a citizen of Spanish Florida in 1803, and many African slaves were smuggled into the US via Florida.

Zephaniah Kingsley opposed allowing the enslaved to participate in Christian religious worship.

Zephaniah Kingsley made a point of remarking that his marriage to Anna, "celebrated and solemnized by her native African customs," was not Christian.

Many of Zephaniah Kingsley's slaves were Muslims; this is suggested in the semi-circular, crescent arrangement of the cabins, and by Zephaniah Kingsley's four wives.

Spain was offering land to settlers in order to populate Florida, so Zephaniah Kingsley petitioned the governor for land but was turned down.

Zephaniah Kingsley arrived with 10 slaves and began to cultivate the property immediately.

Zephaniah Kingsley trained the slaves at Laurel Grove in agricultural vocations to prepare them for future sale; he provided slave buyers from Georgia with skilled artisans, which allowed him to charge 50 percent more than the usual market price per slave.

Many of Zephaniah Kingsley's slaves were sold to Georgians and other planters in the Southeast; they took their purchases with them, illegally, back to the US, where importation of slaves was forbidden as of 1808.

Zephaniah Kingsley is indicated with two other gentlemen as Floridians who accumulated great wealth from the Florida slave trade between 1808 and 1821.

Zephaniah Kingsley married her, he said, in an African ceremony in Havana soon after purchasing her.

Zephaniah Kingsley returned with Anna to Laurel Grove and gradually depended on her to run the plantation in his absence.

In 1811, Zephaniah Kingsley petitioned the colonial Spanish government to free Anna and their three mixed-race children, and the request was granted.

Zephaniah Kingsley became involved in the shipping industry, including the coastwise trade, related to his large-scale domestic slave trading, which continued in the US after the Atlantic trade was prohibited.

Not knowing what to do with so many indigent people, the Coast Guard turned them over to Zephaniah Kingsley, who was the only person in the area who could care for such a number.

In 1813, the Americans captured Zephaniah Kingsley and forced him to sign an endorsement of the rebellion.

John McIntosh, owner of the Fort George Plantation before Zephaniah Kingsley, accused him in 1826 of financially supporting the war.

The accusation was likely politically motivated, as Zephaniah Kingsley suddenly resigned his position on the Territorial Council, and McIntosh was angry about the public treatment he had received since the war for his role in it.

Anna and Zephaniah Kingsley's fourth and last child was born on Fort George Island in 1824.

Zephaniah Kingsley owned and farmed, using Black labor, plantations at Springfield, Conesfield, and Drayton Island.

Zephaniah Kingsley took three much younger enslaved women as common-law wives and fathered children with at least two of them, totaling nine children in all.

Flora, 20 when her relationship with Zephaniah Kingsley began, was the daughter of a lifelong friend.

Zephaniah Kingsley eventually freed each of the slave women: they were named Flora Kingsley, Sarah Kingsley, who brought her son Micanopy; and Munsilna McGundo, who brought her daughter Fatima.

Primary documentation by Zephaniah Kingsley is scarce, but historians consider Flora, Sarah, and Munsila as "lesser wives", or "co-wives" with Anna.

Zephaniah Kingsley lavished all his children with affection, attention, and luxury.

The Americans imposed the binary "racial" caste system that they had developed throughout the Southeastern US This system contrasted with the standing practice in which Zephaniah Kingsley was invested, which, based on Spanish law as implemented in Florida, supported three social tiers: whites, free people of color, and slaves.

Territorial Governor William P Duval recommended to President Monroe in 1822 that Kingsley be appointed to the new Council, but Monroe did not appoint him until the following year, when he was described as an "enlightened and valuable citizen of Florida" in the first book on the new Territory.

Zephaniah Kingsley was recommended by Joseph Marion Hernandez, Florida's nonvoting delegate to Congress before the territory was admitted as a state.

Zephaniah Kingsley's position was that Florida should be receptive, like Spain, to free people of color, that they should have some rights, even though less than those of whites.

Zephaniah Kingsley asserted that when slavery is associated with cruelty it is an abomination; when it is joined with benevolence and justice, it "easily amalgamates with the ordinary conditions of life".

Zephaniah Kingsley wrote that Africans were better suited than Europeans for labor in hot climates, and that their happiness was maximized when they were rigidly controlled; their contentment was greater than whites of a similar class.

Zephaniah Kingsley asserted that people of mixed race were healthier and more beautiful than either Africans or Europeans, and considered mixed-race children, such as his own, a step against an impending race war.

Zephaniah Kingsley became embroiled in a political scandal with Florida's first governor, William DuVal.

Zephaniah Kingsley petitioned President Andrew Jackson not to reappoint Duval as Territorial Governor.

Zephaniah Kingsley highlighted its successes as a nation of free Blacks in his treatise, writing.

Zephaniah Kingsley says that the paradox in Kingsley's thinking indicated a "disordered worldview".

Zephaniah Kingsley was determined to create the society he had written about and defended.

Zephaniah Kingsley was progressively more concerned that his marriage to Anna might not be recognized in the United States, and, in the event of his death, his concubines Flora, Sarah, Munsilna McGundo, and their mixed-race children might be confiscated and sold as slaves.

Zephaniah Kingsley found a suitable location on the northeastern shore of the island, in what is today the Puerto Plata Province of the Dominican Republic.

Zephaniah Kingsley left much of his land to his wives and children, a bequest which was immediately contested on racial grounds by his white in-laws.

Zephaniah Kingsley's will stipulated that no remaining slaves should be separated from their families, and that they should be given the opportunity to purchase their freedom at half their market price.

Zephaniah Kingsley's writings, called "eloquent" by a modern scholar, were mainly on the topic of slavery: its inevitability; how it should be governed; and how free Blacks, in his view, made a country more secure.

Zephaniah Kingsley Avenue is in Orange Park, Florida, modern name for what had been his Laurel Grove plantation.