Zephaniah Kingsley

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (December 4, 1765 – September 14, 1843) was a plantation owner, born in England, who moved as a child with his family to South Carolina, and became a planter, slave trader, and merchant. He built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. Finding his large and complicated family progressively more insecure in Florida, he moved them to a vanished plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in what was then Haiti but soon became part of the Dominican Republic.

In his will, Kingsley called himself a planter, but he was in his younger years first and foremost a slave merchant, and proud to be one: a "very respectful business", in his words. He owned and captained slave ships, and was actively involved in the Atlantic slave trade. A document of 1802 records his arrival at Havana as First Officer of the ''Superior'' with 250 Africans, and another of 1808, 60 slaves to a Spanish land grant. He was also pro-slavery, but by the standards of the day, he was a liberal slave owner. He has been called "a man ahead of his time."

He was a relatively lenient slaveholder who respected slave families and allowed his enslaved a freedom not routine: the opportunity to hire themselves out when their work was completed, and eventually purchase their freedom for 50% of their market value.

Kingsley's main business in Spanish Florida was providing a ready supply of well-trained slaves, who were smuggled by or to planters of Georgia and South Carolina. This, plus his "interracial" family, resulted in Kingsley's being deeply invested in the Spanish system of slavery and society. As in the French colonies, certain rights were provided to a class of free people of color, and children of female slaves were allowed to inherit property from their white fathers. "In the Spanish Floridas free people of color...enjoyed tremendously elevated status when compared to virtually any other person of African descent in North America."

Kingsley casually changed nationalities based on which would most help his slave trading enterprises. Born British, in 1793 he took an oath of naturalization to the United States. In 1798 he swore allegiance to Denmark, and in 1803 to Spain (Spanish Florida), All residents of Spanish Florida who did not leave automatically became American citizens, as is also seen in Kingsley's appointment to the Florida Territorial Legislature in 1822 (in appointing him, President James Monroe called him "one of the most fit and discreet persons in our territory.") At his death his nationality was Haitian, acquired in 1836. Provided by Wikipedia