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

Abstract

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (1765–1843) made his fortune through slavery, over a long life that saw much of the Atlantic World during turbulent times. His father’s mercantile pursuits carried young Kingsley from Bristol, England, to Charleston, South Carolina, and then, because Zephaniah Kingsley Sr. was a loyalist émigré, to New Brunswick. When Kingsley struck out on his own in the early 1790s, he pursued the dangerous but lucrative coffee, sugar, and slave trades in the war-torn Caribbean, flying a series of neutral flags. In 1803, Kingsley moved to Spanish East Florida and transitioned into a planter. Now his nemeses were not privateers but the repeated filibustering expeditions launched from Georgia that sought control of East Florida and its annexation to the United States, typically settling for plunder.Perhaps the biggest conflict that Kingsley had to navigate was the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States in 1821. Like many other Florida planters, Kingsley had a mixed-race family, having taken a slave wife who, along with their children, he had freed, as well as other mistresses, offspring, and favored bondsmen. As elsewhere in Caribbean slave societies, Spanish Florida had an established free black caste. When the legislature of the new US territory set about imposing the two-caste model of the Old South, black slave and free white, Kingsley authored A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of Society (1828), arguing that a free black caste aligned with white slaveholders safeguarded slave society. When the legislature criminalized interracial unions, Kingsley wrote a protest to Congress, signed by several other planters, arguing for multiculturalism in matters of domestic life.Once it became clear that slave society as he preferred it was doomed in Florida, Kingsley acquired lands in Haiti and moved his extended family there. For laborers in a country that had ended slavery, Kingsley freed a number of his Florida slaves on the condition that they enter into indentures to serve him in Haiti. He published an appeal to the free blacks of the United States to emigrate to the Kingsley settlement in Haiti. Kingsley continued to own land and slaves in Florida, generating funds for his Haitian enterprise. A man on the move to the end, he died in New York City in 1843.As Daniel L. Schafer explains, Kingsley focused his life on gaining a fortune and then, as a patriarch, on providing for the security of his extended family. Owning, trading, and working enslaved people were his means of doing so. In 1842, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child sought out Kingsley as he passed through New York City. That Kingsley had an African wife, supported the free black community, and admitted that slavery was exploitative, but was no abolitionist, flummoxed Child. From his patriarchal perspective, Kingsley saw consistency in his life’s course.Because Kingsley traveled to so much of the Atlantic World, so too has his biographer. This book is the product of prodigious research in archives in England, Scotland, Canada, Denmark, Spain, the Dominican Republic, and the United States. There’s no main collection of Kingsley papers, but Schafer has found a multitude of records of him, including such especially rich documents as a melancholic letter Kingsley wrote from Liverpool in 1805, bemoaning that he had not yet achieved financial independence, just before sailing to Mozambique for slaves; and Kingsley’s claim against the United States following the “Patriot War” filibuster of 1812, detailing the African places of origin and the family relations among the slaves he had lost to the invaders.This biography of Kingsley complements the author’s previous study of Kingsley’s wife, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley. Adding Daniel W. Stowell’s recent anthology of Kingsley’s writings (Balancing Evils Judiciously, 2000) and Mark J. Fleszar’s study of Kingsley’s Haitian scheme (Journal of the Civil War Era, December 2014), we have a Kingsley historiographical boom. It is easy to see why Kingsley is attracting so much attention. His life addresses many topics of current interest to historians of slavery: the Tannenbaum thesis, African ethnicity in slave communities, and the transformation of patriarchy into paternalism, to name but a few. Schafer’s Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World is a skillful biography of broad relevance.