ANNA KINGSLEY
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the population of Spanish
Florida was small but diverse. Americans and Europeans came seeking wealth
by obtaining land and establishing plantations; furthermore, the forced
labor of enslaved Africans secured that wealth. Those Africans who were
freed by their owners or who purchased their own freedom became farmers,
tradesmen, or black militiamen who helped protect the colony. On the
frontier, away from the settlements and plantations, the Seminole Indians
and the Black Seminoles kept an uneasy vigil on the encroaching
development of Florida.
Among those striving for freedom and security in Spanish Florida was Anna
Kingsley. Anna was the African wife of plantation owner Zephaniah
Kingsley. At an early age, she survived the Middle Passage and
dehumanizing slave markets to become the property of Kingsley. After
manumission by her husband, Anna became a landowner and slaveholder. She
raised her four children while managing a plantation that utilized African
slave labor. She survived brutal changes in race policies and social
attitudes brought by successive governments in Florida, but survival
demanded difficult, often dangerous, choices.
Anna Kingsley was a woman of courage and determination. She is an example
of the active role that people of color played in shaping their own
destinies and our country’s history in an era of slavery, oppression, and
prejudice. She left, however, no personal descriptions of her life. She
was not a famous or powerful person who figured prominently in accounts of
that era. Today we must find Anna in the official documents of her time
and in the historic structures that she inhabited. There her story may be
discovered.
Anna Kingsley: A Free Woman
On the first day of March 1811, in the Spanish province of East Florida,
white plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley put his signature on a document
that forever changed the life of a young African woman. The document was a
manumission paper which ensured her legal freedom. The young woman, a
native of Senegal whom Kingsley had purchased in a slave market in Havana,
Cuba, was his eighteen-year-old wife and the mother of his three children.
That paper not only marked the beginning of the young woman’s freedom in
the New World, it was also the beginning of the written record of a
remarkable life. Her name was Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley.
A free woman, Anna Kingsley petitioned the Spanish government for land,
and land grant records show that in 1813 she was granted title to five
acres on the St. Johns River. The property was located across the river
from her husband’s plantation, Laurel Grove, south of today’s
Jacksonville. Anna purchased goods and livestock to begin a business, and
she purchased slaves. She became one of a significant number of free
people of African descent in East Florida. They included farmers,
craftsmen, and members of a black militia. Some of these people, like
Anna, owned slaves. Although slavery was supported, Spanish race policies
encouraged manumission and self-purchase and slavery was not necessarily
considered a permanent condition. The free black population held certain
rights and privileges, and they had opportunities to take an active part
in the economic development of the colony. Anna Kingsley was determined to
be an independent businesswoman, selling goods and poultry to neighboring
settlers.
Her blossoming business lasted only months. During an effort to wrest East
Florida from the Spanish, armed American forces entered the province.
Together, with a number of rebellious Floridians, they looted and occupied
the homesteads of planters and settlers to obtain supplies and set up
bases. If these insurgents succeeded and an American system replaced the
comparatively liberal Spanish policies, what would become of the freed
people and their rights? When the Americans approached, Anna herself lit
the fire that consumed her house and property. Then she escaped with her
children and slaves on a Spanish gunboat. The insurrection later ended in
failure and, as it turned out, Anna’s loss was not total. Although a
Spanish commandant reported of Anna’s property “the flames devoured grain
and other things to the value $1,500,” the governor rewarded her loyalty
with a land grant of 350 acres.
Laurel Grove was also destroyed as a result of the conflict. In 1814
Zephaniah and Anna Kingsley, along with their children and slaves, moved
to Fort George Island, a sea island near the mouth of the St. Johns River.
On this thousand-acre island with palm-fringed beaches, birds of every
description, and ancient Indian mounds of oyster shell, they restored an
abandoned plantation. In a fine, comfortable house with views of the tidal
marsh and ocean beyond, Anna spent the next twenty-three years of her
life.
During the years at Fort George, Zephaniah Kingsley’s Florida landholdings
increased to include extensive timberland and orange groves, and four
major plantations producing sea island cotton, rice, and provisions. He
also owned ships that he captained on trading voyages. Kingsley had
managers at his various properties to whom he entrusted his business
operations when he was away. At the Fort George plantation, Anna took this
responsibility and, Kingsley later declared, “could carry on all the
affairs of the plantation in my absence as well as I could myself.” These
“affairs” included overseeing the lives of about sixty men, women, and
children who lived on Fort George Island in slavery. The labor of the
Kingsley slaves provided the wealth of the Kingsley family.
Conditions for all of Florida’s people of color, free and enslaved,
changed drastically when Florida became a territory of the United States
in 1821. An influential planter, Zephaniah Kingsley was appointed to the
1823 territorial legislative council. He tried to persuade lawmakers to
adopt policies similar to those of the Spanish, providing for liberal
manumission and rights for the free black population. He published his
opinions in A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of
Society As It Exists in Some Governments, and Colonies in America, and in
the United States, Under the Name of Slavery, with Its Necessity and
Advantages in 1828. But Kingsley’s arguments did not convince Florida
legislators. Legislative councils used fear of slave rebellion to justify
policies that were increasingly oppressive. Legislation of the 1820s and
1830s reflects racial discrimination that blurred the distinction between
freeman and slave until there was virtually no difference.
The cession agreement between the U.S. and Spain was supposed to protect
the status of free people of color living in Florida in 1821, but the
Kingsleys had reason to be concerned. Parish records reveal that a fourth
child was born to Zephaniah and Anna in 1824. Their new son was subject to
the harsh enactments that Zephaniah Kingsley called “a system of terror.”
Even Anna and her older son and two daughters were not necessarily secure
as racism increased. Anna decided to leave Florida and go to Haiti. Slave
revolution had made Haiti the first independent black republic of the New
World, the “Island of Liberty” as Kingsley called it. Anna and her sons
intended to start a plantation on the northern coast of the island. Their
work force would consist of more than fifty of their former Florida
slaves, freed to work as indentured servants to comply with Haitian law
which prohibited slavery. In 1837 Anna Kingsley left Florida and sailed to
“Mayorasgo De Koka,” her new home in Haiti.
Zephaniah Kingsley described Mayorasgo De Koka as “heavily timbered with
mahogany all round; well watered; flowers so beautiful; fruits in
abundance, so delicious that you could not refrain from stopping to
eat...” Roads and bridges were built and the Kingsley’s planned a school
for the community, but they did not live happily ever after in their
tropical colony. In 1843, in his seventy-eighth year, Zephaniah Kingsley
died.
With an estate worth a fortune at stake, some of Zephaniah Kingsley’s
white relatives contested his will and sought to deny Anna and his
children their inheritance. After much dispute, courts upheld the rights
of the black heirs, but the family suffered another loss. Anna’s older son
George was returning to Florida in 1846 to defend land interests, when the
ship in which he was traveling was lost at sea. Her younger son, John
Maxwell Kingsley, took over management of Mayorasgo De Koka and Anna
Kingsley, for unknown reasons, returned to Florida. She could not return
to Fort George Island; that plantation had been sold years before. She
settled near her daughters who had married and stayed in Florida. Once
more Anna lived on the St. Johns River, this time in a young town called
Jacksonville.
When the Civil War divided the country, Anna and her daughters’ families
supported the Union. With Florida’s secession and hostility from
Confederates intensifying, Anna had to leave her home again. In 1862, she
traveled with relatives to New York. They returned to Florida later that
year, but, to be safe, lived in Union-occupied Fernandina until the end of
the conflict. In 1865 Anna Kingsley returned to the St. Johns River for
the final time.
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley died in 1870. No intimate letters, diaries, or
other personal reflections on her life are known to exist. No portrait or
photograph of any kind remains of her. Even her grave is unmarked. Her
story, however, endures. In the legal petitions and official
correspondence, probate and property records, the details of her life
emerge. And on Fort George Island, near the mouth of the St. Johns River,
the house where she lived for twenty-three years still stands.
Lesson Procedures
In the early years of the nineteenth century, the population of Spanish
Florida was small but diverse. Americans and Europeans came seeking wealth
by obtaining land and establishing plantations; furthermore, the forced
labor of enslaved Africans secured that wealth. Those Africans who were
freed by their owners or who purchased their own freedom became farmers,
tradesmen, or black militiamen who helped protect the colony. On the
frontier, away from the settlements and plantations, the Seminole Indians
and the Black Seminoles kept an uneasy vigil on the encroaching
development of Florida.
Among those striving for freedom and security in Spanish Florida was Anna
Kingsley. Anna was the African wife of plantation owner Zephaniah
Kingsley. At an early age, she survived the Middle Passage and
dehumanizing slave markets to become the property of Kingsley. After
manumission by her husband, Anna became a landowner and slaveholder. She
raised her four children while managing a plantation that utilized African
slave labor. She survived brutal changes in race policies and social
attitudes brought by successive governments in Florida, but survival
demanded difficult, often dangerous, choices.
Anna Kingsley was a woman of courage and determination. She is an example
of the active role that people of color played in shaping their own
destinies and our country’s history in an era of slavery, oppression, and
prejudice. She left, however, no personal descriptions of her life. She
was not a famous or powerful person who figured prominently in accounts of
that era. Today we must find Anna in the official documents of her time
and in the historic structures that she inhabited. There her story may be
discovered.
Anna Kingsley: A Free Woman
On the first day of March 1811, in the Spanish province of East Florida,
white plantation owner Zephaniah Kingsley put his signature on a document
that forever changed the life of a young African woman. The document was a
manumission paper which ensured her legal freedom. The young woman, a
native of Senegal whom Kingsley had purchased in a slave market in Havana,
Cuba, was his eighteen-year-old wife and the mother of his three children.
That paper not only marked the beginning of the young woman’s freedom in
the New World, it was also the beginning of the written record of a
remarkable life. Her name was Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley.
A free woman, Anna Kingsley petitioned the Spanish government for land,
and land grant records show that in 1813 she was granted title to five
acres on the St. Johns River. The property was located across the river
from her husband’s plantation, Laurel Grove, south of today’s
Jacksonville. Anna purchased goods and livestock to begin a business, and
she purchased slaves. She became one of a significant number of free
people of African descent in East Florida. They included farmers,
craftsmen, and members of a black militia. Some of these people, like
Anna, owned slaves. Although slavery was supported, Spanish race policies
encouraged manumission and self-purchase and slavery was not necessarily
considered a permanent condition. The free black population held certain
rights and privileges, and they had opportunities to take an active part
in the economic development of the colony. Anna Kingsley was determined to
be an independent businesswoman, selling goods and poultry to neighboring
settlers.
Her blossoming business lasted only months. During an effort to wrest East
Florida from the Spanish, armed American forces entered the province.
Together, with a number of rebellious Floridians, they looted and occupied
the homesteads of planters and settlers to obtain supplies and set up
bases. If these insurgents succeeded and an American system replaced the
comparatively liberal Spanish policies, what would become of the freed
people and their rights? When the Americans approached, Anna herself lit
the fire that consumed her house and property. Then she escaped with her
children and slaves on a Spanish gunboat. The insurrection later ended in
failure and, as it turned out, Anna’s loss was not total. Although a
Spanish commandant reported of Anna’s property “the flames devoured grain
and other things to the value $1,500,” the governor rewarded her loyalty
with a land grant of 350 acres.
Laurel Grove was also destroyed as a result of the conflict. In 1814
Zephaniah and Anna Kingsley, along with their children and slaves, moved
to Fort George Island, a sea island near the mouth of the St. Johns River.
On this thousand-acre island with palm-fringed beaches, birds of every
description, and ancient Indian mounds of oyster shell, they restored an
abandoned plantation. In a fine, comfortable house with views of the tidal
marsh and ocean beyond, Anna spent the next twenty-three years of her
life.
During the years at Fort George, Zephaniah Kingsley’s Florida landholdings
increased to include extensive timberland and orange groves, and four
major plantations producing sea island cotton, rice, and provisions. He
also owned ships that he captained on trading voyages. Kingsley had
managers at his various properties to whom he entrusted his business
operations when he was away. At the Fort George plantation, Anna took this
responsibility and, Kingsley later declared, “could carry on all the
affairs of the plantation in my absence as well as I could myself.” These
“affairs” included overseeing the lives of about sixty men, women, and
children who lived on Fort George Island in slavery. The labor of the
Kingsley slaves provided the wealth of the Kingsley family.
Conditions for all of Florida’s people of color, free and enslaved,
changed drastically when Florida became a territory of the United States
in 1821. An influential planter, Zephaniah Kingsley was appointed to the
1823 territorial legislative council. He tried to persuade lawmakers to
adopt policies similar to those of the Spanish, providing for liberal
manumission and rights for the free black population. He published his
opinions in A Treatise on the Patriarchal, or Co-operative System of
Society As It Exists in Some Governments, and Colonies in America, and in
the United States, Under the Name of Slavery, with Its Necessity and
Advantages in 1828. But Kingsley’s arguments did not convince Florida
legislators. Legislative councils used fear of slave rebellion to justify
policies that were increasingly oppressive. Legislation of the 1820s and
1830s reflects racial discrimination that blurred the distinction between
freeman and slave until there was virtually no difference.
The cession agreement between the U.S. and Spain was supposed to protect
the status of free people of color living in Florida in 1821, but the
Kingsleys had reason to be concerned. Parish records reveal that a fourth
child was born to Zephaniah and Anna in 1824. Their new son was subject to
the harsh enactments that Zephaniah Kingsley called “a system of terror.”
Even Anna and her older son and two daughters were not necessarily secure
as racism increased. Anna decided to leave Florida and go to Haiti. Slave
revolution had made Haiti the first independent black republic of the New
World, the “Island of Liberty” as Kingsley called it. Anna and her sons
intended to start a plantation on the northern coast of the island. Their
work force would consist of more than fifty of their former Florida
slaves, freed to work as indentured servants to comply with Haitian law
which prohibited slavery. In 1837 Anna Kingsley left Florida and sailed to
“Mayorasgo De Koka,” her new home in Haiti.
Zephaniah Kingsley described Mayorasgo De Koka as “heavily timbered with
mahogany all round; well watered; flowers so beautiful; fruits in
abundance, so delicious that you could not refrain from stopping to
eat...” Roads and bridges were built and the Kingsley’s planned a school
for the community, but they did not live happily ever after in their
tropical colony. In 1843, in his seventy-eighth year, Zephaniah Kingsley
died.
With an estate worth a fortune at stake, some of Zephaniah Kingsley’s
white relatives contested his will and sought to deny Anna and his
children their inheritance. After much dispute, courts upheld the rights
of the black heirs, but the family suffered another loss. Anna’s older son
George was returning to Florida in 1846 to defend land interests, when the
ship in which he was traveling was lost at sea. Her younger son, John
Maxwell Kingsley, took over management of Mayorasgo De Koka and Anna
Kingsley, for unknown reasons, returned to Florida. She could not return
to Fort George Island; that plantation had been sold years before. She
settled near her daughters who had married and stayed in Florida. Once
more Anna lived on the St. Johns River, this time in a young town called
Jacksonville.
When the Civil War divided the country, Anna and her daughters’ families
supported the Union. With Florida’s secession and hostility from
Confederates intensifying, Anna had to leave her home again. In 1862, she
traveled with relatives to New York. They returned to Florida later that
year, but, to be safe, lived in Union-occupied Fernandina until the end of
the conflict. In 1865 Anna Kingsley returned to the St. Johns River for
the final time.
Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley died in 1870. No intimate letters, diaries, or
other personal reflections on her life are known to exist. No portrait or
photograph of any kind remains of her. Even her grave is unmarked. Her
story, however, endures. In the legal petitions and official
correspondence, probate and property records, the details of her life
emerge. And on Fort George Island, near the mouth of the St. Johns River,
the house where she lived for twenty-three years still stands.
Lesson Procedures