Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. and the Atlantic World

Florida
Book Awards, Silver Medal for Florida Nonfiction

Florida
Historical Society Charlton Tebeau Award

Florida
Historical Society Stetson Kennedy Award

A biography of a controversial patriarch of a mixed-race family

A controversial figure for his views on manumission and his unorthodox marital arrangements, Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (1765-1843) is mostly known today for his Fort George Island plantation in Duval County, Florida, now a National Park Service site, and for his 1828 pamphlet, A Treatise on the Patriarchal System of Society, that advocated just and humane treatment of enslaved persons, liberal emancipation policies, and granting rights to free persons of color. Paradoxically, his fortune came from the purchase, sale, and labor of enslaved Africans.

In this penetrating biography, Daniel Schafer vividly chronicles Kingsley’s evolving thoughts on race and slavery, exploring his business practices and his private life. Kingsley fathered children by several enslaved women, then freed and lived with them in a unique mixed-race family. One of the women—the only one he acknowledged as his "wife" though they were never formally married—was Anta Madgigine Ndiaye (Anna Kingsley), a member of the Senegalese royal family, who was captured in a slave raid and purchased by Kingsley in Havana, Cuba.