Kingsley Plantation, Florida
Kingsley Plantation tells one of Florida’s most distinctive slavery stories.
In the early 1800s, Zephaniah Kingsley ran this sea island cotton plantation with his wife Anna Madgigine Jai – a formerly enslaved woman from Senegal – while advocating for more rights for free people of color.
Their story opens a window into the messy realities of slavery in Spanish and American Florida.
Here’s more about the historic Kingsley Plantation.
Zephaniah Kingsley held contradictory beliefs about slavery and race
Born in England in 1765 and raised in Charleston, Zephaniah Kingsley built his fortune as a shipping merchant and slave trader before settling in Florida.
Despite owning slaves himself, he argued for treating people based on abilities rather than skin color and debated with lawmakers about rights for free blacks.
In 1828, he published a defense of slavery where he argued against race being the only factor in determining who should be enslaved.
He allowed enslaved people at his plantation to live in family units, practice African customs, and work on their own projects outside plantation tasks.
Though he advocated for rights of freed slaves, Kingsley never called himself an abolitionist and continued in the slave trade throughout his life. He even owned a fleet of slave ships, some built at a shipyard on his own plantation.
Anna Kingsley went from African princess to plantation manager
Born a princess in West Africa in 1793, Anna Madgigine Jai was captured at 13, sold into slavery in Cuba, and bought by Zephaniah Kingsley.
By the time she arrived at his plantation, they were married according to African custom, and she was pregnant with their first child.
Kingsley freed Anna in 1811 when she turned 18, after which she managed several of his plantations along the St. Johns River.
During the Patriots’ Rebellion of 1812, Anna burned her home and slave quarters to prevent Americans from using them – an act that made her a hero to the Spanish government.
As a free Black woman in Spanish Florida, Anna could legally own property, file lawsuits, and run businesses. While managing Laurel Grove plantation, she oversaw more than a hundred slaves and helped create a highly successful operation that earned $10,000 in one year, an enormous sum at that time.
The buildings were made with tabby, an early coastal concrete
Kingsley Plantation has the largest collection of tabby slave cabins still standing in the United States.
Tabby is a concrete-like material made from oyster shells, sand, and lime used for the slave quarters and other buildings.
This construction method came from Africa and was common along the Florida and Georgia coasts in the 1700s and early 1800s.
Workers burned shells from Native American middens in open pits, crushed them into lime particles, mixed them with water and sand, then poured the mixture into wooden forms layer by layer.
This stuff worked incredibly well in Florida’s coastal climate by keeping buildings cool in summer and warm in winter.
Influences from African village layouts
Most Southern plantations lined up slave housing in straight rows, but at Kingsley, the quarters form a semicircle similar to village layouts in West Africa.
Anna Jai, Kingsley’s wife who was originally from Africa, might have influenced this layout since West African villages often had circular patterns with leadership households in the center.
Originally, 32 cabins arranged in this arc were divided by Palmetto Avenue, the main road into the plantation.
Sea Island cotton made this plantation wealthy
Sea Island cotton was the main moneymaker at Kingsley Plantation from the 1790s until the Civil War.
This special variety had long, silky fibers that grew perfectly in Fort George Island’s coastal climate.
Plantation owners treated their specific cotton seeds like treasures, carefully passing them down through generations. These cotton plants grew up to seven feet tall and needed daily harvesting from July through December.
Beyond cotton and indigo, they grew citrus, sugar cane, and corn, making it a diverse farm that rotated crops to keep the soil healthy.
Enslaved people worked under a task system with some flexibility
Kingsley Plantation didn’t use the gang system common on other plantations.
Instead, enslaved people got specific daily tasks, and once finished, they could use remaining daylight for personal activities like gardening, hunting, or fishing.
Records show enslaved families received one day in spring to plant and time in fall to harvest their own crops, plus plots of land to grow their own food.
Kingsley taught many enslaved workers specialized trades like carpentry, tabby making, and brick laying.
People trained here commanded premium prices when sold, fetching around 50% more than market value because of their acquired skills.
Interracial families were allowed under Spanish Florida’s laws
When Florida was under Spanish rule, marriages between white plantation owners and African women weren’t unusual.
The Spanish government recognized a separate class of free people of color and didn’t consider slavery a permanent condition. They actually encouraged enslaved people to purchase their freedom.
Kingsley maintained a polygamous household with four wives including Anna, which aligned with West African traditions where wives often had separate quarters from their husbands.
At Kingsley Plantation, visitors would see Zephaniah proudly introducing his multi-racial children at dinner tables.
American takeover of Florida changed everything for the Kingsleys
When the United States took over Florida in 1821, everything changed.
The new Florida Territorial Council banned interracial marriage and prevented free blacks or mixed-race people from inheriting property.
This dramatic shift eliminated protections that had existed under Spanish law and completely altered social attitudes about race and slavery.
By the 1830s, things became so difficult that the Kingsleys decided to leave the country altogether.
Zephaniah established a colony in Haiti for his family and some freed slaves since Haiti had already become a free black republic after its revolution.
Before leaving, he freed 50 of his slaves and took them along with Anna and their two sons to Haiti.
Anna fought and won a court battle for her inheritance
After Zephaniah died in 1843, Anna returned to Florida from Haiti in 1846 to fight his white relatives who were trying to cut her and her children out of their inheritance.
Despite intense racial discrimination during this period, she bought and sold land, sued white people in court, and became an important figure in a free black community.
When her oldest son George died in a shipwreck on his way to court, Anna took matters into her own hands.
Her connections in the white community supported her case against Martha Kingsley O’Neill, forcing courts to honor the 1821 Adams-Onís Treaty.
This treaty guaranteed that rights held by free blacks under Spanish rule would continue under U.S. control – a promise the U.S. hadn’t been enforcing until Anna’s case. She won her case and used her inheritance to buy a small plantation in Duval County near her daughters.
Though she owned slaves herself, Anna supported the Union during the Civil War and had to flee her home during the fighting.
She died sometime before June 1870 at age 77 and is buried in Clifton cemetery alongside her daughters and grandchildren.
National Park Service keeps this historic site open for you to explore
Kingsley Plantation has been many things – a social club, tourist attraction, and state park – before the National Park Service acquired it in 1991 as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve.
You can explore the main house, barn, kitchen, and remains of 23 tabby slave cabins, plus a garden showing crops from the plantation era.
The property includes a visitor center with a bookstore and restrooms, plus a dock where you can arrive by boat or kayak if you’d like.
The post A White Slave Trader Married African Royalty and Operated This Controversial Florida Plantation in the 1800s appeared first on When In Your State.