First They Came For…
We thought it was something out of the CBS FBI franchise or James Bondesque movies.
Turns out the man the president called “one of the most fit and discrete persons in our territory” was a presidentially appointed member of the Florida Territorial Legislature and Zephania Kingsley was way more than two centuries ahead of his time.
The English-born and Florida-enriched planter and merchant held multiple citizenships…
British (1765-1793)
American (1793-1798)
Danish (1798-1803)
Spanish (1803-1821)
American (1821-1836)
Haitian (1836-1843)
We apologize.
We forgot to mention that he was a slave owner and slave trader, who captained slave ships and called his a “very respectful business.” His approach to slavery was unique and, for his time, he presented as a contradiction in values and attitudes: During what some might call “off season,” he allowed his slaves to hire themselves out and, eventually, buy their own freedom for 50 percent of their market value.
Kingsley swore his allegiance to the United States in 1793 and lived briefly in Haiti while that new country was attempting to create a society based on former slaves transitioning into free citizens.
He had four enslaved common-law wives; by European standards, he was questionably married to Anna, 13 years old at the time. In the end, Kingsley fathered nine mixed-race children and no white offspring; he eventually freed each of the enslaved women.
Historian and senior editor of The Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association Daniel Stowelll gives some insight into the conundrum that was the slave-owner by citing his “Letter from New York (1842) - Letter 23” (Balancing Evils Judiciously: The Proslavery Writings of Zephaniah Kingsley):
“[T]he colored race [is] superior to us, physically and morally. They are more healthy, have more graceful forms, softer skin, and sweeter voices. They are more docile and affectionate, more faithful in their attachments, and less prone to mischief, than the white race. If it were not so, they could not have been kept in slavery."
Despite assuring that his children by Ana Madgigine Jai, the only woman named in his will and who was emancipated when she turned 18, were educated in Europe and lived in luxury, Kingsley was a man without any sense of national loyalty. “One of Florida’s most flamboyant slaveholders” (“A Troublesome Property. Master-Salve Relations in Florida, 182101865.” The African-American Heritage of Florida, University of Florida Press. 1995) never lived in the same house as Anna or his other concubines – avoiding the charges and scandal of cohabitation with a Black.
Kingsley acquired a 2,600-acre plantation near today’s Jacksonville, Florida in 1803; it was eventually expanded to approximately 32,000 acres (50 square miles) and he benefited from substantial land grants from Spanish Florida because of the number of slaves he bought/brought to grow oranges corn, island cotton and other produce. After the new United States prohibited trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1807 (effective in 1807), Kingsley became a citizen of Spanish Florida and was integral to smuggling slaves from Florida to the Southern States. He also trained his slaves in blacksmithing, carpentry, cotton ginning and fieldwork – enhancing their resale value to Georgians and other planters in the Southern States.
[NOTE: In July 2023, Florida Governor Ron Desantis drew criticism after suggesting that some enslaved African Americans “eventually parlayed, you know, being a blacksmith into doing things later in life.”]
When a U.S. Coast Guard ship intercepted an international slave trade vessel smuggling 350 slaves, they were eventually turned over to Kingsley because the Coast Guard was unable to find anyone to care for them.
After the 1821 transfer of Florida to the United States, as a member of the new Territorial Council, he argued “our personal safety as well as the permanent condition of our Slave property is intimately connected with and depends much on our good policy in making it the interest of our free colored population to be attached to good order and have a friendly feeling towards the white population."
Kingsley was a series of contradictions, as a member of the new Territorial Council arguing for the rights of free Blacks and, 1828, publishing a pamphlet – with the author described as “An inhabitant of Florida.” In it, Kingsley contended:
“Slavery is a necessary state of control from which no condition of society can be perfectly free. The term is applicable to and fits all grades and conditions in almost every point of view, whether moral, physical, or political.”
In the 1829, 1833 and 1834 reprints, he included his name and was self-described as a “slave owner” who has lived “by planting in Florida for the last twenty-five years, disavow[ing] all other motives but that of increasing the value of his property.”
When Florida failed to recognize the rights of free people of color, including the right of (his) mixed-race children to inherit property from their father, Kingsley, purchased land on Haiti’s northeaster shore - today’s Puerto Plata Province of the Dominican Republic. Haitian law at the time did not allow non-citizen whites to own land; the plantation was deeded in the name of his mixed-race eldest son, George Kinsley
Yup! Kingsley seems – on the surface - to have been a “nice guy.” He “cared” about his children and wanted them to get good (European) educations and inherit his properties.
Wow.
But, despite the efforts of anti-DEI provocateurs, Kingsley is an important example of the nature of slavery, slave traders and a dynamic of American history some would keep perpetually locked away.
He made his fortunes as a slave trader.
He was a predatory rapist! At least two of his “wives” or concubines were only 13 years old when he acquired them. Thirteen years old! That’s rape!
He had no – NO! – allegiance to any country, repeatedly moving himself and his money to “protect” his own selfish interests.
As a slave-trader, he ripped fathers and mothers from each other and their children and brothers and sisters from their families. All to enhance his own wealth.
That final point – the separation of spouses, ripping children from the arms of their fathers and mothers, the perpetual destruction of the bonds among siblings – finds its echoes in Judith Giesberg’s (2025) Last Seen: The Enduring Search by Formerly Enslaved People to Find Their Lost Families.
[EDITORS’ NOTE: We used the word “ripping” deliberately because that’s precisely what happened thousands of times in our country under slavery and when Native American children were taken from their families and communities and sent to “Indian schools.” It is what is happening again as documented and undocumented immigrant families are being destroyed today.]
Giesberg is the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of History at Villanova University, where they’re still designing the archways that will declare “Alma Mater of Pope Leo XIV”. Drawing from an archive of nearly five thousand letters and advertisements, her work recounts the struggles of men and women in what historian Ira Berlin referred to as “freedom generations.” Giesberg describes freedom generations as
“men and women who were born enslaved and freed during or just after the U.S. Civil War. Their lives were marked by the great upheaval of the war, and, in the war’s aftermath, they carved out new lives for themselves as freed people.”
Presciently, Giesberg reminds us, “Members of any one generation can never entirely escape the experiences of the previous one…
“The truth about America’s traffic in children and how, long after the end of slavery, children and their parents and siblings remained separated was an affront to those who believed that Americans were pioneers in developing uniquely child-centered family values. It contradicted the narrative of slavery’s happy endings familiar to white audiences….”
She presents the stories of barely a handful of men and women who – across the continent and almost forever – placed “last seen” advertisements searching for relatives lost to the slave trade. Critically, she reports
“As late as 1920, The Chicago Defender was still publishing ads from formerly enslaved people looking for family lost in slavery…
“The success rate of these advertisements might have been as low as 2 percent. Of the 4,568 advertisements (as of May 14, 2024) that comprise the Last Seen Collection,105, or 2 percent, are from people who found each other.”
Last Seen opens with an image of an article from the October 2, 1892 edition of The New York World:
“For thirty-three years, Mrs. Clara Bashop, of Morristown, N.J., has been searching for her lost daughter, and she is searching still…
“Mrs. Bashop belonged to Dick Christian, a wealthy country gentleman, who lived near Charles City Court House, Va. But like many other Virginia county gentleman of those days, Mr. Christian became involved in debt and his slaves were placed on the block. Among them were Mrs. Bashop and her twelve-year—old daughter, Patience.
“‘She was a bright little girl,’ said Mrs. Bashop yesterday, ‘and when we were taken into the marketplace to be sold I prayed that wherever we might go we would go together.’
“But her wish was not fulfilled. She was sold first, and Ben Davis, a professional negro trader, bought her. Then the little girl was placed on the block, and while the weeping mother stood by she was sold to a stranger. Mrs. Bashop fell to her knees before Davis and implored him to buy her daughter from the stranger.”
Approaching a century later, descendants of survivors of the Shoah – the Holocaust – know the unending pain of their parents and grandparents who never fully overcame the pain of separation and the deaths of those they loved. Husbands and wives, parents and children, brothers and sisters never forgot and never overcame the pain of being ripped from each other because they were Jews or opposed Hitler’s Nazis.
Our hometown is living proof.
Miami is a gapping, open emotional wound of Cubans, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, Haitians and others separated by the slavery of dictatorships, drug lords and cartels, gut-wrenching poverty and lost futures.
Now, as a nation, we stand at the shale-like edge of a cliff that threatens to collapse under our feet and produce new generations of men, women and children ripped from each other.
Consider Martin Niemoller.
Raiding Allied ships in the Mediterranean during World War I, German U-boat commander Martin Niemoller was known as “the Scourge of Malta.” Initially, as a pastor ordained in Germany’s Lutheran Church in 1924, he didn’t oppose the rise of National Socialism and claimed he was “confident that Hitler will support collaboration between church and state.”
He became increasingly disaffected by the rising tide of antisemitism and, in 1933, founded the Pfarrernotbund to “combat rising discrimination against Christians of Jewish background.”
Niemoller later reported that in a confrontation with Hitler he told the Nazi leader:
“You have just said, 'I will take care of the German people.' But we, too, as Christians and as pastors, have a responsibility to the German people. That responsibility was entrusted to us by God, and neither you nor anyone in this world has the power to take it from us.’''
In late 1934, Niemoller joined other Protestant churchmen in founding the Confessing Church, a Protestant – Evangelical – movement opposing the Nazification of Germany’s churches. This did not mean that Niemoller abandoned his belief that Jews were responsible for the death of Jesus; it appears he continued to maintain that position for some time.
After signing a 1936 declaration of German Protestant clergy criticizing the antisemitic policies of National Socialism, Niemoller was arrested on July 1, 1937 and tried
by a “Special Court” in March 1938; he was interned in “protective custody” in Sachsenhausen and Dachau concentration camps until 1945.
Writing in The National Jewish Monthly in 1941, Niemoller’s former Sachsenhausen cellmate reported asking why he ever supported the Nazi party and he answered:
“I find myself wondering about that too. I wonder about it as much as I regret it. Still, it is true that Hitler betrayed me. I had an audience with him, as a representative of the Protestant Church, shortly before he became Chancellor, in 1932. Hitler promised me on his word of honor, to protect the Church, and not to issue any anti-Church laws. He also agreed not to allow pogroms against the Jews, assuring me as follows: ‘There will be restrictions against the Jews, but there will be no ghettos, no pogroms, in Germany.’
“I really believed, given the widespread anti-Semitism in Germany, at that time – that Jews should avoid aspiring to Government positions or seats in the Reichstag. There were many Jews, especially among the Zionists, who took a similar stand. Hitler's assurance satisfied me at the time. On the other hand, I hated the growing atheistic movement, which was fostered and promoted by the Social Democrats and the Communists. Their hostility toward the Church made me pin my hopes on Hitler for a while.
“I am paying for that mistake now; and not me alone, but thousands of other persons like me.”
Zephaniah Kingsley ripped fathers and mothers from their children and brothers and sisters from each other. It’s happening again. Judith Giesberg has eloquently shown us that the consequences of this ripping can last almost forever.
The quotation from Martin Niemöllerthat is on display in the Permanent Exhibition of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In 1946, Martin Niemoller published a post-war confessional. It stands as a caution for Americans in 2025:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out —
because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out —
because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out —
because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me —
and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller