Born Anta Madgigine Jai

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