Now folks, real history has so many twists and turns that it makes your brain itch. The following story of slavery and race is utterly unpredictable because it is utterly true.
Making a profit from selling slaves is no different than in any other retail business. Profit depends on your adding value to your product, so that you can sell it for more than you paid. Remember this. We shall come back to it later.
Africans from the interior had been kidnapped for thousands of years. Newly captured slaves were marched north across the Sahara, or shipped down the Nile. They were then sold around the Mediterranean to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans as well as to medieval Europeans and Muslims.
But slave trading boomed during the age of European expansion. African consumers wanted European products-textiles, liquor, machinery. Europeans wanted African slaves to colonize the New World. And so, trading colonies were founded along Africa's coastline. Coastal African states began raiding the inland states, kidnapping slaves for sale to the Europeans. They grew rich on the slave trade.
The only defense against the raids was to have a strong army, with guns and cavalry. But European firearms and horses also had to be bought with slaves. And so the vicious cycle spiraled downward. By 1806, the African interior was virtually depopulated. The slave raiders were reduced to preying upon each other.
Captain Gisolfo, Portuguese master of the Danish ship "The Sally," loaded Anta and two hundred others into the cargo hold. Their passage was a fortunate one. Manacled below decks, only 60 or so perished of dehydration, their corpses dragged out and thrown to the sharks. Upon arriving in Havana, Anta was cleaned up, fed, watered, and her naked body oiled for the auction block.
Zephaniah Kingsley owned his own ship. He had been born in Liverpool of Scottish ancestry and raised in Connecticut. After graduation, he had started a one-vessel shipping business out of Charleston. He carried molasses from the Caribbean to New England, carried rum from there to Gorée, and brought slaves from Africa back to the Caribbean, thus following a triangular route. By 1806 Kingsley had moved his base of operations to Doctor's Inlet on the St. Johns River near St. Augustine, Florida.
Kingsley spoke Wolof and had often bought slaves from Anta's folks. Kingsley raced to Havana, anchored his ship, went into town, and bought Anta in the highest bid of that day's auction.
When Kingsley's ship, "The Esther" sailed for Florida on October 10, her outbound manifest listed four barrels of molasses and three female slaves. When the Esther docked in St. Augustine, she cleared customs with four barrels of molasses, only two female slaves, and an elegantly dressed dark brown teenager, whom Zephaniah introduced as his new wife, Anna Kingsley.
She owned several large plantations. Her most luxurious was in Jacksonville. While their kids attended college in England, she furnished the mansion with the finest European crystal chandeliers, furniture, tableware, and with masterpieces of European painting and sculpture. The building still stands in Jacksonville. It is called Epping Forrest, and you can take tours through it.
Anna's most profitable plantation was on Fort George Island, across the river from Mayport. It was her main training center. She would buy unskilled Florida-born teenagers or newly arrived Africans, and send them to Fort George. Each new unskilled recruit was issued clothing and shoes. They were assigned quarters-two-room concrete houses with fireplaces. Each apprentice was then delivered to a master craftsman for two-to-three years. At the end of their training, the newly skilled craftsmen were then sold at enormous profit, many being smuggled across the U.S. border into Georgia. As we said at the start, value added is the secret of business success.
In December 1827, the Spanish brig "Guerrero," carrying 400 Africans to Cuba was chased across the Gulf Stream by a British frigate enforcing the slave trade ban. She ran aground near Key West. As the Guerrero broke up, about half of the unfortunate Africans were taken in chains to Cuba by other Spanish ships. The rest were rescued from the reef by Key West wreckers.
Eighty-nine survivors became the responsibility of the local U.S. Treasury Department representative, William Pinkney. Federal law said that rescued Africans were to be housed until transportation could be arranged back to Africa. But Pinkney had no budget for room and board, and it could take months for the feds to arrange a ship. What was he to do with them? He could not just let them starve. So, he assigned the Africans to local planters who used their labor until their ship arrived.
But for the other thirty-six Africans, things got more complicated. They had been loaned to Anna Kingsley. When the Naval officers came for them, they refused to go. They pleaded with Anna to stay. She explained that they were being taken home, but they merely wailed and clutched her skirts. So she ordered her foremen to "explain it" to them. The booted, mounted overseers cracked their whips and sternly ordered the thirty-six Africans to collect their belongings and their rug-rats, and get themselves aboard the Africa-bound vessel. The refugees promptly bolted for the woods!
Most were easy to catch. They would creep up to the big house at night, pleading with Anna to be allowed to stay. It took a month to round up the last one. U.S.S. Washington's Barge sailed for Ghana with all the Africans aboard, on September 30, 1829.
Why had they wanted to stay in Florida? Well, the local court was also curious. So a hearing was held before their departure, and their answers are on record. As it turns out, they were being trained as masons, wainwrights, carpenters, blacksmiths, shipwrights, cobblers, cooks, wheelwrights, mechanics. Skilled people have clout, you see, even slaves. Mistreat a farm worker and no one cares. Mistreat a master mechanic and every other slaveowner around will charge you with cruelty in court, hoping to win the person for himself. Craftsmen could demand time to work on their own, to run their own businesses (paying their owner a share), or save up to buy their own freedom.
Slavery was horrible, but it was less horrible if you had a marketable skill. The Hernandez group had been used as raw laborers. They had no hope of betterment in Florida. The Kingsley group had spent eighteen months in vocational school. As Nelson Mandela said about six months ago in a speech to youth leaders in South Africa, "Education is the key. Education is one of the most important weapons that you can have."
On the minus side, race relations plunged in the 1820s and 30s. Historians call the early 1800's wave of complexion-based segregation and consequent interracial hate the "Denmark Vesey" wave, to distinguish it from the similar "Nathaniel Bacon" wave a century earlier, or from the horrific "Jim Crow" wave a century later. Intermarriage was outlawed and free African-Americans were persecuted-even rich ones.
For years the Kingsleys' wealth and political power shielded the interracial couple from laws against miscegenation and against free Black property. But by 1836, the authorities were closing in and it was clear that the Kingsleys could not remain. They fled to self-imposed exile in Haiti. In four years, Anna carved a successful plantation out of the Haitian jungle. Their son George died in a shipping accident. Zephaniah died on the job with his ship in New York in 1843.
Twenty years later, President Lincoln appointed John Sammis, Anna's son-in-law, as Federal tax collector for Florida. U.S. race relations improved after the war, and Anna moved back to Jacksonville. She was 77 years old when she died peacefully at Epping Forest, surrounded by her children and grandchildren. Fourteen years later, her "white" grandson Eggbert Sammis was elected as one of Florida's post-Reconstruction state senators.
When we first saw her, I could not resist running up after her show and asking, "You say you are Anna Kingsley's descendant. But I happen to know that the Baxters and Sammises all assimilated into 'white' society. And, excuse me for mentioning it ma'am, but you are medium brown. How can this be?"
Now folks, if you ever talk to a re-enactor, you will soon discover that each of us has his own narrow pet subject, which he has studied to death. Ask about it and you will open the floodgates to more explanation than you ever wanted to know. For example, now and then after a performance, visitors ask me about the history of the banjo. When they do, I can see Mary Lee, out the corner of my eye, frantically waving, "Don't ask! Don't ask!"
Well, Mavynee's hobby turned out to be genealogy. I had no sooner gotten those words out of my mouth, when she replied, "I'm glad you asked that!" and whipped out a huge photo album, flopped it onto a table, and opened it to reveal family snapshots going back over a century.
It seems that Anna Kingsley's "white" grandson, post-Reconstruction Florida state senator Eggbert Sammis, had a daughter. She was named Mary, after her grandmother. When she grew up, Mary Sammis fell in love with a Black bandleader and they ran off up north and got married. Eventually they returned to Jacksonville. Their son, in turn, grew up to become wealthy as founder and C.E.O. of the first life insurance company in Florida -- Afro-American Life of Jacksonville. And that man was Mavynee's grandfather.
And so, we end this twisty tale of real history with the following observation: the only descendant of that teenager from Senegal who can still be found at the old plantation two centuries later, is an African-American re-enactor, whose link to Anna Kingsley is through her "white" great-grandmother.
She was a teenage princess. Educated by the finest private tutors, fluent in several languages. Her great-uncle had been royalty, her parents were wealthy aristocrats. Her name was Anta Majigeen Ndiaye and she was born in the Wolof nation, a place that is today part of Senegal. Her folks were slave traders. Anta had been trained in the techniques of the slave trade since childhood.Middle Passage
The horsemen from Kajoor appeared in Anta's village at dawn. They torched the houses, shot the defenders, and rounded up the survivors. The very old and the very young were slaughtered. Young Anta saw her family killed. She was shackled by the neck to nine other teenagers. They, plus a dozen similar coffles, were then marched across country to the great slave-trading depot at Gorée on the coast.Building a Business
While her husband continued his triangular voyages, Mrs. Kingsley raised their family. They had three children: Mary, Martha, and George-swarthy, dark, Mediterranean-looking youngsters, as you can well imagine. She also built her own business.
Within a decade, Anna Kingsley became the wealthiest woman in Florida by creating a slave-trading empire that stretched along northeast Florida's waterways from Green Cove Springs to the mouth of the St. Johns, over a hundred miles downriver at Mayport on the Atlantic coast.The Guerrero Refugees
The British are an odd race. Whatever they do is mandatory, and they make everyone else join in. Whatever they do not do is forbidden, and they stop everyone else from doing it either. When Britain outlawed the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, the Royal Navy began chasing peaceful law-abiding slave traders, seizing their cargoes and selling them for prize money.
For fifty-three of the refugees, everything went without a hitch. They were assigned to Don José Mariano Hernandez. His Malacompra sugar plantation was on what is now highway A1A between Flagler Beach and Marineland, Florida. The fifty-three Africans worked for Hernandez for eighteen months. Then, in August 1829, the U.S. Navy schooner "Washington's Barge" sailed into St. Augustine with orders to take the Africans home. Hernandez turned them over to the Navy, and that was apparently that.Exile
Anna's personal life was not as rewarding as her business life. On the plus side, her daughters married very well indeed. Martha married Oran Baxter, a wealthy ship builder of Scottish descent like her father. Mary married John Sammis, an influential politician and sawmill owner of English stock. Anna's grandchildren were born with fair complexions and they and their descendants all assimilated into "white" Florida society.Today
My wife and I interpret living history at Florida's Stephen Foster State Park. An African-American friend of ours, named Mavynee Betsch, also does living history, but at the Kingsley Plantation on Fort George Island. The place still exists. It is operated as a historic site by the National Park Service. Mavynee portrays a recently freed slave. She teaches code songs like "Follow the Drinking Gourd." And she tells African folktales to visitor's kids. But she grabs everyone's attention by telling audiences that she, in real life, is a direct descendant of Anna Kingsley.
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