Anna Kingsley - Haiti and Return To Florida

Haiti and Return To Florida

After Spain ceded control of Florida to the U.S. in 1822, the new state government progressively enacted stricter ordinances separating the races, as was common among other states in the US South. Southern states increased restrictions against free blacks after the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831. The mixed-race Kingsley family was directly and negatively affected by these "illiberal and inequitable laws", as Kingsley stated in his will. Kingsley transferred all their holdings to the three older children and moved to Haiti in 1835. Their two oldest daughters had already married white planters in Florida and remained there. Anna and their youngest son followed Kingsley to Haiti in 1838. In all, 60 slaves, family members, and freed employees moved with Kingsley to Haiti to start a plantation called Mayorasgo de Koka. Because slavery was prohibited in Haiti, Kingsley converted his slaves to indentured servants, who could earn their freedom with another nine years of labor. Kingsley portrayed life in Haiti as idyllic. In 1843, when Anna was 50 years old, Kingsley died on his way to New York, where he was buried.

One of the laws passed by the Territorial Council of Florida that so alarmed Kingsley was the provision that mixed race children could not inherit property. The territory did not recognize interracial or polygamous marriages as legal. The year following Kingsley's death, his sister Martha and her children contested his will as "defective and invalid". Kingsley's sister cited Florida law that forbade black people from owning property, and claimed that Anna and Kingsley's other wives moved to Haiti spontaneously, abandoning the property in Florida to become free people. Anna returned to Florida in 1846 to participate in the Kingsley estate defense, despite the increasingly tense racial climate in Duval County. The court upheld the treaty signed between the U.S. and Spain stipulating that all free blacks born before 1822 in Florida enjoyed the same legal privileges as they had when Spain controlled East Florida. Anna furthermore asked for and was granted the transfer of ownership of slaves who had been sent to the San Jose plantation when the family had moved to Haiti. Her request to rent slaves to other plantations to maximize her profits was rejected by the courts.

Anna and her children became Union sympathizers when the American Civil War broke out the following year. She and other free blacks were evacuated by Union forces when they captured Jacksonville in 1862. She returned home the following year to be closer to her daughters, and died in 1870 at the age of 77.