Kingsley Plantation - Slavery On Fort George Island

Slavery On Fort George Island

Labor at Kingsley Plantation was carried out by the task system: each slave was given an assigned set of tasks for the day, such as processing 20–30 lb (9–14 kg) of cotton or constructing three barrels for a slave who was a cooper. When the day's jobs were completed, slaves were free to do as they chose. Kingsley Beatty Gibbs described the task system in his journal:

October 5, 1841—No work was done today, as all the people have it to gather their own crop—It is a rule which we have, to give all the negroes one day in the spring to plant, and one day in the fall to reap, and as there is a rule on Sea Island plantations fixing the tasks required each day to be done, it occurs, during the long days of summer, that the hand is generally done his task by 2 p.m., often sooner, so they have abundance of time to work their own crop, fish, etc., etc.

This task system of slavery was common among sea island plantations in the Southeastern United States. In contrast, cotton and tobacco plantations in Virginia and other parts of the South practiced the gang system, where an overseer who was also a slave drove slaves to work the entire day.

Slaves on Fort George Island were African or first generation African-American. Records and archeological information show they were Igbo and Calabari from Nigeria, and others from the area around what is today Guinea, and a few from Zanzibar. Archeologist Charles H. Fairbanks received a Florida Park Service grant to study artifacts found at the slave quarters. His findings, published in 1968, initiated further interest and research in African-American archeology in the U.S. Concentrating on two particular cabins bordering on Palmetto Avenue, Fairbanks found cooking pots used in fireplaces, animal bones—fish, pigs, raccoons, and turtles—discarded as food byproducts, and musket balls and fishing weights.

Fairbanks described Kingsley as "an unusually permissive slave owner" who wrote about the physical superiority of Africans to Europeans, armed his slaves for protection, and gave them padlocks for their cabins. Historian Daniel Stowell suggests that the cabins and Kingsley's hands-off approach to slave management was intended to prevent the slaves from running away. Kingsley himself wrote about not interfering in his slaves' family lives and "encouraged as much as possible dancing, merriment and dress, for which Saturday afternoon and night, and Sunday morning were dedicated ... they were perfectly honest and obedient, and appeared quite happy, having no fear but that of offending me; and I hardly ever had occasion to apply other correction than shaming them."

Kingsley used the plantation as his slave trading headquarters, training slaves for specific tasks to increase their value at sale. He developed them as skilled artisans and educated them about agriculture and planting. Those who had been trained by Kingsley fetched a much higher price at sale, on average 50 percent higher than market price. A 2006 excavation sponsored by the University of Florida uncovered artifacts from the slave cabins, such as the tools the slaves used. In one cabin an intact sacrificed chicken on top of an egg was unearthed, adding evidence to the hypothesis that African slaves kept many of their traditions alive in North America. Archeologists also discovered evidence of an added-on porch to one of the cabins facing away from the main house, an atypical feature for a slave cabin, as owners and overseers constructed quarters to be within their view at all times.

The slave houses were constructed out of tabby and built by the slaves probably in the 1820s or 1830s, although evidence exists that indicates two of them were inhabited by 1814. Tabby was constructed of shells left over from Timucua middens, burned by the barrel-full in open pits or kilns, then pounded into lime particles, mixed with water, sand, and whole oyster or clam shells, then poured into wooden foundations about 1 foot (0.3 m) high, and set to dry. The process was repeated and stacked until the desired height of the wall was reached. The floors of the kitchen house and the basement of the owner's house were also constructed of tabby. The material made the houses remarkably durable, resistant to weather and insects, better insulated than wood, and the ingredients were accessible and cheap, although labor-intensive. The slave quarters at Kingsley Plantation are widely considered some of the best surviving examples of the use of this building material.

Each cabin consisted of a room, fireplace, and sleeping loft. The arrangement of the quarters is distinctive: there were originally 32 cabins laid out in a semicircular arc interrupted by the main thoroughfare to the plantation, Palmetto Avenue. This formation is unique in plantations in the antebellum U.S. The historian Daniel Stowell surmises that it may have given slave families a modicum of privacy, although he also suggests overseers and slave managers may have arranged the quarters to be able to watch all the slaves from the owner's house at the same time. Author Daniel Schafer, however, suggests that Anna Jai may have been responsible for this layout. West African villages were commonly constructed in a circular pattern with the king or ruling family living in the center.

In the 1890s John Rollins deconstructed several of the slave cabins to build a boat house and dock. The archeological significance of the site is considerable as the majority of slave quarters in the Southern United States were not built with quality materials, and most quarters were destroyed after emancipation. Six graves thought to contain slaves were unearthed in 2011 by archeologists from the University of Florida. The bodies ranged in age from infants to an elderly woman; three were adults who were probably born in West Africa.