Early Life
Kingsley was born in Bristol, England, the second of eight children to Zephaniah Kingsley, Sr., a Quaker from London, and Isabella Johnstone of Scotland. The elder Kingsley moved his family to the Colony of South Carolina in 1770. His son was educated in London during the 1780s; Zephaniah Kingsley, Sr. purchased a rice plantation near Savannah, Georgia and several other properties throughout the colonies and Caribbean islands, owning probably around 200 slaves in all. Like other British loyalists, Kingsley, Sr. was forced to leave South Carolina without his family, for New Brunswick, Canada in 1782 following the American Revolutionary War.
Zephaniah Kingsley, Jr. returned to Charleston, South Carolina in 1793, swore his allegiance to the United States, and began a career as a shipping merchant. His first ventures were in Haiti, during the Haitian Revolution where coffee dominated his interests. He lived in Haiti for a brief period while the fledgling nation was developing a social system of former slaves transitioning into free citizens. Kingsley traveled frequently, prompted by recurring political unrest among the Caribbean islands. The instability affected his business interests but a sharp increase in demand for slaves in the Southern U.S. occurred around the same time and Kingsley began to travel to West Africa to procure Africans to be traded as slaves between America, Brazil, and the West Indies. In 1798 he became a Danish citizen in the Danish West Indies; he continued to make his living trading slaves and shipping other goods into the 19th century. He became a citizen of Spanish Florida in 1803.
Read more about this topic: Zephaniah Kingsley
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Women who marry early are often overly enamored of the kind of man who looks great in wedding pictures and passes the maid of honor his telephone number.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Anarchism is the only philosophy which brings man the consciousness of himself; which maintains that God, the State, and society are non-existent, that their promises are null and void, since they can be fulfilled only through man’s subordination.... The individual is the heart of society, conserving the essence of social life; society is the lungs which are distributing the element to keep the life essence—that, is, the individual—pure and strong.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)