Zephaniah Kingsley - Restrictions Under A New Government

Restrictions Under A New Government

Following the transfer of Florida from Spain to the United States in 1821, President James Monroe appointed Kingsley to serve on Florida's Territorial Council, which began to establish an American government. The Council focused primarily on allowing immigrants to Florida access to the 40,000,000 acres (160,000 km2) ceded by Spain, and removing the Seminoles to Indian Territory. Americans settled in the central portion of Florida and built productive plantations worked by slaves; the owners were used to the more strictly divided racial caste system that was practiced throughout the Southeastern U.S. This system contrasted with the standing practice in which Kingsley was invested, which, based on Spanish law as implemented in Florida, supported three social tiers of whites, free people of color, and slaves. The Spanish government recognized interracial marriages and allowed mixed-race children to inherit property. Kingsley's first task with the Territorial Council was an attempt to persuade them to determine the place of free people of color in a U.S.-controlled Florida. He addressed the council stating, "I consider that our personal safety as well as the permanent condition of our Slave property is intimately connected with and depends much on our good policy in making it the interest of our free colored population to be attached to good order and have a friendly feeling towards the white population."

When it became apparent to Kingsley that the council could not make a decision on the rights of free blacks and mixed-race people, he resigned his position. Through the 1820s the council began to enact strict laws separating the races, and Kingsley became worried about his future and the rights of his family. To address these issues, in 1828 he wrote a pamphlet titled A Treatise on the Patriarchal or Co-operative System of Society as it Exists in Some Governments, and Colonies in America, and the United States Under the Name of Slavery With its Necessary Advantages crediting himself as "An Inhabitant of Florida", defending the system to which he had become accustomed. In it, he wrote, "Slavery is a necessary state of control from which no condition of society can be perfectly free. The term is applicable to and fits all grades and conditions in almost every point of view, whether moral, physical, or political." Kingsley asserted that when slavery is associated with cruelty it is an abomination; when it is joined with benevolence and justice, it "easily amalgamates with the ordinary conditions of life". He believed that Africans were better suited than Europeans for labor in hot climates, and that their happiness was maximized when they were rigidly controlled; their contentment was greater than whites of a similar class. He furthermore asserted that people of mixed race were healthier and more beautiful than either Africans or Europeans, and considered his mixed race children a barrier to an impending race war.

The treatise was published four times in all, the last printing in 1834. Reception to it was mixed. While some Southerners used it to defend the institution of slavery, others saw Kingsley's support of a free class of blacks as a prelude to the abolition of it. Abolitionists considered Kingsley's arguments for slavery weak and wrote that the only logical conclusion Kingsley could come to was eradication of slavery. Lydia Child, a New York-based abolitionist, included him on a list of people perpetuating the "evils of slavery" in 1836. Although Kingsley was wealthy, learned, and powerful, the treatise was a factor in the decline of his reputation in Florida. He became embroiled in a political scandal with Florida's first governor, William DuVal when DuVal was quoted in newspapers making scathingly critical remarks about Kingsley's motives and his mixed-race family after Kingsley petitioned to have DuVal removed from his office for corruption.