Haiti
After attempting to persuade the new government of Florida to make it possible for his family to have rights as free blacks and his mixed race children to inherit his properties, the independent republic of Haiti became more attractive to Kingsley. Haiti's government was actively encouraging free blacks from across the Americas to settle the island, offering them land and citizenship. Kingsley highlighted its successes as a nation of free blacks in his treatise, writing "...under a just and prudent system of management, negroes are safe, permanent, productive and growing property, and easily governed; that they are not naturally desirous of changes, but are sober, discreet, honest and obliging, are less troublesome, and possess a much better moral character than the ordinary class of corrupted whites of a similar condition." Kingsley's praise of Haiti's new system—which outlawed slavery—combined with his defense of slavery, is notable to author Mark Fleszar, who comments that the paradox in Kingsley's thinking indicated a "disordered worldview". Nevertheless, he was determined to create the society he had written about and defended.
Kingsley's son George and six of his slaves arrived in Haiti to scout for land and found a suitable location on the northeastern shore of the island, in what is today the Puerto Plata Province of the Dominican Republic. By 1835 it became evident that Kingsley's marriage to Anna would not be recognized in the United States, and that in the event of his death, holdings in the name of Anna, Flora, Sarah, McGundo, and their mixed-race children might be confiscated. Over the next two years, most of Kingsley's extensive family relocated — two of his daughters stayed in Florida, as they had married local white planters — to a plantation named Mayorasgo de Koka, which was worked by more than 50 slaves transplanted from the Fort George Island plantation. In Haiti, they were contracted to work as indentured servants, who would earn their full freedom after nine years of labor.
Read more about this topic: Zephaniah Kingsley
Famous quotes containing the word haiti:
“For four hundred years the blacks of Haiti had yearned for peace. for three hundred years the island was spoken of as a paradise of riches and pleasures, but that was in reference to the whites to whom the spirit of the land gave welcome. Haiti has meant split blood and tears for blacks.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)