Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley by Schafer Daniel L.;

Author:Schafer, Daniel L.; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Florida
Published: 2017-05-14T21:00:00+00:00

As it worked out, Elizabeth, Julia, Polly, and Joe became free persons and citizens of the United States of America as the result of the inferno that soon inflamed the entire nation. It is probable they found freedom in the crowded port cities north of Jacksonville as Anna and her daughters fled the area to escape the wrath of vengeful Confederate neighbors. During the American Civil War, Anna Jai Kingsley would again be in flight and seeking a place of safety.

11

Final Flight

The American Civil War

By 1860 Anna Kingsley’s own traumatic experience of captivity and slavery lay a half century in the past. A tough and courageous survivor, Anna had prospered in freedom and become the owner of land and slaves. But as she neared seventy years of age, she increasingly placed her fate in the hands of her daughters, Martha Baxter and Mary Sammis. She lived in comfortable circumstances surrounded by daughters and their husbands, and by her grandchildren and great-grandchildren in the rural free black community she had helped to create. But the anomalous position of free blacks in northeast Florida became untenable as white supremacist sentiments intensified in the 1850s, and secession fever spread through the area. When the country’s bonds of union were severed, the threat to Anna Kingsley’s freedom and safety was as real and frightening as anything she had faced earlier in her life. In 1862 she was again forced to flee from her home, this time by the decision of Florida’s leaders to join with the other southern states in seceding from the Union, an action that was soon followed by a devastating civil war.

The secessionist euphoria came at a time of unparalleled economic prosperity in Florida. The rapid population growth and economic expansion that followed the Second Seminole War led to the opening of new plantation lands to the west of Duval County. Cotton planters and their slaves passed through Jacksonville on their way to what would later become Alachua and Columbia Counties. Settlers opened new communities as far south as Fort Pierce on the Atlantic Coast, and along the Manatee River on the Gulf Coast. Cotton prices were at record highs, lumber mills proliferated from Pensacola to Jacksonville, and two railroads were under construction late in the decade. Florida’s population rose from 87,000 residents in 1850 to 140,000 by 1860, as cotton and lumber exports drew hopeful planters to the rural areas of the state, and northern merchants and artisans to the booming port towns.1

The rapid growth and expansion contributed to general economic prosperity but could not diminish a serious political crisis in the region, one linked to national debates over the extension of slavery into the western territories of the United States. Political leaders in Florida and throughout the South believed fervently that slavery and states’ rights were inseparable and not subject to political compromise. For Confederates in Jacksonville, “Southern rights” meant the unrestricted right to own slave property and to move slaves into the western territories, and defense of property rights meant protection of slave property from abolitionists.

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