The Richest Woman in Florida

By Frank W. Sweet

She was a teenage princess. Educated by the finest private tutors, fluent in several languages. Her great-uncle had been royalty, her parents were wealthy aristocrats. Her name was Anta Majigeen Ndiaye and she was born in the Wolof nation, a place that is today part of Senegal. Her folks were slave traders. Anta had been trained in the techniques of the slave trade since childhood.

Now folks, real history has so many twists and turns that it makes your brain itch. The following story of slavery and race is utterly unpredictable because it is utterly true.

Making a profit from selling slaves is no different than in any other retail business. Profit depends on your adding value to your product, so that you can sell it for more than you paid. Remember this. We shall come back to it later.

Africans from the interior had been kidnapped for thousands of years. Newly captured slaves were marched north across the Sahara, or shipped down the Nile. They were then sold around the Mediterranean to ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans as well as to medieval Europeans and Muslims.

But slave trading boomed during the age of European expansion. African consumers wanted European products-textiles, liquor, machinery. Europeans wanted African slaves to colonize the New World. And so, trading colonies were founded along Africa’s coastline. Coastal African states began raiding the inland states, kidnapping slaves for sale to the Europeans. They grew rich on the slave trade.

The only defense against the raids was to have a strong army, with guns and cavalry. But European firearms and horses also had to be bought with slaves. And so the vicious cycle spiraled downward. By 1806, the African interior was virtually depopulated. The slave raiders were reduced to preying upon each other.

Middle Passage

The horsemen from Kajoor appeared in Anta’s village at dawn. They torched the houses, shot the defenders, and rounded up the survivors. The very old and the very young were slaughtered. Young Anta saw her family killed. She was shackled by the neck to nine other teenagers. They, plus a dozen similar coffles, were then marched across country to the great slave-trading depot at Gorée on the coast.

Captain Gisolfo, Portuguese master of the Danish ship “The Sally,” loaded Anta and two hundred others into the cargo hold. Their passage was a fortunate one. Manacled below decks, only 60 or so perished of dehydration, their corpses dragged out and thrown to the sharks. Upon arriving in Havana, Anta was cleaned up, fed, watered, and her naked body oiled for the auction block.

Zephaniah Kingsley owned his own ship. He had been born in Liverpool of Scottish ancestry and raised in Connecticut. After graduation, he had started a one-vessel shipping business out of Charleston. He carried molasses from the Caribbean to New England, carried rum from there to Gorée, and brought slaves from Africa back to the Caribbean, thus following a triangular route. By 1806 Kingsley had moved his base of operations to Doctor’s Inlet on the St. Johns River near St. Augustine, Florida. Kingsley spoke Wolof and had often bought slaves from Anta’s folks. Kingsley raced to Havana, anchored his ship, went into town, and bought Anta in the highest bid of that day’s auction.

When Kingsley’s ship, “The Esther” sailed for Florida on October 10, her outbound manifest listed four barrels of molasses and three female slaves. When the Esther docked in St. Augustine, she cleared customs with four barrels of molasses, only two female slaves, and an elegantly dressed dark brown teenager, whom Zephaniah introduced as his new wife, Anna Kingsley.

Building a Business

While her husband continued his triangular voyages, Mrs. Kingsley raised their family. They had three children: Mary, Martha, and George-swarthy, dark, Mediterranean-looking youngsters, as you can well imagine. She also built her own business.

Within a decade, Anna Kingsley became the wealthiest woman in Florida by creating a slave-trading empire that stretched along northeast Florida’s waterways from Green Cove Springs to the mouth of the St. Johns, over a hundred miles downriver at Mayport on the Atlantic coast.
She owned several large plantations. Her most luxurious was in Jacksonville. While their kids attended college in England, she furnished the mansion with the finest European crystal chandeliers, furniture, tableware, and with masterpieces of European painting and sculpture. The building still stands in Jacksonville. It is called Epping Forrest, and you can take tours through it.

Annas most profitable plantation was on Fort George Island, across the river from Mayport. It was her main training center. She would buy unskilled Florida-born teenagers or newly arrived Africans, and send them to Fort George. Each new unskilled recruit was issued clothing and shoes. They were assigned quarters-two-room concrete houses with fireplaces. Each apprentice was then delivered to a master craftsman for two-to-three years. At the end of their training, the newly skilled craftsmen were then sold at enormous profit, many being smuggled across the U.S. border into Georgia. As we said at