December 4, 1765 - Zephaniah Kingsley

Kingsley operated at the intersection of Atlantic commerce and human trafficking, describing the slave trade as a "very respectful business" and pursuing it with the disposition of an entrepreneur rather than an outlaw. He owned and captained slave ships across multiple decades, moving hundreds of people across the Atlantic as cargo. His career illustrates how the slave trade was embedded in legitimate mercantile networks and social respectability rather than existing at their margins.

From Wikipedia

Zephaniah Kingsley Jr. (December 4, 1765 – September 14, 1843) was an English-born planter, merchant and slave trader who moved as a child with his family to the Province of South Carolina and enjoyed a successful mercantile career. He built four plantations in the Spanish colony of Florida near what is now Jacksonville, Florida. He served on the Florida Territorial Council after Florida was acquired by the United States in 1821. Kingsley Plantation, which he owned and where he lived for 25 years, has been preserved as part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historic Preserve, run by the United States National Park Service. Finding his large and complicated family progressively more insecure in Florida, he moved them to a vanished plantation, Mayorasgo de Koka, in what was then Haiti but soon became part of the Dominican Republic.

In his will, Kingsley called himself a planter, but he was in his younger years first and foremost a slave merchant, and proud to be one: a "very respectful business", in his words. He owned and captained slave ships, and was actively involved in the Atlantic slave trade. A document of 1802 records his arrival at Havana as First Officer of the Superior with 250 Africans, and another of 1808, 60 slaves to a Spanish land grant.

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