John Ker (1789–1850) was an American surgeon, planter, and politician in Louisiana. Together with several major Mississippi planters, in the 1830s Ker co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society (MCS), promoting the removal of free people of color to a colony in West Africa (which later became part of Liberia). The MCS modeled itself after the American Colonization Society, the national organization for which Ker later served as a vice president.
Born in North Carolina, where his father was the first president of the new state university, Ker moved with his family as a youth to Mississippi after 1817, when his father was appointed to the state supreme court. He went to medical school in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania and returned to the South. A surgeon in the War of 1812 and Creek War, Ker was also a slaveowner and owned a cotton plantation in Louisiana. As a planter, he likewise served in the Louisiana state house.
In the 1830s, Ker was elected and served in the Louisiana State Senate.[2] That same decade, together with major slave owners Isaac Ross (1760–1838), Edward McGehee (1786–1880), Stephen Duncan (1787–1867), and educator Chamberlain, all from Mississippi, he co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society (MCS). Its goal was to send free people of color to a colony run by the society called Mississippi-in-Africa in order to remove them from the southern slave society. Ker served as a vice-president of the society.[2][7][8][9] The organization was modeled after the American Colonization Society and focused on free people of color in Mississippi and later Louisiana, both of which had large enslaved populations but vastly different free populations of color.[8][9] The Mississippi-in-Africa colony ultimately merged into the Commonwealth of Liberia in 1841.
Additionally, Ker later served as one of the vice presidents of the American Colonization Society.[2][10][11][12]
Personal life
He married Mary Kenard Baker, the daughter of Joshua Baker (1799–1885), who later served as the 22nd Governor of Louisiana in 1868.[2][10] They had four sons and two daughters:
Mosette Broderick, Triumvirate: McKim, Mead & White: Art, Architecture, Scandal, and Class in America's Gilded Age, New York, New York: Random House, 2010, p. 52
The African Repository, American Colonization Society, 1842, Volumes 18-19, p. 54
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