About
Don Juan McQueen (1751-1808), born John in Philadelphia, grew up in Charleston, S.C. before moving to Georgia in 1784. He arrived in Europe in late 1785 with letters of introduction from Nathanael Greene and Anne Kinloch of South Carolina for Thomas Jefferson. He was hoping to obtain a contract with the French minister of marine for the sale of live oak timber, a large amount of which he owned on his Georgia property. He eventually became one of the largest enslavers in Spanish East Florida, styling himself "Don Juan." He died there in 1808.
Citation(s):
Walter Charlton Hartridge, The Letters of Don Juan McQueen to his Family, (Columbia, S.C.: The Georgia Society of The Colonial Dames by Bostick and Thornley, 1943), passim.
Paul M. Pressly, A Southern Underground Railroad, (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2024), https://ugapress.manifoldapp.org/read/6e6864d2-5bc7-49d3-84e9-3f92dacb8548/section/ac39223e-ce31-466b-a53d-36e936941d29, accessed 17 March 2026.
“Thomas Jefferson to John McQueen, 16 January 1786,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-09-02-0169. [Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 9, 1 November 1785 – 22 June 1786, ed. Julian P. Boyd. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954, p. 178.]