Duncan F. Kenner

Duncan F. Kenner (1813 – July 3, 1887) was a Louisiana politician, lawyer, and diplomat for the Confederate States of America.

Born in New Orleans, he became a wealthy sugar planter. He used scientific techniques and was said to be the first in Louisiana to use a railroad to bring sugar cane from the fields to the mill. He served for several terms in the Louisiana House of Representatives and was a member of the state constitutional conventions of 1845 and 1852, having presided over the latter conclave.

He was a member of the Confederate Congress and chairman of its ways and means committee. In 1862, Kenner proposed a revolutionary federal invasion of the private exchequer, a national income tax of 20%, with even a schedule of exemptions. His tax bill went nowhere, but in April 1863, Congress passed another act, this one calling for a tax in kind, meaning produce in lieu of money of money, and it was based not on property but on produce and income attached to it. In July 1863, during a recess in the legislature, Kenner was visiting his family at his Ashland Plantation and narrowly avoided capture by the Union army. One of his slaves warned him that the Federal troops were coming, and Kenner was able to make his escape. Kenner had become convinced that emancipating the Confederate slaves was the only way to gain independence for the southern nation. In 1864, he was sent by Jefferson Davis as special commissioner to England and France to secure the recognition of the southern Confederacy. Davis, through Kenner offered the emancipation of the slaves in the Confederacy in exchange for recognition by Britain and France.

Much of his property was confiscated and his slaves were freed on the capture of New Orleans in 1862, but at his death he was again a millionaire. He was fond of horses, and owned one of the largest stock farms in the United States. He built Ashland Plantation for his wife, the former Anne Guillemine Nanine Bringier.

The city of Kenner, LA is named for his family.