Background
John Ker was born on June 27, 1789. His father, David Ker (1758–1805), born in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland and of Scottish ancestry, immigrated with his wife Mary to the United States in the 1780s.
politician member of the Louisiana State Senate
John Ker was born on June 27, 1789. His father, David Ker (1758–1805), born in Downpatrick, Northern Ireland and of Scottish ancestry, immigrated with his wife Mary to the United States in the 1780s.
John Ker was educated privately.
He served as the first President of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The family moved to the Mississippi Territory about 1800. in xxxx after President Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) appointed the father David Ker to the Supreme Court of Mississippi. He received a Doctor of Medicine degree from the Medical School at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1822.
He worked as a medical doctor.
He served as a surgeon in the War of 1812 and the Creek War of 1813-1814. Ker also became a planter, owning the Good Hope Plantation, which produced cotton in Concordia Parish, Louisiana.
He was a patron of Oakland College in Lorman, Mississippi, a college founded by Reverend Jeremiah Chamberlain (1794-1851). lieutenant closed down during the Civil War.
In the 1830s, Ker served in the Louisiana State Senate.
That same decade, together with major slave owners Isaac Ross (1760-1838), Edward McGehee (1786-1880), Stephen Duncan (1787-1867), and educator Chamberlain, all of Mississippi, he co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society, whose goal was to send freedmen to the colony of Liberia in West Africa in order to get them out of United States society. He served as the vice-president of the society. The organization was modeled after the American Colonization Society, but it addressed the issue of slavery and free blacks in Mississippi, where slaves outnumbered whites by about three to one.
Additionally, he went on to serve as one of the vice presidents of the American Colonization Society.
He died on January 4, 1850. He was buried on the grounds of the Linden mansion in Natchez, Mississippi.