Dr Hugh Lang, plantation families, and the legacies of Scottish participation in Danish St. Croix
Jennifer Gray, our research intern, shares this final, fascinating instalment of her series of three blog-posts about Hugh Lang.
In 1814, Lucretia Burke was emancipated by her owner, Joseph Blake Chabert. Seventeen years later, in 1831, Burke and her four children were recorded on the ‘Free Coloured Census’ of St. Croix as living at 60 Queens Street, Christiansted.1 Her five? children—Ann Eliza, Margaret Francess, Adriana, Isabella Dorothea and Janette Adelberta—and a sixth? boy—Willy, who died young—were fathered by Dr Hugh Lang of Mansfield House in Largs, Scotland. Dr Lang’s sustained relationship with Lucretia Burke provides further evidence of the multifaceted legacies of Scottish participation in Danish St. Croix. Historians including Christine Walker and Marisa J. Fuentes have recently studied gendered power dynamics in plantation societies in the British Caribbean.2 The Lang Papers, held at the University of Strathclyde Archives and Special Collections, aid in analysing the nature of such dynamics in the Danish Caribbean, specifically Lang’s relationship with his children in later life. The collection also provides an insight into Lang’s family in Scotland and the material legacy of proceeds generated from slaveholding estates.
Illustration of Dr Hugh Lang’s descendants. Drawn by the author.
Dr Hugh Lang and Lucretia Burke had six children together over an estimated period of ten to fifteen years following her emancipation.3 During this period, the pair fostered a relationship that crossed racial boundaries in a planter society characterised by racial subjugation and enslavement. However, the limits of this relationship were evident in 1831, when Lang returned to Scotland and married a local Scottish woman, Cleland Dunlop, the following year; he had no further children.4 There is no indication that Dr Lang and Lucretia continued their relationship thereafter. Almost thirty years later, letters written by his eldest daughter, Ann Eliza Beckett, between 1860 and 1862, and preserved in the Lang Papers, provide an insight into Lang’s relationship with his children and subsequently, his legacy in St. Croix.
The Lang Papers provide the opportunity to analyse the ways in which free or freed children of white planters and formerly enslaved persons were forced to assimilate into plantation society and, in this case, accept the proceeds generated by their ancestor’s enslavement. In April 1860, Ann wrote to Dr Lang to request that he pay for repairs that needed to be made to her home.5 In July of that year, M. Melchior – a business associate in Copenhagen- referred to a quarterly allowance that Dr Lang paid to his youngest daughter Janette, presumably as she was not yet married.6 At his death, Dr Lang left 80,000 Rigsdaler to each of his children.7 Each of these instances demonstrates the transfer of Lang’s wealth, which was rooted in the former exploitation of enslaved labour prior to Danish abolition (1848), to his children whose mother had been formerly enslaved. It is crucial to recognise that each of Lang’s children, particularly Ann who had been widowed and was the mother of six children, would have faced discrimination due to their African heritage and despite their European heritage. Their integration into planter or European society, as far as was possible, presented the best means of survival.
The signature of Ann Eliza Beckett. T-LA/18.
Ann Eliza Lang married Francis J.C. Beckett – who was born in Guadeloupe- in 1841 and they had six children together.8 By February 1860, when the first letter of Ann’s appears in the Lang Papers, she was widowed and her eldest son Hugh was living with her brother-in-law, Dr George James Zachariae, in Copenhagen.9 The 1860 Danish West Indies census recorded Ann living at what was previously her mother’s address, 60 Queens Street, with five of her children, an elderly widow, two servants and a nurse. One of the servants, Felicia Burke, shared Ann’s mother’s surname and so it is possible she was a relative of Ann’s.10 At the time of the census, Ann was the only Lang child left in St. Croix, as her sister Margaret had married and moved to Copenhagen, taking with her Adriana and Janette, Lang’s youngest daughters. Due to the absence of reference to Isabella—Janette’s twin sister—in the Lang Papers and subsequent research, it appears likely that she had died at some point in the mid-nineteenth century.
Illustration of Dr Hugh Lang’s descendants in Scotland. Drawn by the author.
While revealing the intimate details of the relationship between Dr Lang and his eldest daughter Ann, the Lang Papers additionally provide information on Lang’s family based in Scotland. In my previous blog, I discussed Dr Lang’s inheritance of his brother Robert Lang’s estates in St. Croix, where the family exploited enslaved labour. The proceeds of this exploitation continued to filter through the generations of the Lang family when he appointed his nephews, Hugh Morris Lang and William Lang, alongside two other men, as the primary inheritors of his estate.11 Upon his death in 1864, Dr Lang’s personal estate alone was valued at £168,669.19.10, equal to nearly £10 million today.12 This was notwithstanding the addition of stocks, shares, and bonds, which more than doubled Dr Lang’s fortune.13 Like his uncle, Hugh Morris Lang obtained a medical degree from the University of Glasgow in 1838, after which he practised in Largs where he also owned lands.14 The Lang Papers highlight that prior to Dr Lang’s death, Hugh Morris Lang was involved in the sale of the estate William in St. Croix in 1862 and gave instruction to Mr W. Peebles –who managed the St. Croix estates- to accept an offer of $20,500 for the property.15 This confirms Hugh Morris Lang’s role in selling off the Lang family’s estates in Danish St. Croix, profiting through the sale of the estates when they no longer proved as profitable following the abolition of slavery. As one of the primary inheritors of Dr Lang’s estate, Hugh Morris Lang was listed as the proprietor of Mansfield House—Lang’s Largs-based estate—on the Valuation Rolls of 1885.16 However, in April 1887, Hugh Morris Lang was taken to court by Clydesdale Bank Ltd. for failing to repay a sizeable debt of £4,000; Mansfield House was seized as payment.17
The Lang Papers reveal intricate details about Dr Lang’s descendants, all of whom were innately tied to slavery in St. Croix. The five children Dr Lang fathered with Lucretia Burke were indicative of the divergent and complicated nature of gender and race relations in colonial and plantation societies. Their assimilation into colonial and European society reveals the far-reaching legacy of Scottish participation in the Danish Caribbean. Moreover, the vast inheritance bestowed upon Hugh Morris Lang and William Lang illuminates the generational wealth procured from participation in Caribbean slavery. Dr Lang’s will reveals the extent to which these proceeds penetrated nineteenth-century British capitalist society, as he held shares in Clydesdale Bank Ltd., the North British Railway Company and the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway Company, among multiple others.18 With all of this to consider, the Lang Papers are a crucial resource in analysing the human and material legacy of the Lang family’s involvement with enslavement and plantation society in Danish St. Croix, as well as offering one indicative case study of the legacies of sustained Scottish involvement in plantation and enslavement beyond the British Caribbean.