We are delighted to announce that a full catalogue (to item level) is now available online for the Hugh Lang papers. This small but important collection comprises just under 100 letters, dated 1860-1862, received by Hugh Lang, the owner of five sugar plantations in St. Croix in the West Indies. At the time, Lang was living in Largs, Scotland and the majority of the letters are from Lang’s plantation manager in St. Croix, and various merchants, and relate to the production, shipment and sale of sugar, rum and molasses from the plantations. The letters are rich in detail. Reading them from start to finish, the reader is presented with an unfolding tale of the increasing difficulty in making a profit faced by plantation owners at this date. The letters attest to various reasons for this: the growing shortage of labour (slavery had been abolished in the Danish West Indies relatively recently, in 1848, and, unsurprisingly, labour was now in short supply); the weather and its effect on the crop (the weather is a constant refrain); the increasing price of supplies; and the unsettled state of the sugar and rum markets (especially in America where the Civil War had recently started). The very last letter in the collection (ref: T-LA/94) describes the sale of Estate William, one of Lang’s plantations, as a direct result of these difficulties.
It's not only the minutiae of estate management that are documented. Letters from family members reveal more personal details. Three letters from Lang’s daughter, Ann Beckett, the offspring of a liaison by Lang with an enslaved woman in St. Croix, are particularly poignant. Ann was left in a precarious situation after the death of her husband and had to beg her father for help on more than one occasion. Once, for repairs to her house, and again, as a result of her increasingly ill health, for help looking after her children so that she could take up her doctor’s recommendation of a restorative sea voyage.
Hugh Lang papers online catalogue.
Series of three blog posts about the collection written by student placement, Jennifer Gray:
0 Comments.