Irish planters & merchants: McCalmonts
The McCalmonts had an involvement in Demerara from 1790 and in Berbice from about 1799, when McCalmont, Crafts & Co owned two plantations on the west sea coast. ‘H McCalmont’ was a signatory of an address to the Governor of Berbice in 1803 but in 1805 [van Batenburg, Kort Historische] his interests there were represented by John McCamon.
Hugh McCalmont (1765–1838) of Abbeylands, Co Antrim.
‘The McCalmonts are a striking case of the transfer of wealth from the slave economy into Britain's financial sector just as the City of London rose to dominate the mobilization of international capital.’ [ODNB]
Sources
This biography is based on notes on ‘The M’Calmont Family and their Friends’, compiled from earlier sources (1838 and 1840) and published as part of Francis Joseph Bigger, The Magees of Belfast and Dublin (Belfast: W & G Baird, 1916), provides the most detailed account of Hugh McCalmont’s life. This is available online at: https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/197645/?offset=18676#page=32&viewer=picture&o=info&n=0&q=
Further detail and valuable context is added in Jennifer McLaren, ‘An Irish Surgeon in Barbados and Demerara: Vexation, Misery and Opportunity’ in Daniel Sanjiv Roberts & Jonathan Jeffrey Wright (eds.), Ireland’s Imperial Connections, 1775–1947 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).
Amanda B Moniz, From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism (Oxford: OUP, 2016) contains further information on Crawford’s career.
Nine letters of John Crawford to Hugh McCalmont are held in the Maryland Historical Society Archives MS 1246. McLaren thanks Amanda Moniz (above) of the Smithsonian for access to her transcript of these letters.
Biography
Hugh McCalmont was born in Larne on 31 December 1765 to an Irish presbyterian family with Scottish antecedents. His father Robert McCalmont (1725–75) was captain of a ship trading between Larne and Charlestown (Carolina). After Robert’s death, Hugh’s mother Margaret Munford (or Munfoad) struggled financially but was able to ensure a good education in Larne for her two children, Hugh and his brother James (b.1772). Hugh was said to be ‘a good English scholar and accountant, and wrote well’. On 28 March 1787, aged twenty-one, he sailed for Barbados with a Captain Gillis and was employed there by the Irish doctor John Crawford (1746–1813), remembered as a pioneer of vaccination, who was surgeon to the Naval Hospital. Crawford and a partner – possibly McCalmont – ran a business importing drugs from England and Crawford established the short-lived Barbados Dispensary, a charity which was one of the first of its kind outside Europe.
In January 1789 Crawford arranged two months leave of absence in order ‘to arrange some private affairs at Demerary’ and in 1790 he was appointed chief surgeon to the garrison of the Dutch colony. Hugh McCalmont travelled with Crawford to Demerara and was in partnership with him there for some time. Poor health led Crawford to journey to Europe in 1794 and in the summer of that year he received a medical degree from the University of Leiden. He successfully petitioned the Dutch council for colonial affairs to appoint him superintendent for medical affairs throughout the colony of Demerara and Essequibo and he was given permission to establish a botanical garden where plants which ‘country doctors’ identified as useful could be grown. His plans were disrupted by Britain’s seizure of the colony in 1796 and, although he petitioned to have his appointment confirmed, he left the colony for Baltimore in 1796.
In July 1793 McCalmont was in recipe of correspondence from Matthew Higgins in Grenada regarding the purchase of an estate and in September enslaved labourers were being shipped from Grenada to Demerara on the Rambler. McCalmont was trading as Hugh McCalmont & Co., possibly until Higgins death in 1814. From 1796 – and possibly before – Hugh McCalmont was also in a partnership with George Crafts and by 1798 they had acquired two lots of land on the west coast of Berbice. These became plantation Hope and Experiment which was retained by McCalmont when the partnership was dissolved, probably at Craft’s death in 1806.
Hugh made his first journey back to Britain in 1799 and visited Larne in 1800. He then returned to Demerara and Berbice but after a severe bout of fever decided to leave the colony permanently in 1803. He was in Larne in the autumn of that year and then went to London. He remained in London and other places in England until the summer of 1806, when he decided to settle in Antrim and bought the estate of Abbeylands. On 13 January 1807 he married Elizabeth Allen Barklie. Hope & Experiment was managed under the direction of a number of attorneys in Berbice, including John McLennan and Campbell Faloon.
John Crawford and Hugh McCalmont corresponded with each other until Crawford’s death in 1813. In 1802 Crawford wrote to McCalmont, still then in Demerara, urging his friend – in the wake of the revolution in Haiti – to prepare for the end of white control.
The times in your part of the world as so critical . . . We are in truth on the brink of the same precipice and everything clearly evinces that our precipitation must be near at hand . . . the whole power of France would not reduce St Domingo. It will never be reduced. The cultivators of the soil will be the Lords of it, not only there but in every spot on the Globe. It has been always so, and it must always be so.
Crawford also wrote in 1803 to President Jefferson urging him to put an end to slavery in the United States, lest the country fall to a slave rebellion.
Crawford was a keen supporter of the American revolution and in his letters to Hugh McCalmont there are a number of allusions to the Irish rebellion of 1798 which indicate that Crawford was supportive of the rebel cause. In December 1798 he wrote, in a letter to McCalmont in Demerara, that the ‘storm has been long brewing’ and he was ‘firmly persuaded it must end in complete emancipation, I sincerely hope from every species of foreign influence’ – that is, in Irish independence.
Hugh McCalmont’s younger brother James McCalmont, born in 1772, was also educated in Larne and later learnt Latin so that he could study medicine. He became a ship’s surgeon but on his first voyage, on a slave-ship sailing for Africa, the vessel was destroyed by an accidental explosion and James was killed. This must have been in the mid-1790s.
Hope & Experiment
In 1814 one of McCalmont’s slaves, February, was rewarded with a silver medal, presented by the Court of Policy of the colony, for his role in revealing a plan for an uprising of enslaved Africans. February was a slave on Plantation No 19 on the west sea coast.
From 1819 a Hugh McCalmont owned plantation Hope & Experiment (lots no 15 & 16) on the west sea coast, with 285 slaves. The returns were made on his behalf by John Maclennan but a Hugh McCalmont was certainly in the colony in 1823 when he wrote the following letter:
Since I last wrote you I was on a Bush expedition for twelve days in search of Quamima (of Pln Success) & other ringleaders in the late insurrection, on the Morning of the fourth day we fell in with an immense Camp they had made - Corn & Rice were beginning to spring all round it - they fled long before we reached having a large swamp area to cross they seen us - we destroyed everything & came back to the back of Pln Mon-Repos & renewed our search the next day - when we fell in with him & six more - We shot him & took him - the other, Richard - a head ringleader got away & is not yet taken. We gibbeted Quamima in front of Success Estate - all the others have since been hanged.
[Hugh McCalmont to this namesake, Nov 28, 1823, unpublished private letter in the author’s possession: Empire, enslavement, and freedom in the Caribbean, Michael Craton, (Kingston 1997)]
Quamima hanging at Success [Joshua Bryant, 1823]
This letter was from a Hugh McCalmont to a Hugh McCalmont, suggesting that by this date it was a younger relaton who was managing the family’s interests in Guyana. This was probably the Hugh McCalmont (1811-38) who drowned travelling from Berbice to Demerary on 7 September 1838 and who is commemorated in St Andrew's, Georgetown, as 'late Mayor' of the town and an elder of the church
In 1826 there is a letter from a James Calley, manager of a plantation in Berbice, to the owner Hugh McCalmont in Belfast [National Galleries and Museums on Merseyside, Maritime Archives and Library: 1995 Accessions (DX/1544)]
Hugh McCalmont's family [link to family tree on Ancestry.com - subscribers only]
Hugh McCalmont (1765-1838) married Elizabeth Allen Barklie in 1807. There son Hugh McCalmont (1810-1887) was, at his death, one of the richest men in the country, leaving over £3m, acquired through the merchant bank McCalmont Brothers of London.
This latter Hugh McCalmont was an uncle of the Unionist politician Hugh McCalmont MP (1845-1924).
Legacies
The McCalmonts are a striking case of the transfer of wealth from the slave economy into Britain's financial sector just as the City of London rose to dominate the mobilization of international capital. The scale of their success was atypical, and slavery was one of a number of sources of funding for the City, but the evidence increasingly suggests that the McCalmonts were representative of broader processes at play in the redeployment of slave-derived wealth into the wider British national and imperial economy of the nineteenth century.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography