Charles Crawford 'Earl of Crawford and Lindsay'

'Earl Crawford and Lindsay' was shown as the owner of 183 enslaved people on Antigua in the 1817 Slave Register, the registration made by Thomas Norbury Kerby (q.v.) as attorney, of 139 enslaved people in 1821, the registration made by Samuel Warner atty to Earl of Crawford and Lindsay, and of 141 enslaved people in 1824, registered by William Burnthorn agent. In 1828 William Burnthorn registered 127 enslaved people as the attorney of the late Earl of Crawford and Lindsay. None of the Registers identifies the estate (although from his brother John Francis Crawford's will it was probably called Evansons). Charles Crawford, son of Alexander Crawford of Antigua, had adopted the title of 'Earl of Crawford and Lindsay' and it appears he persuaded at least the Antigua authorities to accept his usage of the title.

1. Charles Crawford was an anti-slavery writer and polemicist in the 1780s and 1790s in America.

2. The will of Charles Crawford calling myself the Earl of Crawford and Lindsay was proved 11/03/1825. In the will (made in 1816) he instructed his executors to extend the lease he had of land in Antigua at £600 p.a. from Clement Tudway MP, and provided that his 'negroes' should be freed in 1833 after they had learned trades, read the Bible and been treated with humanity in the interim. He made several monetary bequests to charitable institutions, and left £10,000 to his nephew John Francis Byrne and Byrne's children: half his residual estate was left to disperse the Bible through the world and the other half to his 'poor Negroes', male and female, share and share alike, in 1833.

T71/245 pp. 141-144; T71/246 pp. 351-355; T71/248 pp. 89-92; T71/249 84-86.

1. Lewis Leary, 'Charles Crawford, a forgotten poet', Pennsylvania History (July, 1959) pp. 293-306.

2. PROB 11/1696/199.