Alexander Johnstone

Brother of Sir James Johnstone bart. and William Johnstone Pulteney (both of whom q.v.). The will of Alexander Johnstone lieutenant-colonel of His Majesty's forces of St Marylebone (made 23/05/1775) was proved 24/01/1783. Buried - as are his brothers - in Westminster Abbey.

1. Alexander Johnstone had purchased for £23,500 the Baccaye estate in Grenada in 1766, which he renamed Westerhall. The estate was valued at £95,017 currency (about £54,000 sterling) in 1770, and annually produced 'crops worth £10,000 in the years before 1795.'

PROB 11/1099/304; http://www.westminster-abbey.org/our-history/people/alexander-and-james-johnstone [accessed 26/11/2014].

1. Douglas Hamilton, Scotland, the Caribbean and the Atlantic world, 1750-1820 (Manchester University Press, 2005) pp. 74, 183. The story of the Johnstone family has also been told in Emma Rothschild's Inner Life of Empires (Princeton, 2012). According to Rothschild, Alexander Johnstone 'became a soldier in the British army and was sent to North America. He served in Canada and later in northern New York [...] He eventually became a colonel in charge of fortifications on the West Indian island of Grenada and purchased [in 1766 for £23,500] a large sugar plantation on the island [Baccaye in St David's parish, which he renamed Westerhall], together with 178 "Negroes and Mollatoe slaves." He was a member of the assembly of the island of Grenada, and in a case before the Privy Council in London, he accused the governor of Grenada of the torture of slaves. He died unmarried at the age of fifty-five, without legitimate children, leaving his slaves, mills, and boiling houses to his brother James.