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ELIZA LUCAS PINCKNEY
(1722-1793)

Born in 1722 in Antigua in the West Indies, Eliza Lucas Pinckney changed the economy of the Colonial South.  She attended school in England where her favorite subject was botany.  Her family moved to Charleston, South Carolina, and soon after her mother died.  By age sixteen, Pinckney was left alone in charge of three plantations and her younger siblings when her father, a British military officer, was sent back to the Caribbean. 

In addition to experiments with flax, hemp and silk as possible cash crops, Pinckney spent her spare time perfecting strains of indigo that her father brought her from the West Indies.  Indigo is a seed that produces a clear blue dye and the shade was in great demand in European textile industries.  Pinckney started growing the indigo on her plantations and she encouraged other planters in South Carolina to do the same.  Within two years, indigo became South Carolina’s second best cash crop behind rice, with 130,000 pounds exported annually. Indigo accounted for over one-third of the value of the colonies’ exports before the Revolutionary War.

With the autonomy and economic power she gained in running the plantations, she could reject the suitors her father recommended and choose her own husband.  She married Charles Pinckney, a prominent planter and lawyer, when she was twenty-two.  Because he was often away and died relatively early in their marriage, Pinckney spent the rest of her life overseeing their plantations in addition to raising a family.  She invested the money she earned from exporting indigo in her children’s education.  Two of her sons became great national figures.  Charles Pinckney was a signer of the United States Constitution and Thomas Pinckney was the United States Minister to Spain and to Great Britain. 

Pinckney died in 1793 and President George Washington served as one of her pallbearers at her funeral.

 

Additional Resources:
Books and Journals:

  • “Eliza Lucas Pinckney” in G. J. Barker Benfield and Catherine Clinton, eds.,Portraits of American Women: From Settlement to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
  • Freyer, Darcy.  “The Mind of Eliza Pinckney: An Eighteenth-Century Woman’s Construction of Herself.” South Carolina Historical Magazine, vol. 99 (1998).
  • Pinckney, Elise, ed.. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739-1762. SouthCarolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.
  • Ravenel, Harriott Horry. Eliza Pinckney. New York: Scribnerís, 1896.


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