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At 16, Eliza Lucas Pinckney managed three South Carolina plantations; she transformed the colonial economy with her hybridization of indigo, increasing its production by 2,500% in just two years.
Perhaps the nation’s first important agriculturist, Eliza Lucas ran three South Carolina plantations at sixteen. Born in the West Indies in 1722, she assumed responsibility for her siblings at an early age because her mother died soon after the family moved to the farming area near Charleston. When her father, an officer in the British military, had to return to the Caribbean, Eliza was left in charge. She had the advantages of Finishing School in England, however, and though that education stressed French, music, and other traditionally feminine subjects, she was particularly interested in botany. From 1739, she worked annually on improving seeds of the indigo plant, for an appreciation of world markets made her aware that the growing textile industry would reward the cultivation of new dyes, and indigo had the greatest potential for a clear blue. By 1744, she had hybridized an ideal strain and began profitably selling its seeds. Her achievement made an astonishing difference in the colonial southern economy: in 1745-1746, a mere 5,000 pounds of indigo was exported, but two years later, more than 130,000 pounds sailed out of Charleston. The crop was second only to rice exports, for cotton did not develop its importance until later. Although it is indigo for which she is remembered, Eliza Lucas experimented with other plants. She wrote, for example, when she was young enough that her mother was still alive, “I have planted a large fig orchard with design to dry and export them.” Aware of how the world would perceive such scientific enterprise from a mere girl, she added that she knew some thought that she had “a fertile brain for scheming” but, she explained with traditionally feminine apology and dismissiveness, “I love the vegetable world extremely.” Marriage at twenty-two diminished Pinckney’s initiative only slightly, for her husband was an active politician who frequently traveled and who also appreciated his wife’s unique abilities. She bore four children in five years, and again demonstrated her scientific bent by going beyond the teaching that all mothers did in the colonial era to also study the “tabula rosa” theories of John Locke: more than a century before Elizabeth Peabody and other progressive educators, she experimented with very early childhood education. Moreover, as a teenager, she had defied convention by teaching black children. Eliza Pinckney lived the most cosmopolitan part of her life in England during the 1750s, but after her husband’s death in 1758, she took over the operation of their seven plantations and actively ran them until her death in 1793. Like other Revolutionary War women, she managed alone during the war, writing in 1780 that the crops would be small because “stock, boats, carts, etc. [were] taken or destroyed” and because of the “desertion of the Negroes in planting and hoeing time.” Meanwhile, the exceptional educations she had given her sons paid off, as they went on to play major roles in the American Revolution and the establishment of a new government. Doubtless Pinckney herself would have pursued such a career had she not been limited by gender, for her “fertile brain” had demonstrated an early legalistic inclination: as a teenager, she had written wills and served as a trustee for the estate of a friend. Her contemporaries held Eliza Pinckney in such esteem that George Washington—the nation’s president at the time—served as one of her pallbearers. 1
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