Eliza Lucas

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Eliza Lucas Pinckney (c. 1722–1793) was the daughter of Lieut.-Colonel George Lucas of the British army, who about 1738 removed from Antigua to South Carolina, where he acquired several plantations. He was almost immediately recalled to Antigua, and his daughter undertook the management of the plantations with conspicuous success. She is the first to introduce into South Carolina (and into continental North America) the cultivation and manufacture of indigo, and she also imported silkworms. The fermentation and processing of the indigo in plastered pits is a complex process for which she had only a general idea learned from the Caribbean process, and she arrived at productive methods mainly by experimentation.

For her contributions to South Carolina she was inducted into the South Carolina Business Hall of Fame. In 1753 she presented to the Princess of Wales a dress made of silk from her plantations.

Eliza Lucas married Charles Pinckney in 1744. She was the mother of Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney, as well as one daughter, Harriott Horry. Contemporary historians often cite Pinckney as an example of republican motherhood although, ironically, she was less enthusiastic about American independence than her two sons, who both became prominent Federalist politicians. She also was widowed later in 1749.

[edit] References

Pinckney, Elise, ed. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739-1762. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

South Carolina Historical Magazine Vol. 99:3(July 1998). Special issue on Eliza Lucas Pinckney, featuring three academic articles and three previously unpublished letters.

This has been adapted from a 1911 encyclopedia.