Elizabeth (Eliza) Lucas Pinckney was born in the West Indies in 1722, educated at a finishing school in England. In hopes of finding a better environment for Eliza’s ailing mother, her father, a lieutenant coronel in the British military, moved the family to South Carolina in 1738. Rather than live in the city of Charleston her father chose to purchase a few plantations in a rural country area approximately 17 miles away. Eliza’s father was called back to his post and left Eliza to run the three plantations.
With an interest in Botany from finishing school Eliza created a new strain of the indigo plant from the West Indies. This allowed for a staple crop export to England so they would not be reliant on getting their indigo from France. At 21 Eliza married Charles Pinckney a widowed lawyer in his forties and they had four children together. Two of her children Charles and Thomas were generals in the American Revolution. During her years in South Carolina, Eliza was a prolific letter writer to her father, family and friends. A collection of her letters from 1739-1762 are published in The Letterbook of …show more content…
Eliza wrote a few times that she work up at 5 a.m. and went to bed after dark. Even in our modern times with new technology we struggle to have jobs and run our homes, she was essentially running a company. That she spent two of her letters pondering the science behind a comet intrigued me when I was reading. She was obviously reading enough about it to be interested in not only the appearance of it in the sky but the science behind it “How much it may really borrow from the sun I am not astronomer enough to tell” (Pinckney 59). Maybe it was her love of science, her interest in Botany was used not only for the indigo crops but also to plant a fig orchard. The figs, she believed, would be another monetary item for the estate through