At the age of 16, she was running three plantations. At 18 she worked with a French expert in indigo processing and an enslaved carpenter named Quash to introduce large-scale production of the valued blue dye to South Carolina. Over the following decades, she developed markets for her products, taught herself law, wrote wills and other legal documents for her neighbors, kept a careful letter-book of all her business and personal correspondence, tutored her younger sister, and raised and educated three successful children. Her sons were officers in the Revolutionary War; one would be governor of South Carolina, the other a member of the Constitutional Convention. Her daughter went on to manage her own plantation.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722–1793) is an ideal figure to help us think through the meanings of independence. She forged a far more independent life than what we might imagine was possible for an 18th-century woman. Yet her life also reveals that no one, at any time, lives a truly independent life, whether a founding father or a 21st-century American.
Pinckney’s father did not intend to leave her in charge of the family’s South Carolina plantations, and a household that included an ailing mother and a 5-year-old sister. But after moving the family to South Carolina from Antigua in 1739, he was recalled into service in the British navy to fight the War of Jenkins’s Ear against Spain. As her correspondence shows, Pinckney at first depended on instructions from her father and advice from male neighbors. (Her letters are readily available in collections online and in print, and her words are beautifully deployed by her best modern biographer, Lorri Glover.) But before long, she developed her own expertise and confidence. Instructions from her father could be delayed for months, and she had to make decisions quickly. She came to understand the complexities of managing overseers and hundreds of enslaved laborers, of anticipating productivity and markets, and of negotiating with British merchants and creditors. She also came to realize that her father had run the family’s Antigua plantations into debt and that she was the better manager.
