The Indigo Girl

Eliza Pinckney (née Eliza Lucas) was born on December 28, 1722, on the island of Antigua in the then colony of the British Leeward Islands. She was the eldest child of Lieutenant Colonel George Lucas and his wife, Ann Lucas (probably née Meldrum). Eliza had two brothers, Thomas and George, and one sister named Mary (nicknamed Polly). Like her siblings, Eliza was sent to boarding school in England at a young age, where she learned French, music, and botany.

At the age of 16, Eliza and her family moved to South Carolina, where Colonel Lucas had inherited three plantations from his father: Garden Hill on the Combahee River, Wappoo Plantation on Wappoo Creek, and 3,000 acres on the Waccamaw River. All three plantations were operated by enslaved people. A year after the family arrived, however, Eliza’s father was called to return to his post in Antigua to participate in the rising conflict between England and Spain. As a result, he was appointed lieutenant governor of the island. Unlike the events of Boyd’s novel, Ann died shortly after the family moved to South Carolina, so she was never an obstacle to her daughter’s indigo ventures. However, Boyd’s novel accurately depicts the fact that Eliza did indeed become the manager of all three plantations in her father’s absence. She also sought to diversify the crops by using the seeds that her father sent her from Antigua.

In 1739, Eliza planned to participate in the expanding textile market and began to experiment with indigo crops to produce indigo dye. As in the novel, it took three years before she was able to grow a successful harvest, as frost killed the crops in the first year and worms ate them in the second year. Her father hired Nicholas Cromwell and his brother from Montserrat to help with the dye-making process. Cromwell did indeed sabotage the production so that South Carolinians would not become a competitor to Monserrat. He was promptly fired for this transgression, but his brother remained to help Eliza produce her first 17 pounds of dye. Although the character of Benoit Fortuné is fictional, he was most likely inspired by the indigo maker of African descent whom Eliza’s father hired after the Cromwells and who had worked in the French West Indies. Eliza’s venture proved incredibly lucrative, and rather than monopolizing the market, she shared her knowledge and seeds with other planters. Before long, indigo became a booming industry and accounted for a third of the value of exports from the American colonies prior to the Revolutionary War.

At the age of 21, Eliza married Charles Pinckney, a neighboring planter and lawyer. She had been close friends with his first wife and became attached to Charles after her passing. Eliza gave birth to three sons—Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, George Lucas Pinckney, and Thomas Pinckney—as well as one daughter, Harriott Pinckney. Charles went on to become one of the signatories of the United States Constitution and later became the Federalist vice-presidential candidate in 1800. His brother Thomas became the Minister to Spain and negotiated the Pinckney’s Treaty in 1795, which allowed American navigation rights along the Mississippi River to New Orleans. He also became the Federalist vice-presidential candidate in 1796. Their sister, Harriott, married Daniel Huger Horry, Jr., and lived out her life at Hampton Plantation.

In 1753, Eliza and her family moved to London for five years. Upon their return in 1758, Charles contracted malaria and died. For more than 30 years, Eliza lived as a widow and continued to manage the family plantations. She died of cancer in Philadelphia in 1793, leaving behind a legacy of agricultural innovation for future generations.