• ENTREPRENEUR
• Established the American INDIGO market, making South Carolina the foremost supplier of indigo to England​
• Left in charge of the family household and three rice plantations when her father left to serve in the British army in Antigua
• Well educated, she taught her younger sister how to read, as well as two slave girls, whom she planned would go on to teach at a school she hoped to build on her land
• Recognizing the danger of growing only one crop, she experimented with other plants, trying out ginger, cotton, and figs, but it was indigo that she ultimately chose
• Growing indigo and creating dye from it is an extremely sensitive and complicated process, and she was unsuccessful for several years
• Corresponded often with her father, who hired a French indigo expert to help her, but the man feared that American indigo production would cut into his own country's exports, and he sabotaged Eliza's dye by contaminating it with limewater; needless to say, she fired him
• Gave much of her indigo seed to fellow plantation owners, hoping to make South Carolina a premier exporter of the crop
• Before the Revolution, indigo comprised one-third of South Carolina's total exports, selling more than one million pounds of it to England
• RESISTED her father's attempts to marry her off, waiting until she was 22 to marry friend and widower Charles Pinckney, after which she dedicated herself to caring for their three children
• Her sons, Charles and Thomas, would go on to become prominent figures in the American Revolution
• No images of her survive (there are lots of images online labeled as Eliza Pinckney, but most of those are of her daughter-in-law, Eliza Izard)

Not So Awesome

Though Eliza Pinckney treated the slaves working on her plantations humanely, she profited directly from their labor and never considered freeing them, nor is there evidence that she had any qualms about the concept of slavery.

Bibliography: Drachman, Virginia G. Enterprising Women: 250 Years of American Business. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Print.
Roberts, Cokie. Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

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Eliza Lucas Pinckney Chapter of the National Society Daughters of the American Revolution

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