Eliza Lucas Pinckney - Beyond Black Rice - Case Study Example

571003 Eliza Lucas (Pinckney) Eliza Lucas Pinckney, a woman who lived in Colonial South Carolina, stands out in history for several reasons. Unlike other women of the colonial era though, today she is not remembered for her patriotic efforts. She did not sew a flag, nurse wounded revolutionary fighters, or organize acts of rebellion against the Crown. In fact, she was a loyal British citizen. What Lucas Pinckney is best remembered for is indigo—blue dye—one of the colors of the American flag and the most American of clothing, blue jeans. Not that she slaved over a pot of bubbling blue dye, coloring fabric. No, she had slaves to do that dirty, hot job. Not that she grew the indigo plant that made the blue dye either. That job also was done by Lucas Pinckney’s slaves. She gets credit for asking her father to send her indigo seeds, which she instructed her slaves to plant. People also give her credit for figuring out a way to process the dye into stackable storable cakes so that it could be shipped across the Atlantic to Great Britain and Europe where other women then were employed to stand over bubbling pots of blue liquid dying textiles. However, at least some of the credit for that should probably go to her slaves too, but usually does not. What Lucas Pinckney does deserve credit for perhaps is the way she persuaded the people enslaved by her and her family to cooperate in making indigo a lucrative business. Lucas Pinckney’s father, a wealthy British Army officer and governor of Antigua, moved his family to South Carolina when Lucas Pinckney was fifteen. Lucas owned plantations in Antigua and in the Low Country of South Carolina. The latter he left for Lucas Pinckney to supervise when she was only seventeen as he and his sons were called to war. Lucas Pinckney’s mother had an unknown illness because even though she was still alive, she is not mentioned as having much authority in supervising the plantation nor her daughter for that matter. Lucas Pinckney’s education is attributed to her father. Kristin Thomas Iden quotes “Harriet Simons Williams [who] suggests that Col. Lucas’s influence in his daughter’s education is present through her mirroring of his intellectual values[:] ‘One of his most distinctive traits, which his daughter acquired, was a desire to see himself and those around him usefully employed. She had his taste for trying “schemes.” She also acquired from him a devotion to his library.”1 Having attended school in England, Eliza was well-educated and not only competent, but also confident. She differed greatly from her contemporary counterparts who were usually married with children by the age of seventeen. Another way she differed was how she viewed her place in society. At the time, the Great Awakening, evangelical religious fervor, was spreading throughout colonial America. To most of those who lived in Colonial America, religion was vital. After all, the freedom to practice it in the way one saw fit was a motivating factor in the establishment of the British colony so far from home. “Pinckney’s religious views reflected those of most Southern Anglicans, who valued the rational exercise of religion. As the Great Awakening began its move to the South in the 1740s, Pinckney appears to have remained unaffected; her letter illustrates that she continued to emphasize a rational piety, a view that Pinckney perceived as rooted in God’s Word.”2 Most women accepted that prevailing religious view that women should be in submission to God and their husbands or fathers regardless of whether they were Anglican or evangelical. While educated women read at the time, proper reading material consisted of “advice literature and sermons which installed and perpetuated a highly stratified social hierarchy, accepted a subordinate social status.” Not only that, since the south was entirely dependent on slavery, another hierarchical system, “white women, identifying with and desiring the protection of the white male, used reading and writing as a means to support the concept of naturalized hierarchies. Thus, in addition to securing the proliferation of slavery, white southern women also forced themselves into a tightly prescribed role as subservient to man.”3 Yet, they still saw themselves above the slave in the hierarchical order, but perhaps Lucas Pinckney saw the order of power in another way. Apparently, Lucas Pinckney was allowed to read outside of the proscribed literature and developed an interest in many subjects, science for example, from whence she came up with her “schemes.” She studied law and helped people to write their wills. One of her noteworthy “schemes” was to plant oak trees to make the masts for ships. She also cultivated silk. Education had value to Lucas Pinckney and she endeavored to share it even with slaves as one of her “schemes,” as she referred to it in a letter to a friend. In the letter, “Lucas assures her [friend] that she will get approval from both of her parents before proceeding with her ‘scheme.’ That Lucas still refers to her plan of instructing of slaves as a ‘scheme,’ despite her parents’ knowledge of the idea, further alludes to the potential subversive nature of such a plan.” Although, teaching slaves to read was not prohibited by law, it certainly was not encouraged among the conservative landed gentry of the Lucas family’s social circle. Yet, Lucas Pinckney went so far as to teach two slave girls and her younger sister, Polly, together demonstrating that she saw no difference in their educations or their intellectual capacities. She indicates in her letters that she knew such progressive attitudes toward early childhood education would be viewed negatively, and she never expresses her feelings on slavery as an institution.4 Since Lucas Pinckney went ahead with her education scheme even though she knew that it subverted the societal norm of the time, it is possible that she continued to challenge what was considered acceptable throughout the rest of her life too. Even though she may have never recorded her feelings about slavery, Lucas Pinckney’s actions reveal how she may have felt about the institution. However, like most of her characteristics, her feelings about slavery, as indicated through her actions, is complicated. When she was left in charge of her father’s plantations and later, her husband’s, she alone managed them with a full complement of slaves to do the actual work. Apparently, the fact that she oversaw forced labor never seems to bother Lucas Pinckney morally. However, she does write about the problems of being a slave owner on one occasion at least. To find you alive and well, my dear Madam, gave me great pleasure, a Sensation I have been little aquainted with of late as you will perceive when I tell you I have been robbed and deserted by my slaves; my property pulled to pieces, burnt and destroyed, my money of no value, my Children sick and prisoners. …Such is the deplorable state of our Country from two armies being in it for nearly two years; the plantations have been some quite nearly, ruined—and all with very few exceptions great sufferers—their Crops, stocks, boats, Carts gone, taken or destroyed; and the Crops made this year must be very small by the desertion of the Negros in planting and hoeing time. Besides their losses the Country must be greatly impoverished by the death of slaves, as small pox within the British camp.5 Presumably the plantations she managed grew rice, a staple crop at the time, but because of war and other factors, did not always run so smoothly or turn a profit. Lucas Pinckney sought to change this. She experimented with indigo after her father sent her some seeds. Her first two crops did not do so well, but on her third attempt, she was successful. Then she shared her seeds with other farmers in the area. Cultivating indigo was not enough though. Many purveyors of the lucrative textile industry thought the Colonies’ indigo inferior to that of India’s. Lucas Pinckney set out to improve the production of the dye substance and the quality of the product. Because of her efforts, “she is credited with changing the economy of the Colonial South when, in 1741, she first manufactured blue dye cakes from the indigo plant that she successfully grew in South Carolina. Indigo was established as a cash crop that was in great demand in Europe. In the late 1700s, indigo ranked just behind rice, with 130,000 pounds in exports, and accounted for more than one-third of the value of the Colonies’ exports before the Revolutionary War.”6 However, Lucas Pinckney’s success in the indigo industry probably was not all her own for many believe she sought out a slave who had knowledge of indigo farming and used his knowledge to successfully grow her own crop. According to the National Parks Service, “Lucas’ father soon employed a French indigo maker, named Cromwell, to assist his daughter. Cromwell, apparently not wishing to betray his native island of Montserrat which held a virtual monopoly on indigo production to that time, purposely produced inferior dye and sought to keep the process secret from Miss Lucas. She was observant enough to detect Cromwell’s deception and in the following years was able to refine her techniques to the point where the production of marketable South Carolina indigo was possible.”7 Indigo quickly took hold and farmers began to produce it along with rice. The two crops were harvested at different times of years, and indigo supplemented rice well. The English paid well for indigo, inferior or not, because the supply routes to their preferred source were hampered by war. “The long-term trend in textile output in the eighteenth century was one of substantial increase, an expansion that was most rapid in the production of the cheaper textiles—coarse woollens, linens, and cottons—in which indigo was most widely used. These textiles were bought mainly by middling and poorer consumers whose tastes shifted from drab and dark to more vivid colours, including the blues (and some greens) derived from indigo, and in general to fabrics that were patterned with coloured stripes and checks.”8 Before indigo became a major cash crop in South Carolina, it had been cultivated, processed into dye and sold on the world market for years in India, parts of Africa, France and Spain. Slaves who came from some parts of Africa were familiar with rice and indigo cultivation, which were completely unknown to the European Americans. Without the knowledge and skills of rice and indigo the slaves brought with them, those two staple crops may never have been as successful as they were in Colonial America. Both rice and indigo, crops that were often grown on the same plantation at different times of the year, were labor intensive crops. The backbreaking work and the damp environment of the rice fields caused early death and a lot of sickness among the slaves who worked them.9 Indigo cultivation was not much better. It was messy and involved several steps of growing, harvesting, boiling the plant in hot vats and then allowing the extracts to dry into cakes of dye. “Extracting the valuable blue dye was a complicated, delicate process that required carefully executed steps: timely cutting and soaking of the leaves; monitoring the colored liquid extracted from the leaves; and forming and drying the cakes. Eliza Lucas Pinckney oversaw a large workforce of male slaves, who performed all the hard labor.10 Some believe that perhaps Lucas Pinckney differed from other slave owners in that she saw the enterprise as more of a cooperative effort, even though virtually all the work was done by forced laborers. One theory, the “Black Rice Theory,” written about by Judith Carney in her book, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, suggests that in exchange for their hard work, slaves were compensated in some way. Perhaps slaves were given a small portion of land where they could grow and sell crops; maybe they could organize their own work schedule; or perhaps, Lucas Pinckney exchanged their knowledge for their children’s education. Many do not subscribe to the “Black Rice Theory” of civilized negotiations between masters and slaves and a cooperative atmosphere of the plantation system. Edelson does not agree with Carney He says, “Such speculation about a literal process of negotiation over labor makes it seem as if colonists acknowledged slaves’ cultural standing, respected their knowledge, and gave up a measure of their authority to obtain it. Violence, not diplomacy, however, was at the heart of the master-slave relationship in turn-of-the-century Carolina. This was an era in which whites inflicted unspeakable tortures and subjected those they enslaved to extreme material privation.”11 However, the evidence of Lucas Pinckney’s letters where she instructs slave girls alongside her sister seems to indicate that she did respect her slaves’ knowledge and thought them at least worthy of educating. So, perhaps she was able to manage a mostly male slave labor force because her slaves respected her. Maybe she traded the knowledge she had in the form of an education standard for the time for the knowledge they had that enabled her to establish a thriving indigo growing and processing business. Conceivably, Lucas Pinckney’s slaves saw her as the woman in charge, but also as someone who respected them and allowed them more freedom than they may have found in other places in Colonial America. No one knows for sure if Lucas Pinckney was a truly progressive slave owner, or if she had another method, perhaps much more severe, for persuading her slaves to cooperate with her. Maybe she was clever enough to pick up the methods the slaves used to process indigo and appropriate them as her own and win the acclaim of being South Carolina’s first business woman. She certainly did not give them credit for the ideas no matter how she acquired them. However, that seems to indicate how much of a business mind she had. What savvy business woman today will not gladly claim another’s idea as her own if it means acclaim and profits? Lucas Pinckney stands out from the women of her time no matter how she went about making herself stand out, and that is why history remembers her when so many other women who may have done equally as noble deeds lie silently in the grave unremembered by anyone. Bibliography African-American Heritage and Ethnography. "Park Ethnography." National Park Service/United States Department of Interior. November 8, 2007. ://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/aaheritage/lowCountryD.htm (accessed September 20, 2011). Brown, Melissa, and Melinda Machado. "Dress from the Pre-Revolutionary War-Era Added to Smithsonian Costume Collection." National Museum of American History/Smithsonian. April 24, 2008. http://americanhistory.si.edu/news/pressrelease.cfm?key=29&newskey=698 (accessed September 20, 2011). Edelson, S. Max. "Beyond “Black Rice”: Reconstructing Material and Cultural Contexts for Early Plantation Agriculture." American Historical Review, February 2010: 125-135. Iden, Kirsten Thomas. "“Yr most obedt. Servt.”: Eliza Lucas’s Epistolary Voice and the Construction of a Southern Female Identity." Auburn, AL: Auburn University, May 14, 2010. Nash, R. C. "South Carolina indigo, European textiles, and the British Atlantic economy in the eighteenth century." Economic History Review 63, no. 2 (2010): 362-392. National Parks Service. "National Registry of Historic Places Registration Form: Otranto Plantation Indigo Vats." United States Department of the Interior/National Parks Service. Novembere 20, 1989. http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/berkeley/S10817708012/S10817708012.pdf (accessed September 20, 2011). Newman, Lindsay. "“Neither Male nor Female”: Gender and Religion during the Great Awakening in Virginia." “Gender, Religion, and Identity in Social Theory” Symposium. April 3, 2009. Pinckney, Elise, ed. The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney 1739–1762. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1972 . United States Department of the Interior/National Parks Service. "National Registry of Historic Places Registration Form: Otranto Plantation Indigo Vats." United States Department of the Interior/National Parks Service. Novembere 20, 1989. http://www.nationalregister.sc.gov/berkeley/S10817708012/S10817708012.pdf (accessed September 20, 2011). Read More