Mother-daughter letters open digital window to Colonial era

When Eliza Lucas was a girl of 17 she wrote a friend: “I have the business of three plantations to transact, which requires much writing and more business and fatigue of other sorts than you can imagine. But least you should imagine it too burthensom to a girl at my early time of life, give me leave to answer you: I assure you I think myself happy that I can be useful to so good a father...”

She wrote boldly and prolifically – not only of cultivating indigo, rice and other cash crops of the Lowcountry but also of friendship and familial ties, of managing her slaves, of her five years among the glories of London, of death and its oppressive grief, of her faith in God.

Through her girlhood, her marriage to planter Charles Pinckney (“one of the most valuable of men and best of husbands”), the raising of three children, and the tumultuous events of the American Revolution, Eliza Lucas Pinckney found time to be a vivid and lively correspondent.

Her sons, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney, would become important Revolutionary War figures and serve in overseas posts on behalf of the newly minted United States. Her daughter Harriett, also a prolific letter-writer, was a keeper of journals, including one that chronicled a famously intrepid 1793 trip up the eastern board and points beyond.

Now, the letters of Colonial South Carolina’s most prominent mother and daughter will become part of a nationally recognized digital project through the University of Virginia Press and its electronic imprint arm, Rotunda.

By late spring or early summer, more than 1,000 letters will be available for scholars to access on the Rotunda website. The Pinckney-Horry collection will be added to thousands of historic digitized documents already on the site, including the papers of George Washington, James Madison, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Dolley Madison, the lone female.

Retired University of South Carolina history professor Constance B. Schulz oversees the $325,000 National Endowment for the Humanities-funded project, drawing on her curiosity to excavate the details of a life that took Pinckney from her birthplace in the West Indiesto London schools and salons and then toSouth Carolina plantations.

“I think she had the confidence of a woman of her class and time, but she would not have been a feminist,” Schulz said. “I think she would sparkle, I think she would attract attention from all sorts of people.”

Elite circles

Eliza Pinckney had a front row seat at the Revolution, with her properties pillaged and her sons imprisoned by the British during the worst of South Carolina fighting.

She lived to see “her dear children” released and elevated to high positions in the new American government. Her son Charles became an S.C. governor, signer of the U.S. Constitution, a minister to France and a Federalist who opposed Thomas Jefferson for president. Thomas also was an S.C. governor, ambassador to England and special envoy to Spain.

Near the end of Eliza Pinckney’s life, she entertained the newly sworn-in President George Washington at her daughter’s Hampton plantation. Washington served as a pallbearer at her 1793 funeral in Philadelphia.

Daughter Harriett, whose French Huguenot husband Daniel Horry first joined the Patriot cause then sought help from the British to protect his vast Carolina resources, was said to have provided sanctuary to Gen. Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion while entertaining British Gen. Banastre Tarleton.

“She knew everybody who was anybody,” Schulz said of Harriett Horry.

Both mother and daughter were widowed in their 30s and found themselves overseers of large plantations and complicated business ventures.

For Schulz and her small staff, it has been an adventure excavating deeply into the biography and letters of a family that held sway over 18th- and 19th-century South Carolina. Many people already knew Eliza Pinckney through the “Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney: 1739-1762,” edited by Elise Pinckney and first published in book form in 1972, but Harriett Horry's writings are less well known. As the staff has worked to bring the correspondence online, they have come to know the Pinckneys and Horrys and those with whom they associated — including the Middletons, Hugers, Rutledges and others in South Carolina elite circles.

“We love Thomas,” Schulz said of one of Pinckney’s sons, who entreats his mother frequently to send supplies during the war. Harriett’s son, Daniel, who left for London and France, is also a favorite.

“He was a ne’er do well,” Robin Copp, a member of Schulz’s staff, said affectionately. A charming rogue who married the niece of the Marquis de Lafayette and lived in Europe, Daniel Horry wrote letters entreating his grandmother and mother to send money to fund his lifestyle.

‘A hundred little mysteries’

While most S.C. schoolchildren recognize Eliza Pinckney for her cultivation of the indigo plant, the trove of documents paint a far more complex and cosmopolitan portrait of the Pinckney family and of South Carolina.

“There are a hundred little mysteries in the letters,” said Mary Sherrer, assistant director of the project. The staff has tried to solve some of those mysteries by identifying and cross-referencing people and places mentioned in the letters and providing historical context through annotation and explanation.

Eliza Pinckney writes of assigning slaves to tasks and teaching them to read and write, but she never reveals her philosophical beliefs on the institution of slavery. In her journals, Harriett Horry writes of traveling with several trusted slaves.

“There are many letters telling what different slaves are doing in the house,” Sherrer said.

The letters will be part of Rotunda’s American Founding Era collection. Libraries, scholars and interested individuals will be able to access the collection but will have to pay fees based on a sliding scale.

Holly Shulman, editor of the Dolley Madison digital edition and a reseach professor in the University of Virginia’s history department, persuaded Schulz in 2007 to take on the Pinckney project and believes the collection, once available, will be an incredible addition to the digital historical record.

“My dream is that we could have a group of women whose complete papers are online,” Shulman said, from letters and legal documents to everyday items such as grocery lists. “They would be cross-searchable and would intellectually support and feed each other.”

Often, she said, this kind of material doesn’t get inserted into the “serious tomes” of the founding families. But she believes the documents offer a tangible way to enter their personal lives.

“I’m not sure you find the real person, but you find the real person’s presentation of herself,” Shulman said. “On a public level, to hear somebody’s voice in a chatty way, to talk about what were for them current events, is really quite wonderful. And for a scholar to get into that material is wonderful.”