The Pinckney-Horry Digital Edition
About the Project
The papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) and her daughter Harriott Pinckney Horry (1748-1830) document the lives of two observant and articulate women who were members of one of South Carolina’s leading families, and distinguished people in their own right. Pinckney’s papers not only illustrate agriculture in the American south east, and the development of indigo; they also reveal the importance for women of her class of trans-Atlantic friendships and social connections. Horry’s correspondence documents the critical importance of social networks in the early republic; the strength of personal ties between women that linked the elite families of the North and the South to each other even as political connections were threatened by disputes over slavery, commercial differences, and political and constitutional conflict.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s accomplishments are well known. While still in her teens she ran her father’s South Carolina plantations while he carried out his duties as Colonel and Governor of Antigua. Later in life she successfully cultivated indigo as the crop crucial to South Carolina’s eighteenth century economic prosperity. She raised two sons, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney (1746-1825) and Thomas Pinckney (1750-1828), who were key southern revolutionary and early national era military and political leaders. She was, in other words, a “great white woman,” worthy of inclusion in textbooks from grade school to graduate school.
The letters and papers of Harriott Pinckney Horry shed light on the changing status and experiences of elite women in the years of the early republic. The second of Eliza’s three surviving children, Harriott married into another important South Carolina plantation and political family at the age of nineteen, and like her mother became a widow while in her thirties. George Washington visited her successfully-managed rice plantation in his 1791 presidential pilgrimage into the South. When her mother was stricken with breast cancer at the age of 70, Harriott Horry accompanied her to Philadelphia in an unsuccessful attempt at a cure, and it is from her 1793 journal that we know of Eliza Pinckney’s last months. In the summer of 1815 she kept a journal of her travels northward from South Carolina to Boston, replete with extensive comments on her observations of areas damaged in the military campaigns of the War of 1812. Horry’s papers illustrate the continued public and private linkages between politically powerful families of the South and North.
The correspondence of these two women is rich in the details of the everyday lives of women of their class; it also contains important references to current economic and political events and people of their time, seen from the perspective of women who were themselves managers of plantations and their slave labor force. As a continuous record over eight decades of the writings and activities of a mother and daughter, the significance of their papers thus bridges traditional political, economic, diplomatic and military history with a broad range of social history scholarship on the history of childhood and of the family, and of women’s history.