In the early 1740s, Eliza Lucas was looking for a cash crop to grow on her family’s South Carolina plantation. Her father, then the lieutenant governor of Antigua, sent her various seeds to try, including indigo. Her first few attempts were unsuccessful, but she continued her efforts and hired an expert in indigo production from Montserrat. After marrying Charles Pinckney, Eliza expanded her cultivation of indigo to his plantations as well. In the following letter, Eliza Lucas Pinckney recalls for her son some of the difficulties she encountered in her first few attempts to produce a successful indigo crop. Among her problems was the sabotage of her crop by her hired expert, Mr. Cromwell.
September 10, 1785
My Dear Child,
You wish me to inform you what I recollect of the introducing and culture of indigo in this country. You have heard me say I was very early fond of the vegetable world, my father was pleased with it and encouraged it, he told me the turn I had for those amusements might produce something of real and public utility, if I could bring to perfection the plants of other countries which he would procure me. Accordingly when he went to the West Indies he sent me a variety of seeds, among them the indigo. I was ignorant both of the proper season for sowing it, and the soil best adapted to it. To the best of my recollection I first try’d it in March 1741, or 1742; it was destroyed (I think by a frost). The next time in April, and it was cut down by a worm; I persevered to a third planting and succeeded, and when I informed my father it bore seed and the seed ripened, he sent a man from the Island of Monserat by the name of Cromweel [Cromwell] who had been accustomed to making indigo there, and gave him high wages; he made some brick vats on my fathers plantation on Wappo Creek and then made the first indigo; it was very indifferent, and he made a great mistery of it, said he repented coming as he should ruin his own country by it, for my father had engaged him to let me see the whole process. I observed him as carefully as I could and informed Mr. Deveaux an old gentleman a neighbour of ours of the little knowledge I had gain’d and gave him notice when the indigo was to be beat; he saw and afterwards improved upon it, not withstanding the churlishness of Cromwell, who wished to deceive him, and threw in so large a quantity of lime water as to spoil the colour. In the year 1744 I married, and my father made Mr. Pinckney a present of all the indigo then upon the ground as the fruit of my industry. The whole was saved for seed, and your father gave part of it away in small quantities to a great number of people that year, the rest he planted the next year at Ashipo for seed, which he sold, as did some of the gentlemen to whom he had given it the year before; by this means there soon became plenty in the country. Your father gained all the information he could from the French prisoners brought in here, and used every other means of information, which he published in the Gazette for the information of the people at large.
The next year Mr. Cattle sent me a present of a couple of large plants of the wild indigo which he had just discovered. Experiments were afterwards made upon his sort, which proved to be good indigo, but it did not produce so large a quantity as the cultivated sort.
I am your truly affectionate mother,
Eliza Pinckney
Source: “A Letter from Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1785,” in The Colonial South Carolina Scene: Contemporary Views, 1697–1774, ed. H. Roy Merrens (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1977), 145–46.