Eliza Lucas

About

Agricultural innovator and plantation manager who built colonial South Carolina's economy on the cash crop of indigo, which, in its processed form (as dye), was a major pre-Revolutionary War export.

Before Fame

At the age of sixteen, she became the primary manager of Wappoo Plantation, one of her family's South Carolina landholdings.

Trivia

Her son, Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, signed the United States Constitution and ran as the 1800 vice-presidential candidate for the Federalist Party.

Family Life

She grew up on a sugar plantation in the British West Indies. She later married South Carolina Chief Justice Charles Pinckney.

Associated With

She and James Hammond -- a pre-Civil War South Carolina governor -- were both South Carolina plantation owners and slaveholders.