Eliza Lucas PinckneyEliza Lucas Pinckney was born in 1772, in Antigua, to a British mother and father. At the age of sixteen, Eliza and her family moved to South Carolina after her father inherited three plantations from his grandfather. In 1739, when a trade war with Spain, known as the War of Jenkins' Ear, broke out, Eliza's father, Lieutenant Colonel George Lucas, was forced to return to Antigua, leaving Eliza responsible for the plantations. Realizing that the fate of the family and the Charleston plantation they lived on rested on her shoulders, Eliza was determined to cultivate a successful cash crop in order to get the plantation out of debt. In a letter dated June 4, 1741, Eliza wrote to her father “The cotton, Guiney corn and most of the ginger planted here have been cut off by frost. »1 This excerpt shows that Eliza had experimented with many crops, before finally finding success with indigo, after her father sent her indigo seeds from the West Indies. In the same letter mentioned previously, dated June 4, 1741, Eliza wrote to her father: "I wrote to you in [a] previous letter, we had a fine crop of indigo seeds on the ground, and since then I have informed that the frost had taken it away before. it was dry. I chose the best one and had it planted, but not more than a hundred bushes grew... I have no doubt that indigo will prove a very valuable commodity to grow. term if we could have the seeds of the West Indies. [in] time to plant the latter at the end of March, so that the seeds are dry enough to be harvested before our frosts. »2This excerpt from Eliza's letter to her father shows that she did not grow indigo easily, but she persevered, and in doing so played a major role in the commercialization of South Ca. ..... middle of paper ......h; and textiles were the largest employer outside of agriculture and generated 50 to 70 percent of England's exports in the 18th century. Indigo could be worked on all types of textiles and was therefore used in greater quantities than any other dye, and from 1750 it accounted for more than half the value of England's dye imports. »19 In 1747, England had imported only 36,601 pounds of indigo from South Carolina. Soon after, England had become so dependent on South Carolina indigo that by 1775, on the eve of the American Revolution, England had imported 1,259,100 pounds of indigo.20 South Carolina South was able to compete in the Atlantic indigo market, thanks to the influence of the Carolinians. ingenuity and the fact that the relatively low price of indigo produced in South Carolina closed the doors to competition. The reputation of Carolina Indigo