Eliza Lucas Pinckney Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2500 words

Eliza Lucas Pinckney - Research Paper ExampleNot that she grew the indigo plant that made the blue dye either. That job also was done by Lucas Pinckneys slaves. She gets credit for asking her father to send her indigo seeds, which she instructed her slaves to plant. People also give her credit for figuring out a fashion to process the dye into stackable storable cakes so that it could be shipped across the Atlantic to Great Britain and Europe where other women then were employed to stand over scintillating pots of blue liquid dying textiles. However, at least some of the credit for that should probably go to her slaves too, but usually does not. What Lucas Pinckney does deserve credit for perhaps is the way she persuaded the people enslaved by her and her family to cooperate in making indigo a lucrative business.Lucas Pinckneys father, a wealthy British Army officer and regulator of Antigua, moved his family to South Carolina when Lucas Pinckney was fifteen. Lucas owned plantatio ns in Antigua and in the Low Country of South Carolina. The latter he left for Lucas Pinckney to supervise when she was only seventeen as he and his sons were called to war. Lucas Pinckneys mother had an unknown illness because even though she was still alive, she is not mentioned as having much authority in supervising the plantation nor her daughter for that matter. Lucas Pinckneys education is attributed to her father. Kristin Thomas Iden quotes Harriet Simons Williams who suggests that Col. Lucass influence in his daughters education is present through her mirroring of his intellectual values One of his virtually distinctive traits, which his daughter acquired, was a desire to see himself and those around him usefully employed. She had his taste for trying schemes. She also acquired from him a devotion to his library.1 Having attended train in England, Eliza was well-educated and not only competent, but also confident. She differed greatly from her contemporary counterparts wh o were usually married with children by the age of seventeen. Another way she differed was how she viewed her entrust in society. At the time, the Great Awakening, evangelical religious fervor, was spreading throughout colonial America. To most of those who lived in Colonial America, religion was vital. After all, the freedom to approach pattern it in the way one saw fit was a motivating factor in the establishment of the British colony so far from home. Pinckneys religious views reflected those of most Southern Anglicans, who valued the rational exercise of religion. As the Great Awakening began its move to the South in the 1740s, Pinckney appears to have remained unaffected her letter illustrates that she continued to emphasize a rational piety, a view that Pinckney perceived as rooted in Gods Word.2 Most women authorized that prevailing religious view that women should be in submission to God and their husbands or fathers regardless of whether they were Anglican or evangelical . While educated women read at the time, proper reading material consisted of advice literature and sermons which installed and perpetuated a highly stratified social hierarchy, accepted a subordinate social status. Not only that, since the southwest was entirely dependent on slavery, another hierarchical system, white women, identifying with and desiring the protection of the white male, used reading and writing as a means to certify the