Preface · Project History · Editorial Methods · Acknowledgements
Eliza Lucas Pinckney has been singled out by historians as a revolutionary era heroine ever since her contemporary and neighbor, Dr. David Ramsey, proclaimed to posterity in History of South Carolina from its First Settlement in 1670, to the Year 1808 (Charleston, SC: David Longworth, 1809, vol. 2, p. 118) that it was she who was responsible for introducing into Carolina its second great eighteenth-century staple crop, indigo. Although Ramsey honored her too as “the mother of Major General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney,” he dedicated a full page of his narrative on South Carolina’s agricultural history to a description of her accomplishments. With the growth of interest in women’s history in the latter half of the twentieth century, and in particular the emergence of the study of the history of southern women, Pinckney’s reputation has grown enormously. Whether she is held up as a southern example of “Republican motherhood,” or praised as a female southern enlightenment thinker, Pinckney has appeared not only in most serious studies of colonial and early national southern women’s history, but also in many introductory United States history textbooks, where few eighteenth-century southern women are mentioned.
Much of the reason for Pinckney’s continued and growing fame lies in the survival and publication of a remarkable letterbook in which she recorded copies of or memoranda about letters she wrote between 1739 and 1762, and of the preservation of a number of her later letters within collections of family papers, now held by the South Carolina Historical Society, founded in 1858. In 1850 her great-granddaughter, Harriott Pinckney Holbrook, published a limited edition of nineteen copies, mostly for the family, of Eliza’s letterbook and some other correspondence, as Journal and Letters of Eliza Lucas: Now First Printed (Wormsloe, GA: 1850). Her great-great granddaughter, Harriott Horry Ravenel, published a book-length biography of her in 1896, Eliza Pinckney (New York: Scribner, 1896), a compilation of snippets and selections from many of Pinckney’s letters loosely strung together with explanatory text. A twentieth-century descendant, Elise Pinckney, edited a full version of the surviving portions of the letterbook, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney 1739–1762 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972; paperback edition Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997). Others of her writings have appeared occasionally in the South Carolina Historical Magazine. By contrast, almost nothing is known of Eliza Pinckney’s daughter Harriott Pinckney Horry, although she too as a young woman recorded letters she had written in a letterbook, is represented in collections of family manuscripts by correspondence by and to her, and in addition kept a remarkable set of journals recording her travel from South Carolina to New England in 1793 and 1815.
In setting out to create this “born digital” edition, I knew from the beginning that it needed to present as full a record as possible of the writings and other papers of both women. Eliza Lucas Pinckney deserves to have all of her writings, not just those of her letterbook during the first half of her life, available to scholars who seek to understand the role and place of women in South Carolina and the nation in the eighteenth century. Harriott Horry’s life paralleled that of her mother in many ways, but also illustrates some of the profound changes which women of the South experienced after American independence. Her surviving written legacy records her experiences as an elite coastal South Carolina young woman before the Revolution, then her activities during the revolution and afterward in the new nation as a wife, mother, and then for forty-five years a widowed coastal rice plantation mistress. Together the papers of mother and daughter provide nearly one hundred years of intelligent witness to the events of their time.
Constance B. Schulz
Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Carolina
Columbia, South Carolina, April 2012
This is not an ongoing publication. We present it as a complete edition in its own right. Although the seeds for this project were sown many years ago, in actions ranging from many generations of the Pinckney family’s careful preservation of the writings of all of their ancestors (not just of the men) to the emergence of the field of southern women’s history, it had its actual start during a transatlantic telephone call in June 2006. Dr. Holly Cowan Shulman had recently launched the first component of The Dolley Madison Digital Edition (University of Virginia Press, 2004, 2007, 2009). As she considered the growing number of scholarly volumes publishing the writings of the men of the founding era—the “Founding Fathers” editions—she became convinced that the women associated with those men, their wives, mothers, sisters, and daughters, had equally compelling stories. Some but not all of the writings of these well-educated and politically involved women were becoming available through the papers of their male kin. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, asked Shulman, if the tools and platform she and the Rotunda staff at the University of Virginia Press had created for the Dolley Madison digital edition could be utilized to create a collaborative project of born-digital scholarly editions of the writings of the women of the founding era? If undertaken using the same technology and published on the same platform, the papers of the individual women could potentially be greater than the sum of their individual parts, enriched by their inter-operability and the possibility that scholars using such editions could search digitally across the writings of many women for their common experiences and concerns.
As Shulman began to explore the possibilities for funding such an enterprise and recruiting other editors, she remembered that a long-time colleague and friend, Dr. Constance Schulz, was working on a biographical chapter on Eliza Lucas Pinckney of South Carolina, the mother of two “founding fathers.” So Shulman telephoned Schulz to persuade her to expand the idea of a biography into a born-digital scholarly documentary edition. Shulman’s telephone call was forwarded to a mobile phone which rang in a train car carrying Schulz and a small group of her Public History MA students from York to London, England, at the conclusion of five weeks of study abroad. At the end of the hour-long conversation—interrupted as the train passed through tunnels or out of range of telephone signals—Schulz had agreed to undertake the task.
It took two more years for the project to get underway. Schulz had already decided that the biographical sketch of Pinckney should be expanded to include the story of her less-well-known daughter, Harriott Pinckney Horry, who as a sister and wife of young South Carolina Revolutionary military officers had herself played an important role in the eventual success of independence in the South. That work appeared as “Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry: A South Carolina Revolutionary-Era Mother and Daughter,” in Marjorie Spruill, Valinda Littlefield, and Joan Johnson, eds. South Carolina Women: Their Lives and Times – Volume 1 (University of Georgia Press, 2009.) To move from writing a biographical chapter to creating a scholarly edition of the two women’s papers, Schulz sought and received cooperation from the History Department of the University of South Carolina, the endorsement and support of the South Carolina Historical Society in Charleston where a large number of Pinckney family papers were housed, and the encouragement of the University of South Carolina Press, which in 1997 had reissued The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney, 1739–1762 , edited by her descendant Elise Pinckney, originally published in 1972 by the University of North Carolina Press. The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded the project, first with a two-year “We the People” grant which began in September of 2008. As the project met its initial goals, NEH provided a third and final year of support, and then a “no-cost extension” to complete the work.
From September 2008 through March 2012, a dedicated staff ranging in size from three to eight part-time people (at its largest roughly the equivalent in weekly working hours of two full-time editorial staff) carried out the multiple tasks of completing the work to bring the edition to publication. They searched repositories in person and through the finding aids available on the internet. The grant application to NEH had estimated there would be 500 Pinckney and Horry documents. The search located over a thousand. Staff learned a new set of skills in use of the “DocTracker” data base system created by technical staff at the Dolley Madison edition for managing editorial work within the project, then preparing it for export to the University of Virginia Press for publication. Documents were acquired and accessioned in a variety of forms: as paper photocopies and digital photographs of original manuscripts and records; as paper or digital images from microfilm; as OCR-scanned and converted word-processing files from previously published versions of the texts. As documents were transcribed or scanned, two-person teams of “tandem readers” verified all scans and transcriptions for accuracy against the original manuscript sources. Once transcribed, corrected word-processing files were loaded into DocTracker, and the text carefully “tagged” with TEI/XML for internet display, and all names, places, and terms in the text marked and linked to the growing glossary data base of things to be identified through research. Eventually more than 3,000 items were selected for annotation, and identifications written and entered into the “Glossary” half of the DocTracker system.
The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry includes every document we have been able to locate which was written to or by Eliza Pinckney or Harriott Horry. We have also included selectively a number of documents which they neither wrote nor received, but which relate closely to them or to their interests and activities. For example, we have included most of a series of letters exchanged between Charles Pinckney (1699–1758) and Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s father, George Lucas (d. 1747), concerning the management of Lucas’s South Carolina plantations, written both before and after Charles Pinckney’s marriage to Eliza Lucas, as they illustrate the larger context of her early role as a plantation manager. We have included a few samples of bills for Harriott Pinckney Horry’s son Daniel (Charles Lucas Pinckney) Horry’s education in England, and indicated the location and dates of the remaining similar invoices. We included some correspondence between Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney, in much of which greetings to their mother and sister indicated that the letters were meant to be shared.
The principal manuscript sources in which we searched for Pinckney and Horry materials included the several collections of Pinckney family papers at the South Carolina Historical Society, and two major collections of Pinckney family papers at the Library of Congress. Smaller collections at the South Caroliniana Library of the University of South Carolina, the Duke University Library, and the Southern Historical Collections at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill yielded additional letters and papers. In addition, we searched for legal and financial documents at the South Carolina Department of Archives and History. Other repositories contributed individual documents; the “Bibliographic Information” box following each document text gives a full citation to the location of the original manuscript source for the document. We searched the South Carolina Historical Magazine for published versions of letters to, from, or concerning the two women. We used the late-nineteenth-century biographical writings about Eliza Pinckney and her world by her descendants, and the biography of Thomas Pinckney by his grandson, for full or partial reproductions of their writings, for some of which the original manuscripts are no longer extant. We did not usually have duplicate versions of the same letter (for example, a letterbook copy and a recipient’s copy); the bibliographic note at the conclusion of the document indicates the form which we used for transcription.
The transcription policies we have followed are based on the standards for scholarly editing recommended by the Association for Documentary Editing. Those standards are described in detail in Mary Jo Kline and Susan Perdue, eds., A Guide to Documentary Editing (3rd edition, Richmond: University of Virginia Press, 2008) and Michael Stevens and Steven B. Burg, Editing Historical Documents: A Handbook of Practice (AltaMira Press, 1997). We have adopted the “modified literal” approach, and have been influenced in our choices by the Papers of Henry Laurens, the Model Editions Partnership, and the Dolley Madison Digital Edition. Transcriptions have been kept as close to the original text as possible. Archaic and misspelled words are retained without correction, abbreviations are left as they appear, and original punctuation and style (indentation, underlining, superscripts, capitalization, dashes, carets, etc.) are followed as closely as possible, with the following exceptions made for readability and clarity of meaning:
The Pinckney family and their correspondents were well-educated, and often included in their writings individual words or brief phrases in a language other than English. Where the meaning of these words is clear from the context, we have not translated them. Where a term or phrase in another language might be unfamiliar to those whose native tongue is English, we have provided a definition or translation in the sidebar “glossary” link. A number of the documents in this Pinckney/Horry edition were written in part or entirely in French. For these documents, we have transcribed the French text following our standard transcription policies, but have followed the transcription with a translation into colloquial English prepared by an historian/scholar specializing in eighteenth and nineteenth century French history.
The summaries serve as brief overviews for the reader and are not full descriptions of the contents of the documents. The reader should bear in mind that almost every letter contains items of news of family, of agricultural concerns such as weather, of routine travel to and from plantations and/or towns, as well as gossip or descriptions of political, social, and military events affecting members of the Pinckney and Horry families. These are not necessarily included in the summary. The correspondent is usually referred to by last name in each summary, unless the inclusion of a first name is needed for purposes of clarity. In many cases we have used the initials of the principal characters in our edition instead of their full names in the summaries (i.e. Harriott Pinckney Horry may be indicated as HPH; her son Daniel Huger Horry, who changed his named in adulthood to Charles Lucas Pinckney Horry, is referred to in the summaries as D(CLP)H.)
Following the “Summary” section in the sidebar to the left of the text of each document is a list of “Topics” which provide intellectual access to the subject content of the document. These topics are designed to function like a subject index. We have not attempted to mark up the text to indicate where a sentence or a phrase occurs linking the document to a particular topical index term. Rather, the “Topics” for the edition as a whole have been selected to allow users of the edition to explore it dynamically in two ways: readers can use the full list of “Topics” to begin their exploration of this edition by searching for all documents to which a particular topic has been linked; additionally, readers of one document can click on one or more of the “Topic” links associated with it to find other documents in the edition which have been indexed and linked to the same topic.
All names, places, and terms (military, nautical, agricultural or botanical, literary) mentioned in each document have been identified when possible. Each identification is contained in a glossary entry linked to all documents in which that name or term occurs. All names of people and places have been standardized in the glossary and in the titles of individual documents for purposes of internal consistency and searchability. For women, the standardized name includes all known names: first, middle, maiden, and married. If a woman married more than once, all of her married names are included in her standardized name (see for instance “Mrs. Stoutenburg” who is identified in her standardized name as “Stoutenburg, Sarah Holmes Raven (Mrs. Luke).” For men, the standardized name includes all known names when possible. Enslaved women and men are identified by all known names; see however the discussion in the editorial essay below concerning slave names. Nicknames are included in parentheses following the person’s given name if appropriate. Standardized names are not used in letter summaries. Signatures are rendered as they appear in the text. When the identity of any person mentioned seems only probable or possible, we have noted that in the text of the identification. What we have not been able to identify is labeled as unidentified.
Every person referred to in every letter has been identified when possible. Each name (or indirect reference) appears in the order in which it is mentioned in the letter in the “crosslinks” sidebar section appearing to the left of the document. In the sidebar, the name or reference as it was written in the letter is on the left, followed by a colon. The standardized name is displayed on the right in a different color, indicating that it is a link to identifying information. This in turn is followed by a search icon (
) which when clicked on will retrieve every letter in the edition in which the name of that person appears. A crosslink thus reads, for example:
Hond. Madam: Pinckney, Eliza Lucas
Eliza Pinckney and Harriott Horry and the members of their extended family knew an astounding number of people, not just in South Carolina, but throughout the United States and in England and Europe as well. While many persons we have identified were the leading political, economic, or social figures of their time, others have largely disappeared from the annals of history. Identifying them is one of the scholarly ambitions of this edition. Beyond that, however, the reader should think of these links as a series of annotations on the life and times of these elite South Carolinians, and the rough equivalent of footnotes contained in letterpress documentary editions.
We have written brief identifications for all places mentioned in the documents, even though many of these are well known (i.e. the individual states of the United States; nations such as Spain, France, and England; and cities such as London and Paris). Although most of these “place” identifications are briefer than those we have written for people, we believe that knowing not only the specific geographical location, but the political, military, or social significance of a place, renders these document comprehensible in a way that would not otherwise be possible.
We have provided full citations for the main sources of the information used to write each identification. While much of this annotation research was conducted in scholarly paper-based publications, in completing research for writing identifications, we have also used online information sources (including Wikipedia where we judged it to be accurate, particularly for geographic information). If our online search for information led us to an item originally published in paper format, including many now published through Google Books, we have cited the original paper source using the Chicago Manual of Style standard for scholarly reference information, but we have also included a notation indicating our online access to that source. All citations to online sources include the date on which we accessed a particular source. We invite readers of our edition, if interested, to seek further information on particular people and places by exploring the sources we ourselves have used.
For each letter in this edition, the archival data format is an XML file tagged according to the encoding scheme developed by the Model Editions Partnership, which in turn is an extension of the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), the standard for markup of literary, historical, and other texts. The underlying XML is transformed to XHTML for Web browser viewing via a series of scripts written in the XML Query Language, or XQuery, which run the searches on the letters in the database and format the output. Bibliographic information derived from the TEI header is displayed in the full-letter view for each document, and much of it is also made available as Dublin Core metadata in the head section of the XHTML sent to the browser, where it can be used by software applications.
An edition such as this one does not reach publication without a great deal of work and support from many individuals and institutions. There would be no edition without the grants we received from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2008 and 2010, and we gratefully thank the NEH commissioners and staff for their continued commitment to scholarly editing in general, and to this edition in particular. Similarly, we could not have completed our work without the commitment of the University of South Carolina through the Department of History, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the South Carolina Honors College, to provide cost-share matching funds and a variety of other support services.
PROJECT STAFF: Neal Millikan served as Assistant Editor and Assistant Director from 2008 to 2010; Mary Sherrer began first as a Senior Editor until 2010, then stepped into Neal Millikan’s position as Assistant Editor and Assistant Director from 2010 to 2012. Peggy Clark and Robin Copp have served as Senior Editors. University of South Carolina History Department public history graduate students Sarah Swinney Epps, Justin McIntyre, Rachel Love, Lee Durbetaki, and Kyna Herzinger all contributed substantially to the project, either in graduate assistantships or graduate internships. We were privileged to participate in a program with the University of South Carolina Honors College to provide undergraduates with research experience, and appreciate the enthusiastic and productive efforts of honors students Nikki Calhoun, Benjamin Sheinkin, and Taylor Kirton.
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA FACULTY AND STAFF: History Department Chairs Lacy Ford and Lawrence Glickman, and staff members Beverly Edwards and Anthony McLawhorn, as well as Honors College computing specialist Christian Price and College of Arts and Sciences Computer Lab specialist Richard England were indispensable. Specialist consultants at the University of South Carolina include Prof. Carol Harrison, who transcribed and translated the letters written in French, and Geography Department PhD candidate Leanne Sulewski who created the maps for this edition. The Center for Digital Humanities, Director David Miller and Associate Director Jennifer Guiliano, also supported our edition, giving us access to and instructions in using their OCR scanner and helping us develop our project webpage.
TECHNICAL SUPPORT: Mary MacNeil not only provided our entire staff with basic instruction in the use of the DocTracker data base system which she developed for the Dolley Madison Digital Edition at the University of Virginia, she has been an indispensable resource in support of our slowly developing expertise in its more sophisticated use. We regularly called on her to adapt DocTracker to meet the special needs our documents presented, and to guide us in the complicated processes of moving texts and metadata from data base to publication-quality XML. DocTracker was developed under the auspices of Documents Compass, and we thank its staff, especially founder Holly Shulman and programmer Bob Oeste, for allowing us to use it and encouraging us to develop it further. We also owe a considerable debt of gratitude for their technical expertise and other support to the staff of the University of Virginia Press, especially Rotunda Technical Director David Sewell. We particularly thank University of Virginia Press Director Penelope Kaiserlian for her belief in and commitment to the completion and publication of this edition.
EDITORIAL BOARD: We were privileged to have the regular support and wise advice of an engaged editorial board. We have called regularly on their expertise in a variety of capacities. We offer our thanks and appreciation to members Martha King, Associate Editor, the Papers of Thomas Jefferson; Charles Lesser, Emeritus Senior Historian of the South Carolina Department of Archives and History; Marty Matthews, Curator of Research for the North Carolina Division of Historic Sites and Properties; Alex Moore, Senior Editor at the University of South Carolina Press; and Robert Weir, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, the University of South Carolina.
Near the beginning of this project, editorial board member Dr. Charles Lesser introduced us to the present-day Thomas Pinckney family, who live in the house at Fairfield Plantation which Eliza Lucas Pinckney’s son Thomas acquired on his marriage to Elizabeth Motte in 1779. The Pinckneys have been gracious supporters of this edition, welcoming us to their home, sharing documents in their personal collections, and urging us to bring the writings and contributions of their Revolutionary Era family to a broad scholarly and public use. We thank them for their generous interest and commitment.
RESEARCH INSTITUTIONS: Scholars and researchers sometimes report that they have “found” long-lost documents in a manuscript repository or archives. The reality is that such documents have not really been lost, but have been carefully preserved in collections which archivists and manuscript curators have organized and described. Most “lost” documents are found through the guidance of professionals who guide researchers to the most appropriate collections in their institutions. It has been with the help of those research institutions and their professional staff that this edition has been able to assemble such a rich documentation of the lives of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and Harriott Pinckney Horry. We owe a particular debt to:
