The introduction of indigo culture was achieved by one of America's
greatest women, Eliza Lucas, afterward the wife of Charles Pinckney
(chief-justice of the province) and mother of the two patriot statesmen
Thomas and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney. Her father, the governor of the
British island of Antigua, had been prompted by his wife's ill health
to settle his family in South Carolina, where the three plantations he
acquired near Charleston were for several years under his daughter's
management. This girl while attending her father's business found time to
keep up her music and her social activities, to teach a class of young
negroes to read, and to carry on various undertakings in economic botany.
In 1741 her experiments with cotton, guinea-corn and ginger were defeated
by frost, and alfalfa proved unsuited to her soil; but in spite of two
preliminary failures that year she raised some indigo plants with success.
Next year her father sent a West Indian expert named Cromwell to manage her
indigo crop and prepare its commercial product. But Cromwell, in fear of
injuring the prosperity of his own community, purposely mishandled the
manufacturing. With the aid of a neighbor, nevertheless, Eliza not only
detected Cromwell's treachery but in the next year worked out the true
process. She and her father now distributed indigo seed to a number of
planters; and from 1744 the crop began to reach the rank of a staple.[8]
The arrival of Carolina indigo at London was welcomed so warmly that in
1748 Parliament established a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo produced
in the British dominions. The Carolina output remained of mediocre quality
until in 1756 Moses Lindo, after a career in the indigo trade in London,
emigrated to Charleston and began to teach the planters to distinguish the
grades and manufacture the best.[9] At excellent prices, ranging generally
from four to six shillings a pound, the indigo crop during the rest of the
colonial period, reaching a maximum output of somewhat more than a million
pounds from some twenty thousand acres in the crop, yielded the community