Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

· INTELLECTUAL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH '
printed or in process of being printed. These writers are the charming
Eliza Lucas Pinckney, the merchant-politician Christopher Gadsden, the
jurist-merchant Robert Pringle, and the planter-merchant-statesman Henry
Laurens.161 Though the three men were in the colonial period especially
and primarily concerned with business, they indicate in effective language
a number of intellectual interests.
Eliza Lucas Pinckney (c. 1722-1793) appears in the Dictionary of
American Biography along with her distinguished sons Charles Cotesworth
Pinckney and Thomas Pinckney. As a letter-writer she is far more
attractive and informative than her sons, the two more public figures. As
far as is known, only her letters between 1739 and 1762 are in existence,
these in a letterbook. From the first letter to her father to the last to British
friends she displays a rare and independent spirit. She turns off one suitor
with the assurance she has chosen the single life, though within a few years
she marries widower Colonel Charles Pinckney, to whom she was devoted.
Her letters to father, brothers, women friends in England and America, are
vivid pictures of the golden age of Charleston and of an attractive and
strong feminine character. Her letterbook does not include information on
the most important event of her life, her marriage, but it does give minute
details of plantation life before that event and her busy years after her
husband's death. She has been quoted earlier as to gardens and architecture
and education and her ideas on indigo culture. She educated herself and
tells how she did it, and she was very careful in choosing British schools
for her children. In her early writing she shows an inquisitive mind and a
knack for saying what she thinks may interest her reader. Her I741 letter to
the first Mrs. Pinckney, for example, contains reflections on her reading and
on her personal identity, which despite Mr. Locke seemed to change as she
moved from town to country. To her future husband she frequently wrote
in a philosophic vein, mingling with her serious reflections the latest chitchat
concerning her neighbors on the Ashley River. In her many letters to
a Miss Bartlett she also mixes the philosophical and scientific with information
on ladies' cap patterns and social gossip. Her remarkable reading is
referred to throughout her letters. Her comments on Pamela, for example,
are quite perceptive.
Like gentlemen and ladies elsewhere in the South, she believed firmly in
the golden mean.
That there is any real hurt in a pack of Cards or going a suet [sweet}
figure around the room, etc., no body I believe are obsurd enough to
think, but tis the use we make of them. The danger arises from the too
frequent indulging our selves in them which tends to effaminate the
mind as it takes it of pleasures of a superior and more exalted Nature
as well as waists our time; and may at length give it a disrelish for them.
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