The two documents I have chosen to explore are letters from, The Letterbook of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and the poem Indico.
I was drawn to the letters from Pinckney because I was astounded by her large roll in running plantations, handling business matters, and generating one of the colonies largest cash crops next to rice, Indigo. This type of entrepreneurship is so impressive to me because women during the colonial period normally played a passive role next to the male. I want to explore her letters that have the general motif of her business interactions and matters, especially those that reveal her process of creating Indigo. These letters have already been transcribed and can be found online or in text at the library.
The poem Indico parallels nicely with the letters from Pinckney because it is a historical poem that captures the meticulous process that went into growing Indigo as well as it’s relevance to people in the Carolinas. The content of a poem reveals things about the society that it was written. However, poetry has a way of revealing things through a different lens, which in turn gives the reader a different perspective. This different perspective is something I want to explore in this 100 line poem. The poem can be found on microfilm at SCHS, and it was published in the South Carolina Newspaper, Gazette, on August 25, 1757.
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