Reviewed by: Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolutionby Lorri Glover Catherine Kerrison (bio) Eliza Lucas Pinckney, Slavery, Charles Pinckney, Gender Eliza Lucas Pinckney: An Independent Woman in the Age of Revolution. By Lorri Glover. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $35.00.) Eliza Lucas Pinckney (1722-1793) has been waiting for this biography for a very long time. For the first time since 1896, when a descendant published a hagiographic account of her life, Pinckney now has a scholarly narrative, firmly grounded in the sources: over three thousand documents newly available digitally on the University of Virginia Press's Rotunda, "America's Founding Era Collection." Lorri Glover's book joins a growing literature of biographies of women in the Revolutionary era, especially those connected to famous leaders of the nation's founding. Eliza Lucas Pinckney is different from those women, however; she stands very much in her own spotlight, outshining all the men in her family, even her [End Page 129]sons who became prominent politicians in their own right. In her fascinating portrait of Pinckney as a "planter patriarch," Glover shows us why. Pinckney, born Eliza Lucas in Antigua in 1722, spent her early years in that colonial outpost where she began her lifelong passions for gardening and reading. Here Eliza also learned about slavery and "to take for granted the ability of whites to inflict violence on blacks at will with impunity" (18). In a clear recognition of her precociousness, George Lucas took the unusual step of sending his ten-year-old daughter to England for a formal education. Supervised by family friends in London and lodged at a boarding school, Eliza spent five years being instructed in the polite accomplishments of elite women, as she also cultivated a broader perspective of the world beyond Antigua's shores. If she did not read legal tomes or Virgil during those years as Glover speculates (see a letter to Mary Bartlett [n.d. 1742]), her English education surely primed her appreciation for those works when she encountered them on her return. Eliza Lucas's career as a planter patriarch really began when, shortly after her father transplanted his family to South Carolina, he was ordered back to Antigua. Only 17, Eliza was left to oversee her father's three plantations and Charles Town home. She met her responsibilities with a resolute determination to learn, augment the family fortune, and bask in her father's approbation. Although Eliza has been credited with launching indigo as a new staple crop, Glover situates her impact instead in the broader context of South Carolina's expanding exports: from 5,000 pounds of indigo in 1746 to 150,000 pounds the following year. If Eliza did not initiate this effort, she was a prominent contributor to it. Glover shows us that Eliza's efforts to diversify her father's agricultural production in these early years were a harbinger of a lifetime of innovation, risk-taking, and industry. Neither marriage to widower Charles Pinckney in 1744 nor motherhood impeded her agricultural and commercial pursuits. Her increasing wealth, now wedded to Pinckney's, underwrote a lavish five-year stay in England, educated her sons in England, and sustained her when her husband died shortly after their return to South Carolina in 1758. She spent the ensuing decade rebuilding her fortune, restoring plantations that had been neglected during their London sojourn. She energetically exhorted her sons in their studies abroad to remember that "the welfair of a whole family depends in a great measure on the progress you make" (163). Conscious of the vicissitudes of life in which widowhood or war could spell unexpected financial catastrophe, she trained up her daughter Harriott to be an enslaver as ruthless and [End Page 130]efficient as she herself was, to ensure her self-support. Pinckney's world imploded during the Revolution, however, with the destruction of her properties and flight of her enslaved workers during the British occupation. After the war, she forsook her plantations for city life, leaving it to the next generation to rebuild the family fortunes. Sons Charles and Thomas pursued successful careers in politics and diplomacy...