Eliza Lucas Pinckney by Margaret F. Pickett

Author:Margaret F. Pickett
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2016-07-13T16:00:00+00:00

The Road to Independence

When Tom left England in 1771 to visit South Carolina, tensions between the colonies and Great Britain had eased somewhat. The non-importation agreement implemented in 1769 had been successful—colonial trade was cut in half and British merchants were unhappy. As a result, in the spring of 1770 Parliament repealed the Townshend duties on paper, glass and dye stuffs, but kept the duty on tea as a reminder to the colonies that it had the right to tax them. The repeal had the desired effect, as the colonists, encouraged by their partial victory over Parliament, began to relax restrictions on the importation of British goods. However, in order to send a message to the British government the boycott on tea was continued.

This was the situation when Tom left England and during the eighteen months he was in South Carolina little happened to change the relationship between Great Britain and her North American colonies. However, soon after Tom’s return to England in the spring of 1773, tea once again became a subject of controversy.

The prolonged colonial boycott of tea had had a devastating effect on the East India Company, the prime supplier of British tea—it had been driven to the brink of bankruptcy. In May of 1773 Parliament felt compelled to intervene to save the company. It did so by passing the Tea Act which gave the East India Company a monopoly on all tea exported to the North American colonies and, in an attempt to diminish colonial resistance to taxed tea, Parliament also reduced the duty on imported tea to the point that East India tea was cheaper than smuggled tea the colonists had been buying from the Dutch.

While news of the passage of the Tea Act was filtering into the colonies during the summer of 1773, Eliza noticed that her oldest son was paying more and more attention to a certain young lady. Charles was twenty-seven years old, nice-looking, a successful lawyer and owned a substantial amount of property—he was, in a word, a very eligible bachelor and it was time for him to settle down, marry and begin raising a family. Of all the attractive young ladies he had met in Charleston, his fancy had fallen on one in particular—Sarah Middleton, the youngest daughter of Henry Middleton and his deceased wife Mary Williams Middleton.

He began a serious courtship that summer and, finding that his feelings were reciprocated, soon asked Henry Middleton for his daughter’s hand in marriage. It was an excellent match for both parties. Henry Middleton was an extremely wealthy man owning twenty plantations and over 800 slaves in South Carolina with additional property in England and Barbados. He was also an influential member of government. Henry Middleton readily gave his consent to the marriage and Eliza could not have been happier. Her friendship with the Middleton family dated back to her earliest days in South Carolina and she could never forget the kind attention her sons had received in England from Mr. and Mrs. William Middleton—Henry Middleton’s older brother and his wife.

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