ined them dared not
charge much above the actual living expenses. Had not public sentiment
been against it, doubtless many of these teachers would have engaged in
the more lucrative work of keeping shops or inns.

In the South it seems to have been no uncommon thing for women to manage
large plantations and direct the labor of scores of negroes and white
workers. We have seen how Eliza Pinckney found a real interest in such
work, and cared most successfully for her father's thousands of acres. A
woman of remarkable personality, executive ability, and mental capacity,
she not only produced and traded according to the usual methods of
planters, but experimented in intensive farming, grafting, and
improvement of stock and seed with such success that her plantations
were models for the neighboring planters to admire and imitate.

When she was left in charge of the estate while her father went about
his army duties, she was but sixteen years old, and yet her letters to
him show not only her interest, but a remarkable grasp of both the
theoretical and the practical phases of agriculture.

"I wrote my father a very long letter ... on the pains I had taken to
bring the Indigo, Ginger, Cotton, Lucern, and Cassada to perfection, and
had greater hopes from the Indigo...."

To her father: "The Cotton, Guiney corn and most of the Ginger planted
here was cutt off by a frost."

"I wrote you in former letters we had a fine crop of Indigo Seed upon
the ground and since informed you the frost took it before it was dry.
I picked out the best of it and had it planted but there is not more
than a hundred bushes of it come up, which proves the more unlucky as
you have sent a man to make it."

In a letter to a friend she indicates how busy she is:

"In genl I rise at five o'clock in the morning, read till seven--then
take a walk in the garden or fields, see that the Servants are at their
respective business, then to breakfast. The first hour after breakfast
is spent in musick, the next is constantly employed in recolecting
something I have learned, ... such as french and shorthand. After that I
devote the rest of the time till I dress for dinner, to our little
Polly, and two black girls, who I teach to read.... The first hour after
dinner, as ... after breakfast, at musick, the rest of the afternoon in
needlework till candle light, and from that time to bed time read or
write; ... Thursday, the whole day except what the necessary affai