Soon after Eliza Lucas’ hard-earned success she married Charles Pinckney, and it is pleasant to know that her father gave her, as part of her wedding gift, all the indigo on the plantation. She saved the whole crop for seed,--and it takes about a bushel of indigo seed to plant four acres,--and she planted the Pinckney plantation at Ashepoo, and gave to her friends and neighbors small quantities of seed for individual experiment; all of which proved successful. The culture of indigo at once became universal, the newspapers were full of instructions upon the subject, and the dye was exported to England by 1747, in such quantity that merchants trading in Carolina petitioned Parliament for a bounty on Carolina indigo. An act of Parliament was passed allowing a bounty of sixpence a pound on indigo raised in the British-American plantations and imported directly to Great Britain. Spurred on by this wise act, the planters applied with redoubled vigor to the production of the article, and soon received vast profits as the rewards of their labor and care. It is said that just previous to the Revolution more children were sent from South Carolina to England to receive educations, than from all the other colonies,--and this through the profits of indigo and rice. Many indigo planters doubled their capital every three or four years, and at last not only England was supplied with indigo from South Carolina, but the Americans undersold the French in many European markets. It exceeded all other southern industries in importance, and became a general medium of exchange. When General Marion’s young nephew was sent to school at Philadelphia, he started off with a wagon-load of indigo to pay his expenses. The annual dues of the Winyah Indigo Society of Georgetown were paid in the dye, and the society had grown so wealthy in 1753, that it established a large charity school and valuable library. Ramsay, the historian of South Carolina, wrote in 1808, that the indigo trade proved more beneficial to Carolina than the mines of Mexico or Peru to old or new Spain. By the year of his writing, however, indigo (without waiting for extermination through its modern though less reliable rivals, the aniline dyes) had been driven out of Southern plantations by its more useful and profitable field neighbor, King Cotton, that had been set on a throne by the invention of a Yankee schoolmaster. The time of greatest production and export of indigo was just previous to the Revolution, and at one time it was worth four or five dollars a pound. And to-day only the scanty records of the indigo trade, a few rotting cypress boards of the steeping-vats, and the blue-green leaves of the wild wayside indigo, remain of all this prosperity to show the great industry founded by this remarkable and intelligent woman.