Lucy Pickens

Queen of the Confederacy

What if the South had won the war,  Lucy Pickens, inventor of iced tea and financer of a large unit of Confederate infantry which bore her name would have appeared on our currency.

 

  Lucy Pickens was born the second of five children of Beverly LaFayette and Eugenia Dorothea (Hunt) Holcombe, on June 11, 1832, near La Grange, Fayette County, Tennessee, on the Holcombe plantation, named Westover or Woodstock. She attended La Grange Female Academy and in 1846, with her older sister, Anna Eliza, began study in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, at another girls' school, which she attended for two years. Between 1848 and 1850 the Holcombes moved to Marshall, Texas. While awaiting completion of the mansion on their nearby plantation, Wyalucing, the family resided in a Marshall hotel. The Presbyterian church of Marshall was organized in the Holcombes' rented quarters. Beverly Holcombe became its first elder.

Lucy became highly acclaimed throughout the South for her "classic features, titian hair, pansy eyes, and graceful figure." In 1850, after a visit with the family of Mississippi Governor John Quitman, Lucy looked in on the legislature, which then adjourned in her honor. Like Governor Quitman, she espoused the liberation of Cuba. Her first affianced, identified as a Lieutenant Crittenden by one writer, died in a filibustering expedition of Gen. Narciso López. Subsequently Lucy, using the pseudonym H. M. Hardeman, wrote " The Free Flag of Cuba, or the Martyrdom of Lopez: A Tale of the Liberating Expedition of 1851", a novelette published in 1855 by the New York publishers DeWitt and Davenport.

At White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, in the summer of 1856, Lucy met Francis Wilkinson Pickens, twice a widower and twenty-seven years her senior. Her acceptance of his marriage proposal, it is said, hinged on his acceptance of a diplomatic post abroad. President James Buchanan appointed him ambassador to Russia, and on April 26, 1858, at Wyalucing, Pickens and Lucy were wed. Lucy was a favorite at the Russian court. She gave birth to her only child at the imperial palace on March 14, 1859, and named her Eugenia Frances Dorothea Olga Neva (the last two names being added by the czarina); the daughter came to be known as Douschka (Russian for "little darling"), a nickname that she kept all her life. Though raised a Presbyterian, Lucy was converted to her husband's Episcopalianism while in Russia.

Foreseeing troubled times for the South, Pickens resigned his diplomatic post in the fall of 1860 to return home. He was elected Governor by the South Carolina legislature and was inaugurated on December 17, 1860. Lucy Pickens donated her jewelry that had been given her in Russia by the Czar and much effort in aiding the doomed Confederacy. With the money from the jewels , Lucy helped outfit A South Carolina Regiment that bore her name, the Lucy Holcombe Legion.  Lucy was accorded another honor by the Confederacy, portraits of her were used on Confederate money-one on the one-dollar notes of June 2, 1862, and another on the $100 notes of December 2, 1862, April 6, 1863, and February 17, 1864. Mrs. Pickens was also vice regent for South Carolina in the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and was also the originator and president of an association that sought to erect a monument to the Confederate dead of Edgefield County, South Carolina. 

As the only woman pictured on Confederate States Currency, she was known as the “Queen of the Confederacy”. Her face was also to appear on Confederate bonds. She was considered the beau ideal of the Southern Belle and some claim she was the model for Scarlet O'Hara. After the War, her life saw much tragedy,; her husband died and in 1893 her beloved daughter Francis Eugenia Olga Neva Dugas "Douschka" died in her early 30s. She lingered on for a few more years in her Aiken home, Edgewood before passing on in 1899. 

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