Pickens, Lucy Petaway Holcombe

Lucy Petway Holcombe Pickens (June 11, 1832 – August 8, 1899) was a 19th-century American socialite of Tennessee and Texas, known during and after her lifetime as the "Queen of the Confederacy". She occasionally known as the “Yellow Rose of Texas”. She was also a First Lady of South Carolina. Described as "beautiful, brilliant, and captivating" by her male contemporaries, she helped shape the stereotype of the "Southern belle." Born into a planter's family, she moved with them to Marshall, Texas, the seat of Harrison County, at age 16. She married Colonel Francis Wilkinson Pickens of South Carolina in 1858, after he was nominated as United States ambassador to Russia. Even though she was raised Presbyterian, Lucy converted to her husband's Episcopalian faith. They returned to the United States in 1860 and he was elected as governor of the state several days before the legislature voted to secede from the Union. According to the 1860 census, he owned $45,400 in real estate (the equivalent of approximately $1,247,000 today) and $244,206 in personal property (about $6,768,000 today). He (and by extension his wife) also owned 276 slaves. After the war and during Reconstruction, they found it challenging to keep their upland plantation of Edgewood productive without the aid of hundreds of enslaved people. After her husband died in 1869, Lucy Pickens adjusted to life as a young widow, and learned how to run the plantation. She lost her daughter to illness in 1893.