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1 The Last Aristocrat Josephine Lyons Scott Pinckney was born in a time and in a place where the dead exercised uncommon power over the living. The time was January 29, 1895, and the place Charleston, South Carolina. Her father, Captain Thomas Pinckney, a Confederate veteran from one of South Carolina’s most renowned families, was sixty-six years old when she was born. Her mother, Camilla Scott, who hailed from the Virginia gentry, married Captain Pinckney in 1892 when she was nearly forty. She had come within a whisker’s breadth of joining the legions of Richmond spinsters in black. The birth of their daughter three years later had the aura of the miraculous about it. The smiling circle gathered around the baptismal font at Josephine’s christening suggests how strongly the past survived in the present among the Pinckney family. The eighty-three-year-old rector of Charleston’s Grace Episcopal Church, the Reverend Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, was Captain Tom’s brother. He also stood as Josephine’s godfather. Time seemed to have doubled back on itself. On the same day, the elderly minister christened his little niece and his own grandson. One of Josephine’s godmothers was Mrs. Charles Bennett, the wife of Charleston’s last rice miller, the end of a long line; just as Captain Pinckney was among the last of the rice planters.1 Josephine Pinckney thus began her life between two worlds, one dying and the other just being born. She was the last of a vestigial plantation aristocracy (America’s first) based on family, agriculture, land, and republican ideals. But she was born at the time when the second American aristocracy, the product of exuberant industrial wealth, self-made men, and rugged individualism, was asserting itself and reshaping the values of the nation. By the time she reached adulthood during World War I, the modern age was transforming American life in disturbing, but also exhilarating, ways. Pinckney spent her first years at 29 Legaré Street in a spacious four-story white clapboard house built about 1835 on one of the largest lots in the city.2 As a child, Josephine played amongst a clutter of desks, cupboards, trunks, and bureaus over- flowing with wonderful treasures. For her, history was concrete, something to be held in the hand, not just a memory. The Pinckneys venerated the relics of their ancestors—ivory miniatures, dishes, and clothes—like the bones of saints. Almost every furnishing in Josephine’s childhood world had a story that was as highly polished as fine mahogany. Through many repetitions of these tales, Josephine learned her place in the universe of the family: what it meant to be a Pinckney and the last of the Low Country aristocrats. The judging eyes of gallant soldiers, honored statesmen, and elegant, accomplished ladies gazed down on the young Josephine from portraits lining the walls. French damask curtains that once hung in the eighteenth-century East Bay mansion of Chief Justice Charles and Eliza Lucas Pinckney survived to grace the windows of Josephine’s own house. Josephine Pinckney’s father, Captain Thomas Pinckney CSA, studied his accounts at the same desk that his grandfather, the Governor Thomas Pinckney, used in London during his tenure as America’s first ambassador to Great Britain. Captain Tom casually tucked his grandfather’s important state papers away in a cabinet.3 One of the family’s prized possessions was an elaborate Recamier sofa, part of a massive collection of japanned furniture believed to have been purchased by General Charles Cotesworth Pinckney on his unsuccessful diplomatic mission to the revolutionary government in France during what became known as the XYZ affair, for the three French agents who demanded bribes to promote trade relations between the countries.4 Since General Pinckney had three daughters who gave him no heirs, many of his personal treasures, such as beautifully decorative Sèvres china, fell into the inheritance stream of his brother. In her own home, Josephine would prominently display a commanding portrait by James Earle of the general in full military dress. Josephine’s family felt a particular responsibility for upholding the memory and reputation of their ancestor. In 1911, an “inquisitive Yankee” from the National Portrait Gallery pestered Captain Tom by asking him to confirm that the general did indeed utter his famous retort to the notorious French agents: “Millions for Defense, but not one cent for tribute.” Captain Tom knew the truth, that General Pinckney had actually sputtered in anger...

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