Lucy Pickens

Today I should be writing a post about how soldiers celebrated Christmas during the Civil War. Truth is, I sidestepped that topic in both my Civil War novels, so I haven’t researched it. But there’s two more Christmas’s to be considered in the last two books in the McBee set, so perhaps by this time next year I’ll know if Christmas trees and jolly ole Saint Nick were part of the 1863 or 1864 Christmas scene in Virginia during the war.

Instead of Christmas 150 years ago, I’m back-stepping to the topic of beautiful women in the 1860’s. I receive a daily e-mail from the Texas Historical Commission about something interesting or significant that occurred in Texas history on that date, sometime in our state’s history.  A few weeks ago, the topic was a Texas beauty named Lucy Holcombe Pickens. Here’s the text:


On this day in 1862, the Confederate government issued $100 notes bearing a portrait of the renowned Southern beauty Lucy Pickens. Lucy Holcombe was born in 1832 in Tennessee. Between 1848 and 1850 the Holcombes moved to Wyalucing plantation in Marshall, Texas. Lucy became highly acclaimed throughout the South for her "classic features, titian hair, pansy eyes, and graceful figure."



In the summer of 1856 she 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 Pickens and Lucy were wed in 1858 at Wyalucing. Lucy was a favorite at the Russian court, but Pickens resigned his diplomatic post in the fall of 1860 in anticipation of the outbreak of the Civil War. Upon his return home he was elected governor of South Carolina.


By selling the jewels that had been given her in Russia, Lucy helped outfit the Confederate Army unit that bore her name, the Lucy Holcombe Legion. Her portrait was also used on the one-dollar Confederate notes issued on June 2, 1862. She died in 1899.


I was easily able to find several period photographs of Lucy with a quick internet search. The images confirm her beauty, although her portrait in profile selected for the paper currency is much less flattering, in my opinion. The photo on the left certainly displays her severely contained “titian hair.”


If I had found the image on the right before the front cover was completed for Tangled Honor, I would have been sorely tempted to find out if the portrait is in the public domain. That portrait is of a young woman whose features and hair style would mark her as very attractive in 2014, over 150 years after the image was made.  I would have loved to have used it on my book cover instead of the sassy model wearing modern eye make-up.


It is fun to consider that a young woman from a plantation in Marshall, Texas would end up being given jewels by the Russian Czar of enough value to help arm and supply a regiment of Confederate soldiers in South Carolina, as the young, beautiful First Lady of that state. Not to mention being the only woman whose image graced any Confederate currency. She also wrote poetry and a novel under a penname. There is a biography of Lucy Pickens, Queen of the Confederacy, published in 2002 by the University of North Texas Press.


The biographer included a short quote in the Epilogue. “Submission is not my role,” wrote Lucy at some point. No doubt, my fictitious Faith Samuelson would have agreed with that quite un-Victorian outlook by a woman in the 1860’s, although I suspect it helped that the historical Lucy’s non-submissive role was aided by virtue of her being  a beautiful woman of substantial means. The book excerpts on Amazon lead me to believe Lucy Pickens was exceptionally beautiful, exceptionally intelligent, exceptionally rich, exceptionally spoiled, exceptionally influential, and exceptionally Southern.  I’m glad to have learned about her.


Meanwhile, back in Lockhart, Texas three days before Christmas, may I wish “all ya’all” a Merry Christmas! 


Peace Be With You.