Lucy Pickens

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 married Colonel Francis Wilkinson Pickens of South Carolina in 1858, after he was nominated as United States ambassador to Russia.

She attended La Grange Female Academy before switching to a finishing school in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, with older sister Anna Eliza, from 1846–1848.

They lived in the Capitol Hotel in the county seat while waiting for the construction of the main house and outbuildings for their cotton plantation Wyalucing.

In the summer of 1857, Lucy met Colonel Francis Wilkinson Pickens of South Carolina, an older widower who proceeded to court her, but with little success.

She and her husband were befriended by Alexander and his wife Maria Alexandrovna, who became godparents to the daughter Lucy bore while in Russia, Eugenia Frances Dorothea Olga Neva—the last two names being added by the Tsarina.

[1] A longing for South Carolina and worries about its leaning toward secession caused the Pickens family to return home in August 1860.

Francis W. Pickens was elected governor by the General Assembly of South Carolina on December 17, three days before the legislature voted to secede from the Union.

Her own family's plantation Wyalusing in Marshall, Texas, was used as the base of the Trans-Mississippi Agency of the Confederate Post Office during the war.

Lucy, then visiting her family in Texas, sold some of her jewelry, including pieces given to her by the tsar in Russia, to raise money for them.