By Melissa A. Winn
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly’s journey from slavery to prominence as Mary Todd Lincoln’s dressmaker is one of extraordinary resilience, skill, and determination. Ironically, when she published her story, Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, it didn’t rally celebrants or justify her travails—it added to them.
Society was not yet ready for the inner musings of a free Black woman and the vulnerable idiosyncrasies of the privileged and controversial first lady.
Keckly (often spelled Keckley) was born in 1818 in Dinwiddie County, Va., the daughter of an enslaved woman, Agnes Hobbs, and her owner, Col. Armistead Burwell. Violence and suffering marked Keckly’s youth. Burwell loaned the teenaged Keckly to his eldest son, Robert, who, in 1835, took her with his family to Hillsborough, N.C. She endured unfathomable physical and sexual violence here at the hands of the Burwells, neighbors, and family friends. Alexander Kirkland, a White store owner in Hillsborough, repeatedly raped the young Keckly and she soon gave birth to a son, George. In her memoirs, she mused, “If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows that she did not wish to give him life; he must blame the edicts of that society which deemed it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my then position.”
Despite the burdens she carried, Keckly excelled at sewing and, according to her memoir, “My needle became my salvation.”
When she and her son were later reunited with her mother and moved to St. Louis, Mo., with Col. Burwell’s daughter Anne and son-in-law, Hugh Garland, Keckly’s sewing skills proved vital. When the financially struggling couple intended to rent out Keckly’s mother, Keckly offered her sewing services to generate income. She successfully “kept bread in the mouths of seventeen persons for two years and five months,” including the Garlands, who could “live in comparative comfort, and move in those circles of society to which their birth gave them entrance.”
As a sought-after dressmaker for prominent women in St. Louis, Keckly made connections in the White community. She continually sought her and her son’s freedom, and Hugh Garland set $1,200 as the price to realize that dream. In 1855, with the help of White clients, she raised the funds and gained freedom. About this time Keckly briefly married James Keckly, a fugitive slave she seemed in a hurry to forget. She barely mentions him in her memoirs, noting, “With the simple explanation that I lived with him eight years, let charity draw around him a mantle of silence.”
In 1860, Keckly settled in Washington, D.C., where her St. Louis connections helped her gain favor with the ladies of political circles and society. In the weeks leading up to President Abraham Lincoln’s inauguration, Keckly was approached by one of her clients, Margaret McClean, to make a dress for the following Sunday for an event with the Lincolns at the Willard Hotel. Pressed for time, Keckly initially refused, but with the promise of an introduction to Mrs. Lincoln, and the prospects of working in the White House, she agreed. The arrangement paid off and Mary Todd Lincoln employed Keckly for her own gowns. During her first spring in the White House, Keckly sewed about 16 dresses for the first lady and she became more than a seamstress. She was a confidante.
Keckly interacted intimately with the Lincolns on a daily basis. The two women bonded in 1862, both grieving the loss of a son. George Keckly, who could pass as a White man, had enlisted in the Union Army and was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in 1861. Willie Lincoln passed away on Feb. 20, 1862. Keckly wrote in her memoirs:
“I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed, when Mr. Lincoln came in. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief. He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, ‘My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. God has called him home. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. It is hard, hard to have him die!’”
Keckly later wrote of Mary Todd Lincoln, “I loved the woman for the dangers she had passed through, for the sorrows she had borne.”
In addition to her work for Mrs. Lincoln, Keckley founded the Contraband Relief Association, which provided clothing, shelter, and support to newly freed African Americans who had escaped slavery and come to Washington. The organization was one of the early examples of Black-led charitable efforts during Reconstruction. Mrs. Lincoln contributed to the organization, as well.
On the fateful morning of April 15, 1865, a messenger arrived at Keckly’s door and took her by carriage to Mrs. Lincoln’s side. Keckly later learned that when the first lady was asked who she wanted to console her in the aftermath of President Lincoln’s assassination, she replied, “Yes, send for Elizabeth Keckly. I want her just as soon as she can be brought here.”
Keckly accompanied Mrs. Lincoln to Chicago. She later returned to Washington with Mrs. Lincoln’s blessing. In 1868, Keckly published Behind the Scenes, a bold move intended to defend Mary Todd Lincoln against harsh public criticism, and to share her own remarkable story.
The book proved controversial and scandalous. Many White Americans were shocked that an African American woman would reveal private details about the White House and the Lincolns. Some accused her of betraying a sacred trust, effectively destroying her dressmaking business among Washington’s elite. It forever soured her relationship with Mrs. Lincoln.
With her income diminished, Keckly accepted a teaching position at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where she taught sewing and domestic skills to Black women. She spent her final years at the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington, an institution she had helped support earlier in life. She died there in 1907 at age 89.
In recent years, Keckly’s reputation and legend have enjoyed a resurgence, and her memoir is revered for its personal depictions of race, society, and the grief of an oft misunderstood first lady and her talented and determined formerly enslaved seamstress.
Melissa A. Winn has been enchanted with photography since childhood. Her career as a photographer and writer includes numerous publications, among them Civil War Times, America’s Civil War, and American History magazines. She is currently Director of Marketing and Communications for the National Museum of Civil War Medicine. Melissa collects Civil War photos and ephemera, with an emphasis on Dead Letter Office images and Gen. John A. Rawlins, chief of staff to Gen. Ulysses S. Grant. Melissa is a MI Senior Editor. Contact her at melissaannwinn@gmail.com.
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