In the spring of 1907, a woman died alone in a small room in Washington. She had no family and no visitors. On the wall above her bed hung a single photograph of Abraham Lincoln. She had been born his slave. By the time he died, she was the only person his wife trusted in the world. Her name was Elizabeth Keckley.
She held Mary Todd Lincoln for 35 nights after the assassination. Then she wrote a book that Lincoln’s own son spent years trying to suppress. This is her story.
On the night of April 14th, 1865, Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a boarding house across from Ford’s Theater. His wife, Mary, was in the front parlor, inconsolable and refusing the touch of every senator and general who pressed close. The most powerful men in the country did not know what to do with her grief. A messenger was sent to find a dressmaker.
The woman who came was Elizabeth Keckley. She was 53 years old. Born a slave in Virginia, she had arrived in Washington less than a decade earlier with almost nothing. She had no official title or political rank. But when she walked through the door, Mary Lincoln reached for her hands.
For more than a month after Lincoln died, through the vigil, the funeral, and the weeks when Mary refused to leave her room, Elizabeth was the only person she would allow inside. How does a woman born into slavery become the most trusted person in the most powerful household in America?
Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in 1818 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. By the time she walked into the White House, she had survived beatings, assault, and the death of her only son on a Civil War battlefield. She had purchased her own freedom and built a thriving dressmaking business.
Her father was sold away while she was still a child. Her mother, Agnes, worked as a seamstress and taught her daughter to sew. At 4 years old, Elizabeth was assigned to watch an infant. The cradle tipped and the baby fell to the floor. The baby was not hurt, but the mistress was in the doorway. Elizabeth survived it.
At 7 years old, she witnessed the sale of a human being. A boy named Little Joe, the son of the plantation’s cook, was brought into the room with a bright face. He did not yet know what was happening. He was placed on the scales, weighed, and sold like livestock. Elizabeth understood that the same scales existed for her.
In her early teens, she was loaned to the household of Reverend Robert Burwell. A rawhide hung on the wall beside the kitchen door. One day, a school teacher named William Bingham decided she required correction. He seized a rope and tried to tie her. Then he picked up the rawhide.
It cut the skin and raised great welts. The warm blood trickled down her back. She did not plead. She did not weep until later. Bingham wept afterward, ashamed of what he had done.
In St. Louis, she was moved to the household of Hugh Garland. She had a son named George. The boy was born around 1839, the son of Elizabeth and a white man named Alexander Kirkland. The involvement was neither consensual nor contested by anyone with the power to intervene.
George was light-skinned. But under Virginia law, the condition of the child follows the condition of the mother. His mother was enslaved, therefore George was enslaved. The calculation had been made before he drew his first breath.
Elizabeth married a man named James Keckley. The marriage was not good. He drank and struggled. They eventually separated, but Elizabeth kept his name. It was the name she had chosen.
She needed $1,200 to purchase her freedom and her son’s. She went to the women she had dressed and asked if they would lend it to her. Seventeen of them said yes. There was no contract any court would honor. It was faith.
On November 15th, 1855, she placed $1,200 on a table in St. Louis. Hugh Garland signed the manumission papers. She did not weep until she left the building. She repaid all 17 loans.
By the spring of 1860, she was in Washington with $2.50. She opened a small dressmaking shop. She built a clientele. One of them would change the course of everything.
Mary Todd Lincoln had heard about the dressmaker on 12th Street. The first meeting was practical, a question of fabric and inaugural gowns. But something else happened. Mary talked to her, not about fabric, but about the pressures of the White House and the isolation of being observed constantly.
Abraham Lincoln called her Madame Elizabeth. He said it with a slight gravity, as if the honorific were entirely appropriate.
Then the war came to her directly. Her son George had enlisted in the Union Army. He went as a white soldier, his light skin making this possible. On August 10th, 1861, he was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri. He was 21 years old.
The news arrived by letter. According to her memoir, a visitor came to the shop that afternoon. A tall man in a stovepipe hat entered quietly and sat down. He took her hands. The President of the United States sat with the woman who dressed his wife and offered no small condolences. He simply stayed.
Six months later, it was Mary Lincoln’s turn. Willie Lincoln, the President’s second son, died of typhoid fever on February 20th, 1862. He was 11 years old. Mary collapsed entirely. Elizabeth was sent for.
Mary would not go near the Green Room where Willie’s body had been embalmed. She sat in near darkness. Elizabeth sat at the foot of her bed and did not leave.
During those weeks, Mary wrote a letter to her husband. "If it had not been for Lizzie Keckley," she told him, "I do not know what I should have done."
One afternoon, Lincoln came to sit with his wife. He walked to the window and pointed toward a large white building on the hill across the river. "Mother," he said, "do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there." He was pointing at the Government Hospital for the Insane.
Elizabeth wrote this down. She was a witness.
On the night of April 14th, 1865, the messenger found her at home. A black physician named Dr. Anderson R. Abbott was waiting to escort her. They walked through streets lit by gas lamps toward the boarding house called Petersen’s.
The parlor was full of men. Mary Lincoln was in the front room, barely coherent. When Elizabeth walked through the door, Mary reached for her.
Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 in the morning on April 15th, 1865. For the 35 nights that followed, Elizabeth slept in Mary’s room in the White House. Mary would not function without her.
By late May, Mary had to leave. She packed slowly. Elizabeth helped her pack. She moved between the trunks and the wardrobes, folding and wrapping.
Mary went to Chicago. She wrote to Elizabeth constantly. In the autumn of 1867, the two women formed a plan. Mary needed money. She had gowns, dozens of them, the official wardrobe of four years as first lady.
They traveled to New York to arrange a quiet sale. It was not quiet. Within days, the press had made it a spectacle. The former first lady selling her dresses in a back room on Broadway. The coverage was merciless.
Elizabeth came home with a question she could not stop turning over. She was tired of the distance between what she knew and what the world believed. She began to write.
The book was called Behind the Scenes, or 30 Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. It was published in the spring of 1868. Elizabeth had not reviewed the final appendix.
The publisher had appended 24 of Mary Lincoln’s private letters. Letters Mary had written to Elizabeth over the years, personal and unguarded. No one had asked Mary’s permission. No one had told Elizabeth they would appear in print.
When Mary read her own words in a published book, she experienced it as the final betrayal. It did not matter that Elizabeth had not authorized the letters. Mary cut her off entirely. She never wrote to her again. She never saw her again.
The press did the rest. "The pretensions of an ignorant negro mantua maker," wrote one reviewer. The book was not reviewed on its merits. It was reviewed on the impertinence of its existence.
Elizabeth’s dressmaking clients disappeared. The business she had built collapsed within months. Robert Todd Lincoln, Mary’s eldest son, quietly acquired the remaining copies of the book. He took deliberate steps to remove it from circulation.
Deep in the chapter about Willie Lincoln’s death, Elizabeth had recorded what she witnessed. Lincoln had pointed at the large white building on the hill. "Mother, do you see that large white building on the hill yonder? Try and control your grief or it will drive you mad, and we may have to send you there."
In the spring of 1875, seven years after Robert removed the book from circulation, he had his mother committed. He arranged the legal proceedings himself. Mary Todd Lincoln spent months confined in a private asylum before her sister secured her release.
Elizabeth returned to Washington with nothing left to lose. She kept one photograph on her wall. A pension arrived each month from the federal government, $8, later raised to $12, in recognition of the fact that her son George had died in Union service.
In the early 1890s, she was offered a position at Wilberforce University in Ohio, head of the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science. She accepted. In 1893, she suffered a stroke.
She returned to Washington. She went to the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, an organization she had helped found in 1862. She lived in a small room. She received occasional visitors. She did not speak often of the book or of Mary Lincoln.
On May 26th, 1907, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley died in that room. She was 89 years old. She had outlived Lincoln by 42 years. She had outlived Mary Todd Lincoln by 25. She had outlived her son by 46.
She was buried at Harmony Cemetery in Washington. In 1960, the city made plans to develop the land. The graves were to be relocated, 37,000 of them. Many had no markers. Some records were incomplete. Elizabeth Keckley’s grave was among those lost.
In 2010, 103 years after she died, a commemorative marker was placed at National Harmony Memorial Park in Maryland. It tells visitors her name. Her actual resting place has never been found.