On the night of April 14, 1865, a messenger ran through the streets of Washington. Abraham Lincoln lay dying in a boarding house across from Ford’s Theater, and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, was in the front parlor, inconsolable and refusing the touch of every senator and general who pressed around her. The most powerful men in the country did not know what to do with her grief. The woman who came was named Elizabeth Keckley.
She was 53 years old, had been born into slavery in Virginia, and 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 over a month after the assassination, through the vigil and the funeral and the weeks when Mary refused to leave her room, Elizabeth was the only person she would allow inside. Elizabeth Keckley is remembered, when she is remembered at all, as a seamstress who made Mary Lincoln’s gowns.
That is an incomplete truth. Born into slavery in 1818 in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, she survived beatings and the death of her only son on a Civil War battlefield. She purchased her own freedom, built a thriving dressmaking business, and became the intimate confidant of a first lady who trusted almost no one. Then she wrote a book that cost her nearly everything.
Dinwiddie County in 1818 held more enslaved people than free. Elizabeth was born in the quarters of the Burwell Plantation. Her father, George Pleasant Hobbs, was enslaved on a neighboring property and was sold away while she was still a child. Her mother, Agnes, worked in the Burwell house as a seamstress and began teaching her daughter to sew as soon as she was old enough to hold a needle.
Elizabeth was 4 years old when she was assigned to watch an infant. The cradle tipped, and the baby fell to the floor. The baby was not hurt, but the mistress appeared in the doorway, and the young girl was held accountable. She survived it, and she filed it away with the precision of someone who understands that memory is one of the few things that cannot be taken.
At 7 years old, Elizabeth witnessed something that made the logic of that world fully visible. She later wrote of seeing a boy named Little Joe, the son of the plantation’s cook, brought into a room with a bright face. He was placed on the scales, weighed, and sold, she wrote, “like the hogs at so much per pound. ” She understood with chilling clarity that the same scales existed for her.
She did not break. She sewed. By her early teens, Elizabeth was already more skilled than most, able to cut cloth cleanly and produce finished seams that looked nothing like a child’s work. In her early teens, Elizabeth was loaned to the household of Reverend Robert Burwell.
In that household, a local school teacher named William Bingham decided she required correction. He seized a rope, tried to tie her, and then, in her own words, picked up the rawhide and it cut the skin, raised great welts, and the warm blood trickled down her back. She did not plead. Afterward, Bingham wept, ashamed of what he had done.
She recorded this without sentiment. In every household, Elizabeth’s skill accumulated quietly. Merchants’ wives heard about her. She worked for no pay, but the skill was entirely hers.
No one could take that. In her late 20s, she was moved to St. Louis to the household of Hugh Garland. She had a son named George, whose father was a white man named Alexander Kirkland.
Elizabeth did not speak of how George was conceived. The record shows Kirkland’s involvement was neither consensual nor contested by anyone with the power to intervene. George was light-skinned, but under the law, the condition of the child follows the condition of the mother. His mother was enslaved, therefore George was enslaved.
A man named James Keckley came calling, presenting himself as free. Elizabeth married him, but the marriage was not a good one. James turned out to be neither free nor steady, and they eventually separated. Elizabeth kept his name.
She needed $1,200, the price of her freedom and George’s. She went to the women she had dressed, the women who trusted her judgment about cut and color and fit, and asked if they would lend it to her. Seventeen of them said yes. On November 15, 1855, she placed $1,200 on a table in St.
Louis, and Hugh Garland signed the manumission papers for her and George. The loans were repaid, all 17 of them, systematically over the years that followed. By the spring of 1860, Elizabeth was in Washington with $2. 50.
She opened a small dressmaking shop and built a clientele. She did not know that one of her new clients would change the course of everything. Mary Todd Lincoln had heard about the dressmaker and arranged a meeting at the Willard Hotel. The initial conversation was practical, a question of fabric and inaugural gowns, but something else happened.
Mary recognized quickly a woman who shared her own strong opinions. By summer, Elizabeth was in the White House regularly, not only for fittings but increasingly for other reasons. Mary talked to her about the pressures of the White House, the isolation, the loneliness. Abraham Lincoln noticed her too and called her Madame Elizabeth.
Then the war came to Elizabeth directly. Her son George enlisted in the Union Army. On August 10, 1861, he was killed at the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri. He was 21 years old.
According to her memoir, the President himself came to her workroom that afternoon, sat down without ceremony, and took her hands. He offered no inadequate condolences. He simply stayed. Six months later, it was Mary’s turn.
Willie Lincoln, the President’s second son, died of typhoid fever on February 20, 1862. Mary collapsed entirely. Elizabeth was sent for and arrived to find the first lady unable to eat or speak to most people. “She was an altered woman,” Elizabeth wrote later.
Elizabeth sat at the foot of Mary’s bed and did not leave, day after day. It was during those weeks that Mary wrote 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 rose, walked to the window, and pointed toward a large white building visible 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 14, 1865, a messenger found Elizabeth at home. A black physician named Dr.
Anderson R. Abbott escorted her through streets lit by gas lamps toward the Petersen boarding house. When she arrived, the parlor was full of generals and cabinet members. Mary Lincoln was barely coherent.
When Elizabeth walked through the door, Mary reached for her. Abraham Lincoln died at 7:22 in the morning on April 15, 1865. For 35 nights that followed, Elizabeth slept in Mary Lincoln’s room in the White House. Mary could not function without her.
She refused food and refused to receive most visitors. Robert Lincoln, the eldest son, managed the arrangements with controlled grief. Mary did not want Robert in those weeks. She wanted Elizabeth.
By late May, Mary had to leave the White House. Elizabeth helped her pack, folding gowns and shawls and objects that had filled four years of a presidency. She had been in these rooms when the decisions of a century were being made. Now she was carrying them down the stairs.
Mary went to Chicago, consumed by grief and a fear of financial ruin. She wrote to Elizabeth constantly. In the autumn of 1867, the two women formed a plan to sell Mary’s gowns through a consignment dealer on Broadway. It was not quiet.
Within days, the press had turned it into a spectacle, and the coverage was merciless. Mary returned to Chicago exposed and humiliated. Elizabeth came home with a question she could not stop turning over. She had watched Mary Lincoln be misunderstood for years, reduced to a caricature of an unstable widow.
She had been in the rooms where the real Mary existed. She picked up her pen and wrote 300 pages in defense of the woman the world had decided to discard. The book was called “Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. ” It was published in the spring of 1868.
Elizabeth had shaped every sentence deliberately, choosing what to include and what to leave in silence. She had not reviewed the final appendix. When the printed copies arrived, she found the publisher had appended 24 of Mary Lincoln’s private letters. Letters Mary had written to Elizabeth, personal and unguarded, about money, about her dead sons, about Robert, about what she feared.
They had been shared with the publisher as background material, not as content. No one had asked Mary’s permission. No one had told Elizabeth they would appear in print. When Mary Lincoln read her own words in a published book, she experienced it as the final, absolute 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 a reviewer for the New York Citizen. Other publications followed. The book was not reviewed on its merits.
Elizabeth’s dressmaking clients began to disappear, and the business she had built from $2. 50 collapsed within months. Robert Todd Lincoln, Mary’s eldest son, quietly acquired the remaining copies of “Behind the Scenes. ” Historians have established that Robert took sustained and deliberate steps to remove the book from circulation.
The reason he gave was his family’s dignity. But the book contained something else. Deep in the chapter about Willie Lincoln’s death, Elizabeth had recorded what Lincoln himself had said at the White House window, his warning that grief might drive Mary mad and that the asylum across the river might be needed. In the spring of 1875, seven years after Robert removed the book from circulation, Robert Lincoln had his mother committed.
He arranged the legal proceedings himself, hired the doctors, and managed what the newspapers were told. Mary Todd Lincoln spent months confined in a private asylum in Batavia, Illinois before her sister secured her release. The witness had been discredited. The book had been buried.
Elizabeth Keckley returned to Washington with nothing left to lose. She kept one photograph on her wall: the portrait of Abraham Lincoln. 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 and returned to Washington. There was a place in Washington she could go. She had helped found it in 1862, an organization that had become the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children.
She went there in the last years of her life and asked to be taken in. She lived in a small room. She did not speak often of the book or of Mary Lincoln or of the White House years. On May 26, 1907, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley died in that room.
She was 89 years old. She was buried at Harmony Cemetery in Washington. In 1960, the city of Washington made plans to develop the land where Harmony Cemetery stood. The graves were to be relocated, 37,000 of them.
Many had no markers, and certain names were lost. Elizabeth Keckley’s grave was among them. 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.