Keckly’s statue in the Virginia Women’s Monument (Photo by Jay Paul)
On April 6, 1865, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly accompanied first lady Mary Lincoln on a tour of smoldering Richmond. They came to the Virginia State Capitol, where the Confederate Congress had convened until a few days prior. Born into slavery, Keckly, whose son died fighting for the Union, sat in the chair once occupied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis.
She recounted in her later memoir that the Capitol building “presented a desolate appearance — desks broken, and papers scattered promiscuously in the hurried flight of the Confederate Congress. I picked up a number of papers, and, by curious coincidence, the resolution prohibiting all free colored people from entering the State of Virginia.”
A day later, Keckly and the first lady visited Petersburg. Still standing was 314 N. Sycamore St., where Keckly had lived with her mother and son from 1845 to 1847. She was brought there when slaveholders Hugh and Anne Burwell Garland’s financial reversals forced them to quit their plantation. Despite the circumstance of bondage, Keckly regarded Virginia as home.
“I was born a slave — was the child of slave parents — therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action,” she later recalled. “My birthplace was Dinwiddie Court-House, in Virginia.”
Earlier in her life, Elizabeth and her mother, Agnes Hobbs, tended to the children of plantation owners Armistead and Mary Burwell. Armistead, the father of Anne Burwell Garland, was probably Elizabeth’s actual father, as revealed by Agnes on her deathbed. Agnes taught her daughter to sew and, though it was illegal, to read.
In 1832, at age 14, Elizabeth became a charitable loan to the Burwells’ eldest son, Robert, unable to afford his own servants. There, in Hillsborough, North Carolina, she underwent repeated floggings to break her “stubborn pride.” She further endured four years of sexual abuse by Alexander Kirkland, a Burwell neighbor, and as a result, she gave birth in 1839 to a son, George, who took Kirkland’s name. Sometime after that, Elizabeth was sent to work for Hugh and Anne Garland.
The Garlands moved to St. Louis in 1847, with Elizabeth and her mother among the servants, but the family struggled financially. Elizabeth used her skill as a seamstress to help support the 17-member household and became an in-demand dressmaker.
In this way, she came to the attention of the first lady.
Mary Lincoln biographer Jean H. Baker notes that Elizabeth Keckly “no doubt became Mrs. Lincoln’s ‘closest friend’ despite or perhaps because of the inequality between an ex-slave, mulatto seamstress and a president’s wife.” In Washington, D.C., where the Lincolns were outsiders, and Mary Lincoln was viewed as even more so, her trusted female intimate also stood at society’s fringe.
Historian Jennifer Fleischner, whose 2003 book “Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly” analyzed the friendship between the two women, describes their relationship as “secret sharers.”
Mary Lincoln discussed with Keckly the division of the nation that ran through the first lady’s own family. After her 1842 marriage, she dropped her maiden name or abbreviated it with a “T,” a decision which was only reinforced after her Todd relations supported the Confederacy. The women also held in common the trauma of a child’s death. Keckly’s son, George, left college in Ohio to join the military, and in his first engagement, on Aug. 10, 1861, at Wilson’s Creek, Missouri, he died. The Lincolns’ second son, William Wallace, nicknamed “Willie,” succumbed to typhoid fever at the White House on Feb. 20, 1862. Keckly witnessed Mary Lincoln’s “paroxysms of grief” and the president’s quiet sadness at his son’s bedside.
Washington society dressmaker Elizabeth Keckly (circa 1861) was a confidante of Mary Lincoln. (Photo courtesy Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University Archives)
While in Washington, Keckly became an activist, organizing relief and aid groups to assist formerly enslaved people and black soldiers serving in the military.
Keckly is known primarily for her slave narrative/memoir, written three years after Lincoln’s assassination, “Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House.” She composed the book ostensibly to deflect criticism against Mary Lincoln for selling off her expensive dresses to stave off destitution. The white press instead regarded the book with disgust. Black commentators didn’t like her revelations, either.
Keckly’s depictions of intimate, often emotional and poignant, scenes of the Lincoln family and their White House life broke the conventions of the day’s social proprieties. That a woman — and a black woman at that — dared to make public such matters went too far for many. She asserted that her literary counselor James Redpath printed personal letters of Mary Lincoln to “Lizzie” in the book’s appendices without Keckly’s knowledge.
“Whatever Mary’s outsiderism,” Fleischner says, “she was white, and so when ‘betrayed’ by her black servant, white ranks closed around her.”
Keckly’s upper-class apparel business withered, and she later taught domestic science for Wilberforce University. At the Home for Destitute Women and Children in Washington, a charitable institution she had helped establish, Keckly died from a stroke on May 26, 1907.
Her presence in the White House and her book, though controversial at the time, led to her rediscovery by latter-day historians. Steven Spielberg’s 2012 film “Lincoln” featured Gloria Reuben as Keckly. Reuben’s performance is notable, but the film didn’t allow space to present Keckly’s wider role beyond that of Mary Lincoln’s couturier and confidante. George Saunders’ acclaimed 2016 novel, “Lincoln in the Bardo,” incorporates passages from Keckly’s writings.
A state historical marker honoring Keckly received installation at the Dinwiddie County Courthouse in 2014. That same year, the then-Petersburg-based New Millennium Studios of Tim and Daphne Maxwell Reid released a documentary about Keckly as part of its Legacy series, titled “The Life and Times of Elizabeth Keckly.” The film, which features April Marcell as Keckly, is available through the Urban Movie Channel. Keckly’s memoir is still in print.
A more recent memorialization depicts Elizabeth Keckly among what ultimately will be a dozen bronze figures at the Virginia Women’s Monument in Capitol Square. Her likeness stands straight and dignified there, as her eyes gaze toward Thomas Jefferson’s columned capitol and the future.
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