Early Years
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly (sometimes spelled Keckley) was born in February 1818 in Dinwiddie Courthouse, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, the only child of Agnes Hobbs, a mixed-race woman who was enslaved in the household of Armistead Burwell. The Burwells also enslaved Hobbs’s extended family, including an aunt, her children, and at least one uncle, among whom Keckly was raised.
As a child, Keckly knew her mother’s husband, George Pleasant Hobbs, to be her father. He was enslaved on a neighboring farm. When Keckly was about seven, Hobbs was forced by his enslaver to move to Tennessee, and although the Hobbs family was able to exchange letters (all were literate), Keckly never saw him again. In about 1854, near the end of her life, Agnes Hobbs would finally tell Keckly that Armistead Burwell was her biological father.
In the depression of the early 1820s, Burwell took a job as steward at Hampden-Sydney College, where he moved his household. Keckly, then age five, was given the job of looking after the Burwell’s new baby. Even at this young age, Keckly understood the harsh realities of slavery. Mary Burwell had Keckly beaten for letting the baby fall from her crib. Keckly also witnessed Burwell’s sale of the three-year old son of the cook, and she feared she’d be next.
In 1832, Burwell lent Keckly as a wedding gift to his oldest son, Robert Burwell, and his new wife, Margaret Anna Robertson Burwell. In 1835 Robert Burwell took a position as minister of the Presbyterian Church in Hillsborough, North Carolina, and the family relocated there. Anna Burwell, who was admired for her education, founded a well-respected girls’ school, and the couple, relying on Keckly’s forced labor, raised twelve children and boarded pupils in the house.
In her memoir, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868), Keckly describes how Anna Burwell—proud, unhappy, and anxious—enlisted a local schoolmaster named William J. Bingham to “break” Keckly’s pride through a series of savage beatings. Keckly resisted, physically and morally, and eventually she and Anna Burwell reached a wary truce. Keckly also established a Black social network outside the Burwell household—most likely of others who were enslaved. Intelligent, striking, and energetic, she also attracted unwanted attention. By 1838, she was being sexually assaulted repeatedly by Alexander Kirkland, the son of a wealthy Hillsborough plantation owner and enslaver and a member of Robert Burwell’s church. Kirkland’s violent persecution lasted for four years. In 1841, Keckly had a son by Kirkland, whom she named George after her father.
Dressmaking and Freedom
By 1842, Armistead Burwell had died, and Mary Burwell was living on a farm near Petersburg with her daughter Anne Burwell Garland and son-in-law Hugh A. Garland. Keckly and George were sent to the Garland’s farm, where she was reunited with her mother, her aunt, and her cousins. Keckly would remember these years fondly, particularly compared to the torments of Hillsborough, which she viewed as her darkest years of bondage.
In 1845, indebtedness forced the Garlands to give up their farm and move to nearby Petersburg, a commercial center of tobacco factories, mills, and merchants. The move was a fortunate one for Keckly, giving her a view of the possibilities of freedom for Black people. In Petersburg, she was exposed to a sizable free Black population—a third of Petersburg’s population of approximately 7,500 Black inhabitants was free, and Black women headed more than half of the town’s free Black households.
In 1847, the Garlands took Keckly, George, and Keckly’s mother to St. Louis, where Hugh Garland opened a law practice. St. Louis unexpectedly provided Keckly with new opportunities. The financially strapped Garland hired Keckly out as a seamstress and dressmaker to supplement the family income. The talented Keckly soon built a following and became the Garland family’s primary means of support. In her memoir, Keckly notes bitterly that it was her labor that allowed “others [to] live in comparative comfort, and move in those circles of society to which their birth gave them entrance.” Determined to be the one to profit from her labor, in 1850 Keckly proposed to Garland that she be allowed to buy her and her son’s freedom. Garland refused. That same year, James Keckly, an apparently free Black man Keckly had known in Virginia, arrived in St. Louis and proposed marriage. Not wanting to bring another child into slavery, Keckly turned down the marriage proposal. In much the same way, she rebuffed Garland’s suggestion that she gain her freedom by fleeing north. The strengthened Fugitive Slave Law, part the Compromise of 1850, mandated the capture and return of fugitives from slavery found in the free states. Without emancipation papers, Keckly could not live openly as a free woman, something that Garland understood all too well, having with his law partner successfully represented Irene Emerson, who owned Dred and Harriet Scott, in the lawsuits filed in the Missouri courts for the Scotts’ freedom.
By 1854, Garland was in failing health. With the family sinking deeper into poverty, he finally acquiesced to Keckly’s request to buy her freedom. Anticipating freedom, Keckly agreed to marry James Keckly, and a ceremony was held in the Garland’s parlor. Although Garland died before he could honor his agreement with Keckly, Anne Burwell Garland followed through. In 1855, with money borrowed from her sewing clients, Keckly paid the $1,200 Hugh Garland had named as the purchase price for herself and George; Keckly was thirty-seven and George was fourteen.
Keckly remained in St. Louis through 1859, working to pay off her loans. In 1860, she separated from James Keckly, whom she had discovered was enslaved, rather than the free man he’d represented himself to be, and whom she later noted was often “dissipated,” which made him “a burden more than a helpmate.” With George enrolled at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the first historically Black university in the United States, and her mother dead, Keckly decided to head east to Washington, D.C.
Washington, D.C., and the Lincoln White House
In the spring of 1860, Keckly arrived in Washington, D.C., where she found work as a seamstress. After a dress she created for Mary Randolph Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee, was widely praised at a reception for the Prince of Wales, Keckly received numerous commissions from prominent southern women. Beginning in November 1860, she was employed by Varina Howell Davis, the wife of then-Senator Jefferson Davis, and spent her afternoons working in the Davis home, where she heard talk about secession and the prospect of war following the election of Republican Abraham Lincoln to the presidency. In January 1861, she turned down Varina Davis’ invitation to accompany her south as Davis prepared to leave Washington for Mississippi.
Eventually Keckly employed twenty seamstresses at her shop on 12th Street. She used the professional title mantua maker—an elite category of dressmaker who was able to sew the popular mantua, a dress whose bodice had to fit snugly through a series of tight vertical pleats in the back. Keckly’s ambitions had long centered on sewing for the occupants of the White House, and in the spring of 1861, she secured an introduction to Mary Lincoln. Keckly’s interview took place in the White House on March 5, 1861, the day after Lincoln’s inauguration, and Mary Lincoln hired Keckly on the spot. The daughter of enslavers in Kentucky, Mary Lincoln was educated, opinionated, and socially and politically ambitious, but deeply insecure. Although a staunch supporter of her husband and the North, she was attacked for her supposedly divided loyalties and soon would be criticized for her extravagant spending. In a city where the First Lady had few friends, Keckly became not only Lincoln’s dressmaker, making sixteen dresses that first season, but also her personal dresser and confidante.
Keckly’s memoir depicts her intimate and conflicted relationship with Mary Lincoln and the degree to which the First Lady relied on Keckly for emotional support and advice. This dependence deepened after February 1862, when the Lincoln’s twelve-year-old son Willie died of typhoid fever, and the intensity and scope of the Civil War battles increased. Keckly spent days in the Lincoln’s private White House quarters, where she was privy to family conversations and private moments. She was asked to watch over Mary Lincoln after Willie died, and she recalled being in the Green Room, where Willie’s body was laid out, and watching as Lincoln leaned over the body and wept. She remembered Mary Lincoln’s kindness after her son, George, was killed on August 10, 1861, in the Battle of Wilson’s Creek in Missouri. Unable to enlist as a Black soldier by law, George Kirkland had enlisted as a white man, using his white father’s surname.
Keckly became a recognized and respected figure in the middle-class community of freeborn and freed African Americans in Washington, D.C. In April 1862, following the emancipation of enslaved laborers in Washington, she was featured in a newspaper article about successful free Blacks in the city. Described as a “stately, stylish woman” and “an artist,” she was depicted as a businesswoman with authority. “Stately carriages stand before her door, whose haughty owners sit before Lizzie docile as lambs while she tells them what to wear.”
That year, Keckly began working on behalf of contrabands, formerly enslaved individuals who fled to the safety of Washington during the war. She was struck by the difficulties facing the migrants eager to find freedom and paid work. Organizing the members of Union Bethel Church, to which she belonged, Keckly became the founding president of the Contraband Relief Association. In the fall, she traveled with Mary Lincoln and Tad, the Lincoln’s youngest son, to New York City and Boston, where she raised money for her relief association. In New York, she met with the Black nationalist the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet. She also persuaded the Black steward at her hotel to collect donations from the Black waiters. In Boston, she met with leading Black abolitionists, such as the Reverend J. Stella Martin Stella and the Reverend Leonard A. Grimes, as well as the white abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Frederick Douglass, the famed formerly enslaved abolitionist, raised money for Keckly’s association through lectures before antislavery societies. Mary Lincoln also donated two hundred dollars to the association.
Keckly also devoted herself to training free Black women to sew for their own support. She taught Black seamstresses, many in her employ, her special system of cutting and fitting dresses. She also taught self-respect and self-care, insisting the women sit upright when they sewed to avoid damaging their eyes, backs, and necks.
In 1864, Keckly shared in Mary Lincoln’s joyful relief when Lincoln won reelection. In early April, Richmond fell into Union hands, and Keckly joined the presidential party that visited Richmond and Petersburg, which revived bitter memories of her enslavement. On April 11, Keckly watched from inside the White House as President Lincoln delivered what would be his final public address, in which he recommended voting rights for Black men. Listening in the crowd outside was the actor John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin.
After Lincoln’s assassination, Mary Lincoln was overwhelmed by grief. She was unable to leave her bed, even to attend Lincoln’s funeral in the East Room. She called for Keckly to be brought to the White House, where she remained for nearly six weeks to nurse the widow. Keckly then accompanied Mary Lincoln and her children to Chicago. Throughout, Keckly mourned Lincoln’s death deeply, both as a personal loss and as a blow to the cause of Black civil rights.
For a time after she returned to Washington, Keckly’s business prospered. She opened a second shop and joined the elite Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church, where the wealthiest, most prominent light-skinned African Americans worshipped. In 1866, to the surprise of some of her friends, she traveled to Virginia to visit Anne Garland and the remaining Garland family. For Keckly, the reunion was mix of triumph and reconciliation. She was admired for her success and received the only apology she sought: an apology for being denied an education.
Gratitude to Lincoln, as well as her complex relationship with his wife, moved Keckly to agree to help Mary Lincoln when in 1867 she traveled to New York City to sell her used jewelry and clothing to pay the debts she had run up as First Lady. The auction was a disaster and a public embarrassment for Lincoln, who was seen as trying to profit from her husband’s death. The Old Clothes Scandal, as it became known, not only damaged Mary Lincoln’s reputation, but left her no better off financially and unable to pay Keckly, who had devoted considerable time to her care. To support herself, and to defend Mary Lincoln and her own participation in the scheme, Keckly wrote Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House sometime between October 1867 and April 1868, apparently receiving editorial help from the journalist and editor James Redpath.
Keckly correctly anticipated she would be attacked for “writing too freely” about Mary Lincoln, a notion she rejected as racist. In her narrative, she gave accounts of the Lincolns’ private conversations and the First Lady’s extravagant spending; Mary Lincoln’s private letters to Keckly appear in an appendix. “If I have betrayed confidence in anything I have published, it has been to place Mrs. Lincoln in a better light before the world,” Keckly wrote in her memoir. Mary Lincoln did consider the book a betrayal, and she refused to see or acknowledge Keckly ever again. Robert Lincoln had production of the book halted, and Keckly lost a number of clients.
Final Years
The rise of ready-to-wear clothing at the end of the nineteenth century depressed demand for custom dresses, which further contributed to the decline of Keckly’s Washington business. Keckly sold some of the mementoes she had from the Lincolns, including the cloak Mary Lincoln wore on the night of her husband’s assassination, to a Chicago collector to raise money. From 1892 to 1897, Keckly headed the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science at Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio, and she organized the Wilberforce exhibition on dress reform at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. Forced by a mild stroke to retire, she returned to Washington, D.C., where she rented a room in the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children, an institution founded during the war with funds she had helped raise. She died in 1907 at the age of 89. In his eulogy, the Reverend Francis Grimké described Keckly as a “commanding figure and splendid presence.” She was buried in the National Harmony Memorial Park in Landover, Maryland.
