Keckley, Elizabeth
Keckley, Elizabeth( 1827–1907),modiste and memoirist. After an early life as a slave, including bearing a child by her master, she earned her own and her son's emancipation in 1855 for $1200 by making dresses. In Washington she established herself as a custom dressmaker and had as clients Mrs. Jefferson Davis, Mrs. Stephen Douglas, and, for four years, Mary Todd Lincoln. From this experience she wrote a historically important memoir used by all Lincoln biographers: Behind the Scenes; or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). Mary Todd Lincoln confided to Elizabeth Keckley her extravagances that must be kept from Mr. Lincoln, and many other family matters before and after Lincoln's death. Though her own son was killed in the war, Mrs. Keckley keeps herself in the background, and gives the foreground to the famous whom she knew. She wrote to Frederick Douglass and others asking support for a plan of lecture...
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