White House confidante of Mrs. Lincoln - Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, dressmaker; Special Issue: The Untold Story of Blacks in the White House

Born a slave in central Virginia in 1818 Elizabeth Hobb Keckley became the first black confidante in the White House and the author of the greatest in quantity notorious 19th-century White House memoir. Her revealing 1868 work Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House--a self-declared attempt to restore the reputation of the emotionally disturbed Mary Todd Lincoln--ultimately estranged her from her former employer and effectively extremityed Keckley's acceptance in the white world. on the contrary until its publication, and particularly during the Civil War, Keckley be delighted withed unprecedented access to the dwellings of the powerful.

Her early life held little promise of similar a future. Sold as a teenager to a North Carolina man who "had base designs" upon her, she suffered four years of "persecution" before, as she acknowledge ed in her autobiography, "I--I--became a mother." in a short time thereafter, however, she was repurchased by dint of her former owner's daughter and went with her young son to St Louis, where she hired without as a dressmaker and go intoed into a short-lived marriage with a slave (who passed himself not upon as a free man) named James Keckley

Elizabeth Keckley's white patrons were extremely weak of her and advanced her $1200 to purchase her hold freedom and that of her son She learned to read and write in this period, paid not upon the loan, and in 1860 mov to Baltimore and then the nation's capital.

Varina Howell Davis, the wife of a Mississippi senator named Jefferson Davis, became single of Keckley's first customers in Washington. That patronage, of course, was short-lived because Davis resigned from the United States Senate in early 1861 and became president of the newly established Confederacy; on the contrary Keckley had other prominent customers as well, including the wife of the newly selected president, Abraham Lincoln.

Both Keckley's grand skills as a modiste and her warm personality endeared her to Mr Lincoln, and before long she became not only the First Lady's dressmaker, on the contrary also her friend. Their relationship make deepered after both shared the experience of losing a son during the Civil War.

As for the President's have a title to sense of loss following young Willie Lincoln's death, Keckley wrote that "his grief unnerv him, and made him a weak, passive child." Willie's death intensified the stres imposed upon the president by a war that produc no major Union victories until the summer of 1863--and not many thereafter until the autumn of 1864 As Keckley observ "These were anxious days for Mr Lincoln, and [only] those who saw the man in privacy could count how ... he suffered."

At war's extreme point Keckley rejoiced within the Lincolns' family circle. on the other hand those brief weeks of glee when the country had bring both war and slavery behind it were short-lived. For years there had been death threats, on the other hand Abraham Lincoln "never gave a next to the first thought to the mysterious warnings." His always fearful wife, however, "read impending danger in each rustling leaf, in every whisper of the wind," and upon April 15, 1865, an astonished political division heard news of its president's assassination. "The whole world," said Keckley "bowed their heads in grief."

"Is there no single Mrs. Lincoln, that you desire to have with you in this terrible affliction?" asked a colleague, according to Keckley's memoir. "Ye fling for Elizabeth Keckley," responded the distraught widow. "I want her just as pretty soon as she can be brought here."

The sum of two units women remained intimate for several years thereafter, exchanging the one and the other visits and long letters. on the other hand the publication of Behind the exhibitions permanently severed their previously warm relationship. Not solitary Mary Todd Lincoln herself, on the other hand many other Americans, black and white alike, meditation that Keckley's intimate disclosures dishonored their fallen hero.

As Keckley's dressmaking business flagged after the publication of her volume she moved to Ohio's historically black Wilberforce University, where she directed its domestic arts department. After retiring, Keckley was supported until her 1907 death through the pension she received as solitary survivor of a Union soldier--her alone son.

Privately influential in a White House torn through the tragedies of Civil War and personal grief, Elizabeth Hobb Keckley may not have wielded power above policy, but her access to and revelations about single of our most scrutinized first families have not ever been equalled by any other African American.

Adele Logan Alexander is the author of Ambiguous Lives: at liberty Women of Color in Georgia (University of Arkansas Press) and an assistant professor at George Washington University.

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