Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley — she herself signed Keckly — was born enslaved in February of about 1818 at Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia. Her girlhood was a ledger of the institution's cruelties: loaned away as a wedding gift, beaten at a mistress's orders, and subjected for years to a violence from which her only son, George, was born. Moved to St. Louis with the Garland household, her needle became the support of seventeen people who owned her.

In November 1855 she purchased herself and her son for twelve hundred dollars — raised as a loan by her patron Elizabeth Le Bourgeois among the ladies whose gowns she made, and repaid in full from her own earnings; the repayment is the measure of the woman. Washington received her in 1860, and in March 1861, the day after the inauguration, Mary Todd Lincoln engaged her — sixteen dresses that first season, and a confidence that deepened into the friendship of the White House's hardest hours. Her George, barred from the army as a Black man, enlisted as white, and fell at Wilson's Creek in August 1861.

Grief became organization: in August 1862 she founded the Contraband Relief Association — later the Ladies' Freedmen and Soldier's Relief Association — with Mary Lincoln among its donors. Her 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, published by Carleton with James Redpath's editing, told the Lincoln household truthfully and kindly; the scandal of its appendix letters — published, she maintained, without her consent — cost her the friendship and much of her trade, and Robert Lincoln pressed to suppress the book. She taught sewing and domestic arts at Wilberforce from 1892 and represented the university at the 1893 World's Fair.

She died on the twenty-sixth of May 1907, at about eighty-nine, at the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children in Washington — an institution she had helped found, sustained in her last years by her soldier son's pension. Honored be Elizabeth Keckley, who stitched her way out of bondage and dressed the age that freed no one for her.