Born a slave in 1818, Elizabeth Keckley became a skilled dressmaker for First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. After President Lincoln’s assassination, Keckley wrote one of the first personal accounts of life inside the Lincoln White House, Behind the Scenes: Or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Elizabeth Keckley had experienced the exploitation and degradation common to thousands of slave women. She was born in Dinwiddie Court House, Virginia, and spent her childhood as a slave of the Burwell family. During adolescence, she was “loaned” to a North Carolina slave owner and beaten and eventually raped. She was later returned to one of the Burwell daughters, who took Elizabeth and her son George to St. Louis. She became an increasingly
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She learned to read and write. In 1860 she moved to Washington and attracted a prosperous clientele that included the wives of prominent politicians, such as Varina Davis, the wife of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy. Shortly after the Lincolns arrived in Washington, Keckley began making dresses for the First Lady and became Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante and traveling companion. Keckley helped convert Mrs. Lincoln, whose family owned slaves in Kentucky, to strong antislavery views. With Mrs. Lincoln’s assistance, Elizabeth Keckley founded the Contraband Relief Association to provide aid to former slaves in Washington. Elizabeth Keckley spent the rest of her life living off the pension from her son’s service as a Union soldier. She died in Washington in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children, which she had helped found years …show more content…
Keckley achieves this through a reversal of the well-known editorial power relationship between white and formerly enslaved women in slave narratives. Interpreting her reputation as a first-class mantua maker of the Washington elite as powerful enough in symbolic capital to speak on behalf of Mary Lincoln’s pain, Keckley uses sentimental sympathy to carve out a space for her and Mary Lincoln’s inner life. She thus insists on a cross-racial female right to emotion and interiority that can be brokered by those who were formerly only the dependent recipients of white (female) tutelage: African American
She learned to read and write. In 1860 she moved to Washington and attracted a prosperous clientele that included the wives of prominent politicians, such as Varina Davis, the wife of Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis, soon to be president of the Confederacy. Shortly after the Lincolns arrived in Washington, Keckley began making dresses for the First Lady and became Mrs. Lincoln’s confidante and traveling companion. Keckley helped convert Mrs. Lincoln, whose family owned slaves in Kentucky, to strong antislavery views. With Mrs. Lincoln’s assistance, Elizabeth Keckley founded the Contraband Relief Association to provide aid to former slaves in Washington. Elizabeth Keckley spent the rest of her life living off the pension from her son’s service as a Union soldier. She died in Washington in 1907 at the Home for Destitute Women and Children, which she had helped found years …show more content…
Keckley achieves this through a reversal of the well-known editorial power relationship between white and formerly enslaved women in slave narratives. Interpreting her reputation as a first-class mantua maker of the Washington elite as powerful enough in symbolic capital to speak on behalf of Mary Lincoln’s pain, Keckley uses sentimental sympathy to carve out a space for her and Mary Lincoln’s inner life. She thus insists on a cross-racial female right to emotion and interiority that can be brokered by those who were formerly only the dependent recipients of white (female) tutelage: African American