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In 1868 a remarkable book appeared called Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House. By this point, over 100 slave narratives had been published, and some of them had met considerable commercial success. In most slave narratives, the immediate motive for publication was money. Ex-slaves were (understandably) in need of whatever income they could get. And the larger motive was to support the abolitionist movement by showing just how traumatic, degrading, and evil the institution of slavery was.

Well, by 1868 the abolitionist movement had won. The Emancipation Proclamation had been signed, and the war was over. The slaves were free. So it could be asked whether the world needed another slave narrative. (As far as historians are concerned, the answer is yes, of course it does, but publishers don’t think that way.)

Had it been just a slave narrative, it might not have found a publisher. But Elizabeth Keckly had something else to offer and as you will see, her story and her motives were far, far more complex than your ordinary slave narrative. And this is her story:

A Childhood Enslaved

In February 1818, a little girl named Lizzy was born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Her mother was Agnes Hobbs, slave of Armistead Burwell. Agnes was married to George Hobbs, a slave on another plantation, and so the girl was formally Elizabeth Hobbs though everyone who looked at her would have instantly known that George Hobbs could not possibly be her father. Elizabeth was nowhere near as fair-skinned as our last two heroines (Ellen Craft and Harriet Hemings). But she was much fairer than either George or Agnes, which means her most likely father was none other than Armistead Burwell himself.

George was a good man. He claimed her anyway, though she didn’t see him much. But she grew up in a family of slave children and their mothers. She was only four or five years old when she was told to mind the baby (the last of the legitimate Burwell children). The modern mind boggles at the idea of leaving a four year old in charge and the modern mind is right. Because Lizzy did tip the cradle too far. The baby fell out and cried and Mrs. Burwell came in while a panicked Lizzy was trying to scoop up the baby with a shovel. She was whipped for what they called her carelessness & decades later she still remembered and recorded it.

As she grew older, her master often told her she would never be worth her salt. Besides being personally degrading, there was real threat behind those words, a fact she could not possibly have missed on the day he sold her 3-year old cousin away and whipped his mother for looking sad about it. Or on the day her uncle chose to hang himself rather than report that he had lost some of the farm equipment. They would later learn the equipment had been stolen not lost, but of course, it was already too late for that to matter.

Lizzy called these incidents “the dark side” of slavery, which begs the question about whether there was any other side. According to her, yes, there was, but we aren’t there yet. She was to experience the dark side personally starting in 1832 at age 14.

A Teenager Enslaved

Armistead did not sell her. But he loaned her to his son. This meant leaving her home, her mother, her aunts, & her cousins, and going to Petersburg, where Robert Burwell ran a small country church and his wife Anna ran the home.

There is no doubt that Anna needed help. The salary of a country minister was small. She was nearly always pregnant or nursing. She was well-educated, but her parents had died, leaving her penniless. Robert Burwell was a cold, uninspiring husband. So Anna was young, anxious, insecure, and lonely. In a better world, perhaps she and Lizzy could have comforted each other. But instead Anna chose to establish her dominance, making everyone around her unhappy. The house was so unpleasant, even the Burwell relations refused to visit.

Before this, Lizzy had lived in a large household where work was shared. In this small household she, in her own words, did the work of 3 servants: cooking, cleaning, laundering, nannying, nursing, whatever was needed.

Lizzy’s only respite was writing to her mother (yes, they were both literate). “Tell Miss Elizabeth,” Lizzy wrote (speaking of Robert’s younger sister), “that I wish she would make haste and get married, for mistress says that I belong to her when she gets married.” A poor hope, indeed. Not freedom: that was too much to hope for. But merely to be a slave somewhere else. That was all that was keeping her going.

As Lizzy grew, things went still further wrong. Anna got the next-door neighbor to whip Lizzy. She fought back but he was bigger stronger. When she demanded to know what she had done to deserve whipping, Robert knocked her down with his chair. This continued weekly for a while and the only explanation she ever got was that Anna thought her pride needed subduing.

And the Burwells and their next-door neighbor were not the only ones to fear. A slave girl was always at risk just by her gender. In her own words:

“For four years a white man—I spare the world his name—had base designs upon me. I do not care to dwell upon this subject, for it is one that is fraught with pain. Suffice it to say, that he persecuted me for four years, and I—I—became a mother. The child of which he was the father was the only child that I ever brought into the world. If my poor boy ever suffered any humiliating pangs on account of birth, he could not blame his mother, for God knows she did not wish to give him life; he must blame the edicts of that society which deemed it no crime to undermine the virtue of girls in my then position.” (Keckley, I 6)

That is 100% of what Elizabeth chose to reveal on this subject. Now if this had been a modern memoir, written after the #metoo movement, we might have had all the graphic details, and I initially attributed their deliberate absence as Victorian delicacy. However, biographer Jennifer Fleischner gives a different take and that is that slaves had no power over sexuality or privacy. By giving no details, Lizzy was asserting a right that only free women had: a right to own her own story and decide which parts were public.

But we know the name of the man from her son’s military record. And with the name, we can look at the records of the town where they both lived and that is enough to tell us that, yes, Alexander Kirkland was married. Yes, his wife was pregnant when he began raping Lizzy. Yes, he was drunk, violent, in debt, and generally despised. And if that was what his white neighbors and family thought of him, Lizzy’s encounters with him must have been deeply, deeply traumatic.

Improved Fortunes (but Still Enslaved)

In 1842, Lizzy’s fortunes were suddenly better. She and her son were sent to live with Anne Burwell and her husband Hugh Garland. This was all around good: Not only did she escape the terrible circumstances in Robert’s home and neighborhood, but also her mother, aunts and other family members were there too. It was still slavery, but it must have felt like a release from prison. In later years, Lizzy remembered the Garlands fondly, despite the fact that they were her owners. This, in part, is what Lizzy referred to as the bright side of slavery. (Her words, not mine.)

The trouble was that Hugh Garland had a positive genius for not making money. He really couldn’t afford to keep a large family plus so many slaves. And economic uncertainty would always fall hardest on those who were there as assets, not family, and could always be sold

They moved several times, trying out new ventures, none of which went very well. Along the way Lizzy saw new places, some of which had strong free black communities, containing many single black women working for nobody but themselves. Lizzy was watching. Eventually, they ended up in St Louis on the very border between slave and free land. There Garland set himself up as a lawyer, but not a very wealthy one. So Garland proposed to hire out Lizzy’s mother to bring in extra income. Lizzy was appalled. Her mother was aging. Her mother had never worked outside the family and Lizzy knew very, very well what the potential dangers were. Instead, she proposed to hire out herself as a seamstress.

This proposal was accepted and Lizzy went to work. Now this was partly altruism, to save her mother. But this was also opportunity. By hiring herself out, Lizzy would be free to move around the city. She would meet people the Garlands did not know. She would network with a wide variety of people, from free blacks to the pinnacle of St Louis white society.

In the 1840s, men could buy ready-made clothes, but women mostly could not. Women’s clothes were intricate and fitted and the despair of many a home seamstress. As such, the wealthiest women hired dressmakers who would visit them, measure them, advise them on fashion, and return with the perfect dress for every occasion. A single dress could involve multiple visits to get the proper fit. Bodices were meant to fit like wallpaper. Lizzy had learned to do this, fitting dresses on her white half-sisters. And it soon proved that she was very, very good. Her reputation soared among St. Louis’s fashionable ladies.

Lizzy was proud of her skill, her network, and her income. Except that it wasn’t her income. It went to supporting the 17 people in the Garland family. According to her own account, she was the breadwinner of the family (which makes me wonder what Garland was doing at his law firm all day), but Lizzy was obviously resentful when she wrote “the thought often occurred to me whether I was really worth my salt or not.”

The Path to Freedom

It was also during this time that a certain Mr. Keckly, a free black, met her, courted her, and proposed to her.

Lizzy didn’t want to marry. She knew all about slave families and what happened to them. So she needed to be free. Running away would have been easy. Illinois was just across the river. But she’d have to abandon her mother, maybe her son, maybe Mr. Keckly, and definitely a good business. Besides that Lizzy craved respectability. That much is obvious all through her memoir. I might even say that she wanted respectability more than she wanted freedom She wanted legal freedom because everyone agreed she deserved it, not a life on the run because she had stolen herself.

Lizzy asked Garland if she could buy herself and her son. He said no, and don’t ask again. She asked again anyway. He practically dared her to run away, and she refused. All this took guts, knowing the power he held over her. She probably also knew that he was at the time involved in a case about a certain slave named Dred Scott, and he certainly wasn’t representing Scott. No, no, Garland was representing the owner. And if you remember your US history textbook, you’ll know Garland won that one. Scott was declared a slave.

But Lizzy wore Garland down, and he agreed to free her and George for $1200.

Which she didn’t have. Yet.

On the promise of liberty, Lizzy married James Keckly, which was a mistakes, as he turned out to have lied on so many counts. He wasn’t free. He was a slave. He was also a drunk. They lived together for eight years and he was nothing but a burden. As with her teenage years of rape, Lizzy guards her privacy on this subject. We know none of the details.

And what about that $1200? Lizzy despaired of ever earning so much and eventually she planned (with permission) a trip to New York to beg the abolitionist movement for help. To get permission, Lizzy had to get six St. Louis gentlemen to vouch for her, which means that if she refused to come back, they would compensate the Garlands for the loss.

Lizzy had no problem with this. She had been in and out of all the best households in St. Louis. She was known to be scrupulously honest. She got five signatures with no trouble. But the sixth. Oh, the sixth. He agreed to sign. But he did not believe she’d come back. He was sure those abolitionists would convince her that all Southerners were savages and that she could stay in New York without any need for $1200.

Sick at heart, Lizzy walked home without his signature: not because he wouldn’t give it, but because she wouldn’t accept the signature of a man who didn’t believe her. Like I said, freedom was not the only thing she wanted. She would not take it at the price of her self-respect.

She was weeping at home when Mrs. Le Bourgois, a customer, stopped by.

“Lizzy,” she said, “I hear that you are going to New York to beg for money to buy your freedom. I have been thinking over the matter, and told Ma it would be a shame to allow you to go North to beg for what we should give you. You have many friends in St Louis, and I am going to raise the $1200 required among them.”

Mrs. Le Bourgeois was as good as her word. The money was raised and the St Louis Circuit Court recorded her freedom and her son’s on November 15, 1855.

She was free. Legally free. But in her own eyes, she was not quite respectably so because she wanted to pay the money back. Which she did.

A Business of Her Own

All of what I’ve just said takes up the first 27 pages of Lizzy’s memoir. The remaining 130ish pages are about her time in DC. That story is inextricable from Mary Lincoln’s, which is a different episode as far as I’m concerned. So I’m going to skate through a lot so I can focus on Elizabeth Keckly’s story, not Mary Lincoln’s.

Their stories became bound together because in 1860, Lizzy moved to Washington D.C. and set up shop as a dressmaker. Her previous Southern lady clientele recommended her to the Southern ladies in the capital, and she sewed for Varina Davis, wife of Senator Jefferson Davis. But it wasn’t long before the Davises left town for the Confederacy. Lizzy got herself recommended to the new first lady, who liked her and her work and really, really liked fancy dresses.

Mary Lincoln has received generally unfavorable reviews. Lizzy claims that one of her purposes in writing was to elevate Mary from all the nasty things said about her. And she does use nice adjectives: graceful, confident, self-possessed. But if rescuing Mary’s reputation was the goal, Lizzy didn’t do it very well. The Mary in these pages is petulant, jealous, and self-centered. She overspent her budgets, getting herself into tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and stooping to all kinds of deceit and stratagems to hide it from Abraham. This is documented by more than just Lizzy’s account.

Mary alienated most of the society women in D.C. In fact, one woman commented that Lizzy Keckly was the only woman capable of getting along with Mary Lincoln. Both she and Lizzy referred to their relationship as friendship. But it’s a little odd from a modern point of view. Lizzy was, after all, paid for her time. And you can’t help thinking that Lizzy had lots and lots of experience dealing with unreasonable, demanding white women and Mary was just the latest in the series.

But Lizzy doesn’t say that. Instead she recounts how she became much more than a dressmaker. She even nursed little Willie Lincoln on his death bed, and comforted Mary as she sunk into an all-consuming grief.

By this point, her own son George had died, so it was something the two women had in common. George had joined the First Missouri Volunteers as a white man because Blacks were not yet allowed to fight. He died in his very first battle.

Lizzy says relatively little about the death of her son. Fleischner suggests that the circumstances of his birth might have tampered Lizzy’s maternal love toward him and that’s certainly possible. But positioned as it is next to Willie Lincoln’s death and Mary’s two years of mourning, I think it is slightly resentful. Mary could afford to cancel engagements, hold séances, refuse to enter Willie’s room, and sit around sobbing uncontrollably. A woman who had to earn her own living could not. Moreover, Lizzy no doubt drew on the lessons learned when her aunt had been whipped for “looking miserable” after her son was sold away. In a sense, grief was a privilege, and one not afforded to women like her.

Meanwhile business was booming. So much so that Lizzy hired other women to work for her. The Evening Post ran a special on her, saying among other things that “Stately carriages stand before her door, whose haughty owners sit before Lizzie docile as lords while she tells them what to wear. Lizzie is an artist, and has such a genius for making women look pretty, that not one thinks of disputing her decrees.” (Fleishner, 236)

Proving Her Success

She was busy outside of work too. DC was with former slaves coming in as refugees. Not all were as equipped to handle freedom as Lizzy had been. Some imagined freedom for them would look like it had for their former masters. If so, those hopes were quickly dashed as the realities of cold hunger and unemployment set in. Lizzy was soon president of a society that raised money to help these people.

And it is only in this context that what Lizzy calls the “bright side” of slavery makes sense. Over 4 million slaves would eventually be freed. The idea that they were all going to happily repatriate to Africa had been dashed. There was a sense of panic about these people that was not at all unlike the world’s more recent migrant-refugee crisis. Where will they go? How will their needs be met? Will they be a drain on taxpayers? Are they qualified to do any of the jobs we need done? Will they take jobs from other groups? Will they bring disease, crime, and cultural habits we don’t like? Etc., etc., etc.

For a hard-working, successful business owner like Elizabeth Keckly, it was very, very important to show the world that she and other ex-slaves like her were not so traumatized and degraded that they could not contribute to society in a productive way. Instead she had to talk about all the things she had learned from slavery: self-reliance, hard work, a sense of justice, and all that. It’s almost like when you don’t have exactly the qualifications the employer wants so your resume has to show how your experience taught you the same skill set anyway. Well, Keckley is beefing up her resume here, explaining why her past is just as good as yours.

Her Contraband Relief Society was one of several that convinced the War Dept that a Freedman’s Bureau was necessary.

She also applied for a military pension as the mother of a slain Union soldier. This was tricky because George had passed as white to get into the army. Lizzy could not pass. Even worse than that was the 19th century view of illegitimacy and how we never ever admit it. So the pension application maintains that Lizzy, a Black slave, married Alexander Kirkland, a free white man, how he died, leaving her with an 18-mouth son, and then she married Mr. Keckly. This is an obvious and stupid pack of lies, but everybody signed, presumably with a straight face, and Lizzy got her pension.

Victory came at last, and Lizzy was in the crowd watching President Lincoln give a speech, standing alone above thousands of citizens, when she thought, “How easy it would be to shoot him there.” Nor was she the only one to think so. John Wilkes Booth was in the same crowd.

In the weeks after the assassination, Lizzy was one of the few Mary would see as she collapsed back into grief and fear. Mary begged her to come away from DC with her, which Lizzy did do for a time. But the fact was that her business was in DC, and Mary could not afford her.

Lizzy was doing well enough that she not only visited the Garlands, but also had one of the Garlands visit her. And it is with obvious satisfaction that she points out that she was now financially better off than they were. One can’t help wondering if that is not another motive behind writing her memoir. She was absolutely worth her salt and then some.

Mary Tood Lincoln and an Infamous Book

For two years, Mary and Lizzy exchanged letters. Mary never cheered up and grew increasingly frantic about her financial situation. Finally she decided that she must sell her many, many boxes of fancy dresses. And who better to help her with this project than Elizabeth Keckly?

They decided New York was the best place for selling. Lizzy had to close her business in DC to go, but she did it because she felt a great deal of loyalty to both the Lincolns.

The project set off badly from the start. When Lizzy arrived, the hotel would not give her a nice room on the floor where Mrs Clarke (aka Mary) was staying. Mary, bless her, was indignant about the racism. So they both moved up to the servants quarters. But Mary had already eaten, and it was Lizzy who was not allowed to eat in the hotel’s restaurant and she who went hungry.

Mary wanted anonymity. (She’d already been the focus of an enormous amount of bad press.) But she also wanted deference a high prices for what she had to sell. The two desires were really not compatible. Mary fell in with a couple of brokers who thought her best chance was to ask those prominent men who owed their positions to Abraham. That might have been all right except that the letters were threats: Pay up or we’ll tell the world you only have your position because you paid the Republican party for it and wouldn’t help Abraham Lincoln’s widow when she needed it.

Lizzy hung around anxiously advising Mary to use the mildest language possible. But nothing materialized. Even the expenses of the trip involved borrowing from the brokers. Finally, Mary agreed to put her dresses up for public exposition. She herself went back to Chicago, leaving Lizzy and the brokers to manage things.

The public reaction was uniformly negative: the prices were too high, the dresses were torn and stained, and they were all too low-cut. Mary was vulgar, greedy, unprincipled, etc.

The fact was it wasn’t ladylike for her to put herself in the public eye. Mary was unwise on many occasions, but in this society really did put her in an impossible position. Women in her class were raised to depend on their husbands, and Abraham was dead. No one had trained her to support herself. Congress had given her some money, but not enough. The estate was not huge and some of it had already passed to her son. And now she wasn’t allowed to sell her assets because it was unladylike. The only thing she was allowed to do, was sink quietly into desperate, unrelenting poverty.

Lizzy tried to help. She sent several letters to the newspapers, correcting their inaccurate accounts of the events.

She also canvassed among her black friends. Black friends were hardly the wealthiest segment of the population, but many were very grateful to Abraham Lincoln and they were willing to help. Lizzy told Mary so, but Mary, ever unwisely impulsive, declined to receive help from colored people. She later changed her mind, but it was too late. Having been turned down initially, they were no longer so keen to help her.

What Mary may not have known was that Lizzy had decided to write a book. Remember Lizzy had closed her business to help Mary, she had now been in New York for months, and Mary could not pay her anything at all. Her own circumstances were deteriorating rapidly.

The book would make money and set the facts straight about this scheme that Lizzy clearly felt had sullied her own reputation as well as Mary’s. And remember, her reputation was very, very important to her. More important than freedom itself. So the book was written to clear herself as well as Mary.

Sadly, this was a huge, huge miscalculation. It is true that in her account, Mary is cleared of many of the worst charges against her. But it showed private conversations in the Lincoln home and worse, it reprinted some of Mary’s letters to Lizzy. The newspapers had loved tearing Mary down. They were just as happy to tear Lizzy down.

One wrote:

“Has the American public no word of protest against the assumption that its literary taste is of so low grade as to tolerate the back-stairs gossip of negro servant girls?” Another said, “What family of eminence that employs a negro is safe from such desecration? . . . Where will it end? What family that has a servant may not, in fact, have its peace and happiness destroyed by such treacherous creatures as the Keckley woman?” (Fleischner, 316)

And another said the book was proof of the dangerous consequences of educating black and Irish working women.

Lizzy was surprised and stung. She knew she was Negro, but she did not consider herself a servant. She was a business owner. Mary was a friend and a customer. She challenged anyone to compare her book with what those very same newspapers had already said about Mary and then decide who had said worse things about Mary Lincoln. Was it because “my skin is dark and I was once a slave [that I am being] denounced? … As I honestly purchased my freedom may I not be permitted to express, now and then, an opinion?” (Fleishner 318). Again, respectability was what she wanted. What she thought she had had. The loss of it cut deep.

Mary read the book, of course, and was also appalled. She felt betrayed by a friend and cut Lizzy out of her life. Lizzy did write to say that Mary’s letters had been published without her permission. That letter may not have reached Mary, but it made no difference. The friendship was over.

Lizzy never really got over the way her friendship with Mary ended. She once tried to apologize to Robert Lincoln in person. He rejected her. Lizzy told some that Mary had eventually forgiven her. But no surviving letter offers the details.

Lizzy returned to Washington. Some of her white customers would not take her back. But she took in apprentices and trained many young Black seamstresses. In 1892 she moved to Ohio to head Wilberforce University’s Dept of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts. But by the late 1890s she had a stroke and could no longer work. Her last decade was spent in DCs National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children. And that address is a something of a commentary on how hard life was for single, Black women. Even when they had a successful career, it wasn’t enough to see them comfortably through their last years. Elizabeth Keckly died in her sleep in 1907.

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Selected Sources

I have two major sources for today. One is Elizabeth Keckly’s own work Behind the Scenes. You can read the full text for free from the University of North Carolina, but the version I used was from Penguin, with a very helpful introduction by William L. Andrews. The other major source was Jennifer Fleischner’s Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly.

The feature image is a photo of Lizzy in 1870, after the publication of her book and after her subsequent fallout with Mary. Source: Wikimedia Commons.