Glamour and Innovation: Elizabeth Keckly

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly

(February 1818 – May 1907)

Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly was born enslaved in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. She was the child of an enslaved woman, Agnes, and the plantation owner, Colonel Armistead Burwell. Keckly learned to sew from her mother, and later began a successful seamstress business, creating dresses for high society women in St. Louis, Missouri. Keckly’s business was a success, and through her dressmaking skills and loans from wealthy society patrons, she purchased freedom for herself and her son, George. Keckly’s reputation and skills for dressmaking put her on the radar of First Lady Mary Lincoln, who was a friend of one of Keckly’s patrons. Lincoln and Keckly first met at the Willard Hotel in Washington, D.C. shortly before her husband’s Inauguration. Mrs. Lincoln instructed Keckly to come to the White House the day after the Inauguration, where she hired Keckly. During the spring of 1861, Elizabeth Keckly sewed more than a dozen dresses for Mrs. Lincoln, and the two developed a business partnership that eventually became a friendship. In 1868, Keckly published a memoir, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.