Elizabeth Keckley

Elizabeth Hobbs was born in February 1818 at Dinwiddie County, Virginia, the daughter of Agnes Hobbs — an enslaved Black household worker on the Armistead Burwell plantation — and Armistead Burwell, the white plantation master who is recorded in her 1868 memoir as her biological father.

She was apprenticed in childhood to the principal Virginia plantation household-dressmaking tradition of her mother — and was sold at fourteen to the Burwell son Robert Burwell of the Hillsborough, North Carolina household.

She was relocated in 1847 with the Burwell family to Saint Louis, Missouri — and supported the principal Burwell household of approximately seventeen members across the late-1840s and 1850s through her commercial dressmaking practice for the principal Saint Louis white aristocratic household community.

She purchased her own freedom and the freedom of her son George from the principal Burwell estate on the thirteenth of November 1855 — for twelve hundred dollars raised through her Saint Louis dressmaking practice and contributions from her white Saint Louis clientele.

She relocated to Washington, D.C. in 1860 — and was hired in March 1861 by Mary Todd Lincoln as principal modiste to the Lincoln White House. She held the principal Lincoln White House modiste position from March 1861 to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln on the fifteenth of April 1865.

She produced across the four years at the Lincoln White House approximately fifteen principal Mary Todd Lincoln state gowns — including the principal inaugural ball gown of March 1865.

She founded the principal Contraband Relief Association at Washington, D.C. in 1862 — the principal Black charitable association for the principal Civil War contraband-slave-and-freed-Black-refugee community at Washington — and held the principal Contraband Relief Association presidency from 1862 to 1868.

She published the principal 1868 memoir Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House at the principal G. W. Carleton publishing house at New York — the principal first published Black-American memoir of the Lincoln White House period.

She was named in 1892 the head of the principal Wilberforce University Department of Sewing and Domestic Science at Xenia, Ohio — and held the principal Wilberforce department head position from 1892 to 1898.

She died at the Home for Destitute Women and Children at Washington, D.C. on the twenty-sixth of May 1907 of complications of a stroke, at eighty-nine.

She is honored here as the modiste of the Lincoln White House and the author of Behind the Scenes.