![]() The quietly determined Keckly’s life moved from extraordinary to unique thanks to her groundbreaking 1868 memoir. ![]() She went on to be a successful dressmaker, at the apex of her career becoming modiste and confidante to Mary Todd Lincoln. In 1855, Keckly, 37, purchased her freedom. Louis, Missouri, both home to thriving free black communities. Keckly spent the years 1842 to 1855 in Petersburg, Virginia, and St. That son, passing as Caucasian, served-and died-in the Union Army. When the girl was 18, Alexander Kirkland, a White neighbor, repeatedly raped her, leading to a pregnancy. She was born enslaved to Aggy Hobbs, a mixed-race Black, and Hobbs’s White owner, Armistead Burwell, in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. ![]() Keckly’s painful early times were all too common in the antebellum South. “It is a face strong with intellect, and heart, with enough of beauty left to tell you that it was more beautiful still before wrong and grief shadowed it.” The journalist was describing seamstress Elizabeth Keckly years before Keckly endured her life’s most historic and shattering event. “A smile half-sorrowful and wholly sweet makes you love her face as soon as you look on it,” Mary Clemmer Ames wrote from Washington, DC, in the New York Evening Post in 1862. ![]() Mary Todd Lincoln’s closest confidante was a seamstress born in slavery Elizabeth Keckly: The Black Woman Who Became a Part of the Lincoln Family Close ![]()
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