From Virginia, she accompanied the Garland family when it moved west to St. After the birth of her son, 21-year-old Elizabeth was sent back to Virginia to live with her master’s daughter, Ann Burwell Garland, and Ann’s husband, Hugh. At age twenty, Elizabeth became pregnant as the result of a rape, and her only child, George, was born in 1839. Bingham, ostensibly to subdue her “stubborn pride,” as she later wrote. During this time she endured whippings and beatings from the village schoolmaster, a Mr. When Elizabeth was fourteen, she was sent to live with her master’s eldest son, the Reverend Robert Burwell, and his wife in North Carolina. George Hobbs was parted from his family permanently when his master relocated west. Agnes and George had an “abroad” marriage meaning that except for one brief period of time when George resided on the Burwell property, the family lived apart. Armistead Burwell farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in 1818 to Agnes and George Pleasant Hobbs (although her biographer Jennifer Fleischner asserts that Col. Abraham Lincoln, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (1868).Įlizabeth Hobbs was born into slavery on the Col.

She died in Washington in 1907 at the National Home for Destitute Colored Women and Children.Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley is best known as Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidant and as the author of Behind the Scenes By Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave, But More Recently Modiste, and Friend to Mrs. Lincoln felt betrayed by the woman she described as “my best living friend.” The two women never spoke again, and Keckley’s successful dressmaking business declined. Although Keckley apparently thought her revealing book would help restore her former employer’s reputation, it had the opposite effect, and Mrs. Keckley published her autobiography, Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, three years after Lincoln’s assassination. Army and was killed at the battle of Wilson's Creek, Missouri. It was a remarkable friendship between two very different women, but it ended with the publication of Keckley’s memoir in 1868.ĭuring her White House years, Keckley organized relief and educational programs for emancipated slaves with the help of Frederick Douglass. Keckley became Mary Lincoln’s favorite dressmaker and later her personal companion, confidante, and traveling companion. Her skills brought her to the attention of Mary Todd Lincoln, who hired Keckley in 1861. Born a slave in Dinwiddie County, Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (1818–1907) purchased her freedom in 1855 and supported herself as a seamstress, first in St.

Behind the scenes by elizabeth keckley