With Malice Toward None: A Biography of Abraham Lincoln

by Stephen B. Oates

Her closest confidante, though, was her Negro seamstress, Elizabeth Keckley. A poised, handsome woman in her thirties, “Lizzie” had suffered a great deal in her life, and yet she wasn’t bitter. On the contrary, she was one of the most dignified and compassionate women Mary had ever known. Born a slave in Virginia, Lizzie had spent more than twenty-five years in bondage and could speak with firsthand authority about life under the lash. She’d seen Negroes beaten and families broken up, had seen a boy sold away from his mother so that the master could pay for some hogs. By the time she was eighteen, she was living with her master and mistress in North Carolina. She was a pretty girl, with a spirit that aggravated many white people. To break her stubborn pride, the village schoolmaster, “a hard, cruel man,” approached her with a whip and ordered her to take her dress down. When she refused, he tore the dress off and flogged her—and then for good measure struck her with a chair. Later another white man raped her and made her his mistress. “I spare the world his name,” Lizzie said, but “he persecuted me for four years,” and she bore his son. In time, a new master took her out to Missouri, where she married a Negro named James Keckley, who turned out to be “dissipated, and a burden.” In 1855, with the help of several kindly whites, she bought her freedom and that of her son. In 1860 she left her husband and came to Washington to live and find employment. Ironically enough, she w...

Elizabeth Keckley…Mary Lincoln's confidante.