Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker Quotes

“She would almost prefer to fold her arms and sink into an eternal slumber, so that the great longing of her soul for peaceful rest would at last be gratified.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Mr Lincoln suggested that the Lord sent us this terrible war as punishment for the offense of slavery and that the war may be a mighty scourge to rid US of it”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Then it occurred to her (Elizabeth Keckley) that if Tad (Lincoln’s son) had been a colored boy rather than the son of a president, and a teacher had found him so difficult to instruct, he would have been ridiculed as a dunce and held up as evidence of the inferiority of the entire race. Tad was bright; Elizabeth knew that well, and she was sure that with proper instruction and hard work, a glimmer of his father’s genius would show in him too. But Elizabeth knew many black boys Tad’s age who could read and write beautifully, and yet the myth of inferiority persisted. The unfairness of the assumptions stung. If a white child appeared dull, the entire race was deemed unintelligent. It seemed to Elizabeth that if one race should not judged by a single example, then neither should any other.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“And of course you believed their wise counsel," said Elizabeth lightly, "because people who have never met me are always the best judge of my character.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“It is good to find comfort in memories,” Mr. Fry said gently.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Don’t worry, Mother, because all things will come out right. God rules our destinies.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“The Moses of her people had fallen in the hour of his triumph. His tragic death was all the more heartbreaking because he had not lived to enjoy the peace he had toiled so long to achieve.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“If a white child appeared dull, he and he alone was thought to suffer from a lack of intelligence or a deficient education, but if a colored boy appeared dull, the entire race was deemed unintelligent.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Good people with strong convictions could overturn any injustice if they simply refused to quit.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“They who had already crossed the river into the land of freedom were obliged to turn and offer a hand to those who were taking their first tentative steps upon the shore, and Elizabeth resolved to do exactly that.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Women employees were reportedly hired for their personal attractions rather than their skills, and several young ladies claimed that they were refused employment until they yielded to the passionate embraces of the superintendent of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“In the midst of her bereavement, Elizabeth found comfort in a heartfelt, compassionate letter from Mrs. Lincoln and from the gentle kindness of Virginia, Walker, and Emma, whose eyes brimmed with tears when she told Elizabeth she wished she would have known her fine, heroic soldier. For a brief moment, Elizabeth allowed herself to imagine George and Emma meeting, falling in love, marrying, raising children—but then she banished such thoughts forever. He had died a free man. That much, at least, she had done for her son.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Her greatest legacy could not be measured in garments or in words, but in the wisdom she had imparted, in the lives made better because she had touched them.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“The sublimity of witnessing the ruler of a mighty nation turning to Holy Scripture for comfort and courage, and finding both in his darkest hour, brought tears to her eyes, and she was obliged to quickly compose herself before returning to Mrs. Lincoln’s side.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“the license that, like all free Negro females over the age of fourteen, Elizabeth was required to obtain within thirty days of her arrival if she wished to remain in the city.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“anguished grieving. To Elizabeth Mrs. Lincoln”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“And Richmond is my home. I can't leave."
"But it will be so hard for colored folks in the South when the war is done."
Martha managed a smile. "It's always been hard, and we've always gotten by.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“It may without exaggeration be said today that we are having something of an excitement.'

[New York Times Baltimore correspondent, reporting on Maryland's declaration of a state of emergency as Confederate troops threatened Baltimore and Washington, D.C.]”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Never in her life had Elizabeth known a more peculiarly constituted woman.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union,” he wrote, “and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“On August 14, the president received a delegation of Negro leaders at the White House and made his case for the colonization of freed slaves in Africa or Central America. The presence of the colored race on the American continent had caused the war, the president asserted, and enmity between races was certain to persist after the conflict was resolved. Even when they ceased to be slaves, the colored race would never be equal to the white, and thus it would be better for both if they were separated.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: Dutton, 1942). Of course, no work was more important than Elizabeth Keckley’s own memoir, Behind the Scenes (New York, G. W. Carleton & Company,”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1987); Joan E. Cashin, First Lady of the Confederacy: Varina Davis’s Civil War (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006); Catherine Clinton, Mrs. Lincoln: A Life (New York: HarperCollins, 2009); Daniel Mark Epstein, The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage (New York: Ballantine Books, 2008); Jennifer Fleischner, Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave (New York: Broadway Books, 2003); Ernest B. Furgurson, Freedom Rising: Washington in the Civil War (New York: Knopf, 2004); Becky Rutberg, Mary Lincoln’s Dressmaker: Elizabeth Keckley’s Remarkable Rise from Slave to White House Confidante (New York: Walker and Company, 1995); Justin G. Turner and Linda Levitt Turner, Mary Todd Lincoln: Her Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E.”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearth-stone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.” Knowledge”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“Lincoln turned away from her husband with a look of offended dignity, but before”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker

“of her husband’s cabinet, who had their own ideas for the president’s social calendar. The worst conflict, and the most upsetting for Mrs. Lincoln, was with John George Nicolay, the president’s personal secretary, who was charged with the responsibility of arranging state dinners. Single-minded in her resolve”
― Jennifer Chiaverini, Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker