Lincoln was later “drowning in debt,” she reached out to Keckley to assist in selling off her wardrobe and other items to raise money.īecause the auctions failed to solicit any funds for Lincoln, Keckley reached out to prominent African Americans for assistance, including asking leaders in the Black church to take up offerings for her former boss. Immediately after President Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, Mary Todd Lincoln sent for Keckley.Īccording to, when Mrs. I know that he is much better off in heaven, but then we loved him so. “He came to the bed, lifted the cover from the face of his child, gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, ‘My poor boy, he was too good for this earth. I never saw a man so bowed down with grief,” Keckley wrote. “I assisted in washing him and dressing him, and then laid him on the bed when Mr. Lincoln after learning their son, Willie, had died in 1862. In the 166-page memoir, Keckley recalls an intimate scene between President and Mrs. first ladies – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and Varina Davis, the wife of President Jefferson Davis.Ī seamstress to both Davis and Lincoln, Keckley practically lived in the White House during the Civil War.īecause Keckley made her close relationships with the Lincolns so public, the reaction nearly ruined the Lincolns’ reputation and almost destroyed Keckley’s life. Keckley detailed her life as a slave who purchased her freedom and then worked in the White House for two U.S. The historical work was perhaps the bluntest and most controversial of its era. “Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House,” by Elizabeth Keckley, currently stands as the 24th most popular book in Amazon’s category of U.S. A Black woman’s memoir published 153 years ago still tops Amazon’s books sales chart.

Elizabeth keckley thirty years a slave