Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House

by Elizabeth Keckley

Overview

2017 Reprint of 1868 Edition. An autobiographical narrative, Behind the Scenes traces Elizabeth Keckley's life from her enslavement in Virginia and North Carolina to her time as seamstress to Mary Todd Lincoln in the White House during Abraham Lincoln's administration. It was quite controversial at the time of its release--an uncompromising work that transgressed Victorian boundaries between public and private life, and lines of race, gender, and society.

Keckley's first 30 years were spent as a slave, and the cruelties and injustices of her life are related clearly and succinctly. This enlightening memoir recounts how she was beaten and how she became a dressmaker to support her master and his family, how determined she was to purchase freedom for herself and her son, how her friends in St. Louis came to her aid, how she became Mary Todd Lincoln's dressmaker and close friend, and her perspectives and experiences from her inside view of Lincoln's White House. Keckley emerges as a calm and confident person who speaks of a very tumultuous period of American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195060843
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	12/01/1989
Series:	Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers Series
Edition description:	REPRINT
Pages:	404
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 4.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Keckley (1818-1907) was a former slave turned successful seamstress who is most notably known as being Mary Todd Lincoln's personal modiste and confidante, and the author of her autobiography, Behind the Scenes Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. Mrs. Keckly utilized her intelligence, keen business savvy, and sewing and design skills to arrange and ultimately buy her freedom (and that of her son George as well), and later enjoyed regular business with the wives of the government elite as her base clientele. After several years in St. Louis, she moved to Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1860, where she had the country's most elite women of the time requesting her services. Through shrewd networking and hard work, she ended up making gowns and dresses for more notable wives such as Mrs. Varina Davis, wife of Jefferson Davis, and Mrs. Mary Anne Randolph Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee. Of all her clients, she had the closest and most long-standing relationship with Mary Todd Lincoln, devoting many of her days during Abraham Lincoln's administration to being available to her and the First Family in a myriad of ways.

Table of Contents

Preface		11	(6)
CHAPTER I. Where I was born		17	(14)
CHAPTER II. Girlhood and its Sorrows		31	(12)
CHAPTER III. How I gained my Freedom		43	(20)
CHAPTER IV. In the Family of Senator Jefferson Davis		63	(13)
CHAPTER V. My Introduction to Mrs. Lincoln		76	(15)
CHAPTER VI. Willie Lincoln's Death-bed		91	(20)
CHAPTER VII. Washington in 1862-3		111	(16)
CHAPTER VIII. Candid Opinions		127	(12)
CHAPTER IX. Behind the Scenes		139	(17)
CHAPTER X. The Second Inauguration		156	(22)
CHAPTER XI. The Assassination of President Lincoln		178	(23)
CHAPTER XII. Mrs. Lincoln leaves the White House		201	(27)
CHAPTER XIII. The Origin of the Rivalry between Mr. Douglas and Mr. Lincoln		228	(10)
CHAPTER XIV. Old Friends		238	(29)
CHAPTER XV. The Secret History of Mrs. Lincoln's Wardrobe in New York		267	(65)
Appendix--Letters from Mrs. Lincoln to Mrs. Keckley		332