Keckley’s credit, she didn’t give up on the grieving widow while others criticized the First Lady for her months of grieving. President that ambition has been gratified, and now I must step down from my pedestal.” She once summarized her state of mind: “I had an ambition to be Mrs. Keckley “watched faithfully by her side.”īut Mary Todd Lincoln was practically inconsolable. Keckley was there for the First Lady’s grieving process, Mrs.

Keckley, only to get lost in the process. Lincoln, one group frantically went to find Mrs. Keckley be at her side while President Abraham Lincoln slowly succumbed to an assassin’s bullet.

The Lincolns periodically checked in on Willie who steadily got worse before succumbing to typhoid fever. Keckley, for example, was there the night the Lincolns’ young son, Willie, died, watching over him as the President and First Lady were hosting a reception at the White House. Lincoln’s emotional state, her time with the Lincoln family, and reflections of the bond she had with Mrs. Second, the other part of the book records her friendship and support of Mrs. Keckley’s book suffers from a lack of details about these actions. Although most slave narratives are quite sentimental, describing the many whippings, in great detail, and highlighting the harsh treatment slaves received, Mrs. Keckley’s in even the basics of sentimental and alarming detail. Keckley excuses her “owners’ names” because it would be embarrassing to her perpetrators.Īs a slave narrative, then, the book is only ordinary, with so many competing books on the market, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, far surpassing Mrs. Absent, for example, are the names of her owners. While readers are told of her difficult fight to buy herself and her son, the book is a bit sketchy and limits her readers’ responses. Elizabeth Keckley had suffered as a slave, including her rape and subsequent life as a “sex slave.” She records, to a degree, her indignant and harrowing experiences, including the terrible treatment by her masters and mistresses, and even her half-brother. Lincoln.įirst, it was one of many slave narratives, tracing the injustices that Mrs. Lincoln in her efforts to sell her old dresses.īut it was way too much when her 1868 book, Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House became an expose of her “friendship” with Mrs.

It wasn’t enough when she wrote a book, she said, to support Mrs. It wasn’t enough that she was just a seamstress for Mary Todd Lincoln and became her confidant and best friend. It wasn’t enough that she was an ex-slave and a woman.

Elizabeth keckley book