1 - Dressing down the First Lady: Elizabeth Keckley's Behind The Scenes, Or Thirty Years A Slave And Four Years In The White House

Summary

Lizabeth, you are my best and kindest friend, and I love you as my best friend.

Mary Todd Lincoln to Keckley, Behind The Scenes

My association with Mrs. Lincoln … clothed me with romantic interest.

Elizabeth Keckley, Behind The Scenes

“I have been her confidante, and if evil charges are laid at her door, they also must be laid at mine. To defend myself, I must defend the lady that I have served. The world have judged Mrs. Lincoln … and through her have partially judged me, and the only way to convince them that wrong was not meditated is to explain the motives that actuated us” (xiv). With her remarkable, brief invocation of “us” in the Preface to Behind The Scenes (1868), seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (1824–1907) unites her reputation with that of the President's wife in order to stage their narrative separation. More interested in defending her own honor rather than her “imprudent” (xiii) lady's, Keckley must at once claim identification with Mary Todd Lincoln to establish her prestigious place in the White House-hold as modiste and intimate, yet distance herself from the widow's fall from social grace. When Mrs. Lincoln sold her presidential finery and clothes in 1867 in order to pay off her notorious debt of $70,000 to seamstresses, milliners, and shopkeepers, Keckley – as her dressmaker – risked appearing vicariously responsible for the scandal.