Biography black history elizabeth keckley
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Born into slavery, Elizabeth Keckley’s story is one of perseverance and ingenuity in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds. As an African American businesswoman and philanthropist, Keckley defied stereotypes and redefined what an African American woman could accomplish in the Nineteenth Century.
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley (also spelled Keckly) was born in February in Dinwiddie County, Virginia. Her mother, Agnes (Aggy) Hobbs, was an enslaved woman on Colonel Armistead Burwell’s plantation. Col. Burwell was also Keckley’s biological father, and it is likely Col. Burwell and Hobbs’s relationship was non-consensual. The Burwells never recognized Keckley’s parentage and frequently beat her as a child. Aggy’s husband, George Pleasant Hobbs, was an enslaved man on a nearby plantation. George was devoted to Keckley and regarded her as his daughter. Keckley, likewise, regarded George as her father. As a form of resistance to enslavement, Aggy gave Keckley George’s last name.
As early a
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This article is part of the Slavery in the President’s Neighborhood initiative. Explore the Timeline
In , Elizabeth (Lizzy) Hobbs Keckly (also spelled Keckley) published her memoir Behind the Scenes or Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House.1 This revealing narrative reflected on Elizabeth’s fascinating story, detailing her life experiences from slavery to her successful career as First Lady Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker. At the time of its publication, the book was controversial. It soured her close relationship with Mrs. Lincoln and destroyed the reputation of both women. Although the American public was not prepared to read the story of a free Black woman assuming control of her own life narrative at the time of publication, her recollections have been used bygd many historians to reconstruct the Lincoln White House and better understand one of the nation’s most fascinating and misunderstood first ladies. Her story is integral to
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Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley is best known as Mary Lincoln’s dressmaker and confidant and as the author of Behind the Scenes By Elizabeth Keckley, Formerly a Slave, But More Recently Modiste, and Friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House
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Elizabeth Hobbs was born into slavery on the Col. Armistead Burwell farm in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, in to Agnes and George Pleasant Hobbs (although her biographer Jennifer Fleischner asserts that Col. Burwell was in fact Hobbs’s father). Agnes and George had an “abroad” marriage meaning that except for one brief period of time when George resided on the Burwell property, the family lived apart. George Hobbs was parted