Elizabeth Keckley Publishes Memoir of Life with the Lincolns

Elizabeth Keckley, who had purchased her own and her son's freedom, became Mary Todd Lincoln's personal dressmaker and confidante in the White House, and in 1868 published her memoir Behind the Scenes, or Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House. The book was an extraordinary account of life at the highest levels of American power from the perspective of a Black woman, and remains an invaluable historical document.