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

In 1862, a formerly enslaved woman from Virginia walked into the White House carrying a needle and thread. Within months, she would become Mary Todd Lincoln's most trusted confidante, the woman who dressed the First Family during the Civil War and witnessed history from inside the mansion's private rooms. Elizabeth Keckley's memoir is the only surviving account written by a Black woman who lived inside the Lincoln White House, and its candor scandalized the nation when it was published in 1868. Keckley writes of her childhood in Virginia, ripped from her mother at fourteen and sold to a series of owners. She describes her grueling path to freedom, working as a dressmaker in Washington D.C. and eventually purchasing not only her own liberty but her son's. The book reveals the Lincolns in moments of private grief and political desperation, offering a perspective no historian could fabricate. This is essential American history told in a voice that was never supposed to exist.