Elizabeth Keckley - Behind The Scenes

Behind The Scenes

In 1867, Mrs. Lincoln, who was deeply in debt because of extravagant spending, wrote to Keckley, asking for help in disposing of articles of value, including old clothes, by accompanying her to New York to find a broker to handle the sales. In late September, they arrived in New York, where Mrs. Lincoln used an alias for the duration of her visit. Keckley attempted to help by giving interviews to newspapers sympathetic to Mrs. Lincoln's plight and wrote letters to friends like Frederick Douglass and Henry Highland Garnet, a highly respected minister in the black church community. The fund raising effort became publicly known, and Mrs. Lincoln was severely criticized for selling clothes and other items associated with her husband's presidency.

Elizabeth Keckley donated her Lincoln memorabilia to Wilberforce College for its sale in fundraising to rebuild after a fire in 1865. Mrs. Lincoln was angry about her action, and Keckley changed her original intention to have the articles publicly displayed for fees in Europe. The publicity and criticism of Mrs. Lincoln strained their relationship, but they remained in contact, although not so close.

In 1868, Elizabeth Keckley published Behind the Scenes, to "attempt to place Mrs. Lincoln in a better light before the world" and to "explain the motives" that guided Mrs. Lincoln's decisions regarding what became known as the "old clothes scandal". She gained the help of James Redpath, an editor from New York and friend of Frederick Douglass, to help her edit and publish her book.

Keckley described her own rise from slavery to life as a middle-class businesswoman who employed staff to help complete her projects. She was claiming a part in the educated, mixed-race middle class of the black community. She emphasized her ability to overcome difficulties and the development of her business sense. While acknowledging the brutalities under slavery and the sexual abuse that led to the birth of her son George, she spent little time on those events. This was in contrast to other women's slave narratives, in which they revealed white men taking sexual advantage of them. Essentially she "veiled" her own past but, using alternating chapters, contrasted her life with that of Mary Todd Lincoln and "unveiled" the former First Lady, as she noted her debts.

Keckley wrote about the Lincolns, in a style of near hagiography for him, but with a cool, analytical eye for Mary Lincoln. Advertisements labeled the forthcoming book as a 'literary thunderbolt' and the publisher, Carleton & Company, joined in by declaring it as a 'great sensational disclosure'. The editor included letters from Mary Lincoln to Keckley in the book, and the seamstress was strongly criticized for violating Mrs. Lincoln's privacy.

At a time when the white middle class struggled over "genteel performance", Keckley unveiled a white woman by the very title of her book, showing what went on behind the public scenes and revealing "private, domestic information involving, primarily, white women." The Lincolns had been subject to criticism as westerners early in his presidency, and Mary Todd Lincoln's anxiety about their position led to her trying to dress right and conduct the White House well. Critics such as Carolyn Soriso have identified Keckley's unveiling of Lincoln as the reason that the book generated such a backlash. A reviewer from the "Cleveland Daily Plain Dealer declared that they were pleased that Keckley's book was published, as it would serve as a warning "to those ladies whose husbands may be elevated to the position of the President of the United States not to put on airs and attempt to appear what their education, their habits of life and social position, and even personal appearance would not warrant." By writing about Lincoln, Keckley transgressed the law of tact. Her relationship with Lincoln was ambiguous, as it drew both from her work as an employee and from the friendship they developed, which did not meet the rules of gentility. People felt as if Keckley, an African American and former slave, had transgressed the boundaries that the middle class tried to maintain between public and private life.

Joanne Fleischner writes of the reaction to Keckley's book,

"Lizzy's intentions, like the spelling of her name, would thereafter be lost in history. At the age of fifty, she had violated Victorian codes not only of friendship and privacy, but of race, gender, and class. Not surprisingly, the newspapers that attacked Mary Lincoln in the fall, in the spring now leapt to her defense... The social threat represented by this black woman's agency also provoked other readers, and someone produced an ugly and viciously racist parody called Behind the Seams; by a Nigger Woman who Took Work in from Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis and Signed with an "X," the Mark of "Betsey Kickley (Nigger), denoting its supposed author's illiteracy."

Stunned and dismayed by the negative publicity, Keckley wrote letters to newspaper editors and defended her serious intentions, which was part of the model of gentility. The uproar over the book subsided, but it did not sell well. The writer Joanne Fleischner has suggested that Mrs. Lincoln's son Robert, who was perpetually embarrassed by his mother's behavior in private life (and would have her committed to an asylum in 1875), did not want the public to know such intimate details as appeared in the memoir. He may have been involved in suppressing the sale and distribution of the memoir.