![]() ![]() Elizabeth was trained to become a domestic servant like her mother and learned various skills, such as sewing, from her. She grew up believing that her mother’s husband, George, an enslaved worker on a nearby plantation, was her father. As slavery was determined by the mother’s position, Elizabeth was thus born enslaved. ![]() Her mother was Agnes Hobbs, an enslaved worker on a plantation, and her father was Armistead Burwell, the white plantation owner. Keckley was born Elizabeth (“Lizzy”) Hobbs in February 1818 in Dinwiddie county, Virginia. She chronicled that time as well as other aspects of her life in Behind the Scenes or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). As such Keckley had firsthand knowledge about life in the White House during the American Civil War (1861–65). American seamstress Elizabeth Keckley rose from enslavement in Virginia and Missouri to employment as the dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of U.S. ![]()
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