Was former slave her true friend?

MRS. LINCOLN AND MRS. KECKLY: THE REMARKABLE STORY OF THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN A FIRST LADY AND A FORMER SLAVE

By Jennifer Fleischner

Broadway, $26, 372 pages, illus.

REVIEWED By ERIN MENDELL

The “remarkable story” of the relationship between Mary Todd Lincoln and her dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckly, turns out to hardly be a story at all, as the two don’t meet until Page 202 of Jennifer Fleischner’s account.

That’s not to say Miss Fleischner’s story isn’t compelling or that Keckly’s life alone isn’t remarkable. At the very least, “Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly” gives a voice to a largely forgotten former slave whose remains lie in an unmarked grave. But it also weaves an interesting narrative out of the well tread biographical ground of the former first lady.

From her early childhood, Keckly used her talent as a seamstress to her advantage, eventually buying freedom for herself and her son and building a dressmaking business that brought her to the White House. Her rise is difficult to explain without acknowledging the class distinctions within the black community at the time, a nuance to which Miss Fleischner pays less-than-due attention. Keckly’s lighter skin gave her an edge over field hands, and she worked in the slave owner’s home, where she received the education that allowed her to develop her ambitions.

Those ambitions carried her into a world foreign to those she grew up with, one in which she had access to the president and membership at an elite Washington church where the other congregants were also light-skinned.

Several years after Keckly had been freed, President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation liberated a population of blacks who were still mentally encumbered by slavery and who struggled to understand the idea of working for wages. Keckly attempted to help them, and in doing so, she must have felt torn between her world and theirs, but that ground goes largely uncovered by Miss Fleischner.

Lincoln, the other half of Miss Fleischner’s story, grew up in a household similar to Keckly’s but in the position of master rather than slave. She had her own ambition — to get to the White House. Brought up to attach her identity to her husband’s, she said she would one day be first lady. She was depressed, moody and difficult. Once in the White House, she found herself unpopular and a detriment to her husband’s reputation.

The friendship that emerged between Lincoln and Keckly — and Miss Fleischner spends a great deal of time proving that a friendship did emerge — seems a natural outgrowth of the two women’s lives and personalities.

Lincoln was needy and demanding, and by the time she became first lady, she did not have many women in her life. She even had difficulty communicating with the White House staff. For much of her life, she had maintained unquestioned control over black slaves in her household. In Washington, she was uncomfortable with the white, usually Irish, servants she and her husband employed.

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