It is important to remember that Elizabeth Keckly was neither a servant nor an employee at the White House, but someone with an independent business relationship that evolved into a close friendship. Her role, while clearly not political, was part of the atmosphere in which the Lincolns endured multiple political and personal crises with few relatives or friends in the mix. That she became a trusted companion to the first lady, and sometimes a sounding board for the president of the United States, is a testament to her social, political, and cultural skills. Given that Mary Lincoln grew up in a slaveholding and pro-Confederacy family, both women must have traversed complex boundaries as their personal friendship deepened.
Quite apart from her connection to the White House, Elizabeth lived an expansive life and was active on many fronts during and after the Civil War. In the early days of the conflict, she was concerned about the large number of so-called “contrabands” who poured into the city as the war disrupted and fractured the slave system. These were enslaved blacks that attempted to free themselves by taking advantage of the chaos of war. Although escapees were relatively safe in D.C., in the period before Congress abolished slavery in Washington, D.C. on April 11, 1862, it was uncertain whether the Union would return them to their enslavers even if the North won the war. And certainly if the South won or was able to maintain a secessionist status, it would first and foremost demand that its “contraband” be returned.
Group of black “contrabands” make it to a Union camp during the Civil War
As D.C. roiled with all of these economic and political concerns, camps were established to address the needs of these newly free individuals. One camp was constructed on land that would not long after the war become home to Howard University, one of the nation’s first colleges for African Americans.
In response to the situation, in 1862 Keckly founded what was initially called the Contraband Association and then, after the war, the Freedmen and Soldiers’ Relief Association. To raise funds for the Association, Elizabeth traveled all over the United States and even to England. She received contributions from all levels of society, from famous and powerful figures like Frederick Douglass, Henry Highland Garnet, and the Lincolns to unknown and struggling individuals such as black waiters.14
While Elizabeth had her relatively successful dressmaking business to rely on, Mary Lincoln found herself in dire straits after the assassination of her husband. Circumstances rapidly degenerated for the widowed first lady, never popular with the Washington, D.C. political class and certainly stressed and disoriented by the shocking murder. Foremost among her troubles were mounting debts due to irresponsible and unaffordable spending on dresses and other attire during her time in the White House—debts she had kept from the president. In desperate need of money, in 1867 Mary decided to sell her dresses through a New York distributor. Embarrassed by the situation, she called upon Lizzy to act as her go-between as a way to shield her identity and prevent gossip from possibly leaking out that the former first lady was destitute. In a scenario out of a bad spy movie involving fake names and forged letters, the president’s widow and a former slave tried hard to furtively sell the former first lady’s dresses, but in the end they mostly lost money.
That episode created an unusual degree of tension in the relationship. However, it was Keckly’s publication of her book, Behind the Scenes, Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House, that brought about a rupture in the friendship. Lizzy did not inform Mary Lincoln that she was working on a book about her experiences at the White House, which of course involved intimate details about her relationship with Mary. The book also included personal letters that the two women had written to each other, which Mary Lincoln claimed had been published without her permission. While the book was generally autobiographical in nature and offered little political discourse, it was deeply personal. Keckly revealed conversations not only between her and the Lincolns but also between President Lincoln and others.
Many critics of the time condemned the book with racist venom. One New York reviewer wrote, “Has the American public no word of protest against the assumption that its literary taste is of low grade as to tolerate the back-stairs gossip of negro [sic] servant girls?” A D.C. critic echoed that sentiment, writing, “What family of eminence that employs a negro is safe from such desecration? Where will it end? What family that has a servant may not, in fact, have its peace and happiness destroyed by such treacherous creatures as the Keckly woman?”15 Overall, it seemed that opposition to the book was due to the fact that a black woman had written it more than to anything else. Breaking the mold of black women as subservient to whites, Elizabeth had stepped into an arena dominated almost exclusively by white men. The idea that a literate black woman could become intimate with the wife and family of the sixteenth president of the United States menaced the racist worldview of many white critics and incited them to attack her and the book.
What with the political climate in Washington, D.C., neglect of her business due to time spent with Mary Lincoln, and the controversy sparked by her book, Keckly’s livelihood began to suffer. Her business essentially fell apart, and she no longer held the social influence she had enjoyed during her years of access to the White House. Fortunately, she was able to secure a job teaching at Wilberforce University in Ohio, where from 1892 to 1893 she headed up the Department of Sewing and Domestic Science Arts. When her health began to deteriorate, Elizabeth returned to Washington and spent the rest of her life at the Home for Destitute Women and Children, one of several charitable institutions she had helped to found. It was there, at the age of 89, that Elizabeth Keckly died on May 26, 1907—the end of as full and remarkable an American life as there has ever been.
Harshly criticized when it was first published, Keckly’s book had little impact in her time and is still largely unknown today. Most scholars ignore it or give minimum weight to her examination of Lincoln.16 This is a mistake. It is quite possible that she was the closest black person to him during his presidency. Her read on Lincoln is first person, intimate, and genuinely insightful. And it is impossible to find anyone else who was as much in touch with the first lady as Keckly, perhaps even more so than the Lincolns’ son Robert, at various points. While she perhaps broke the unspoken protocol by revealing private communications that had transpired within the White House, she was not there as a servant or staff. She penetrated the inner sanctum as an independent businesswoman and had no obligation to abide by rules meant for those who were White House employees. Her activism also separated her from most other blacks who worked there, many of whom distanced themselves from those who were enslaved, escapees, or poor. Their nonpartisan stance was a necessary part of keeping a good job through changing administrations. Keckly was fiercely clear in her views on race and the policies needed to bring relief to people suffering from the chronic racism of the time. As a black woman who not only survived enslavement but achieved access to multiple levels of U.S. society, her contribution goes beyond the insights she provides on the Lincolns and enriches our understanding of the period’s dynamics of race, gender, and class from a vantage point that has often been marginalized, criticized, and dismissed.
A Shaky Emancipation
The two competing stories regarding Abraham Lincoln’s signing of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, in many ways reflect the ongoing debate about his legacy in the nation’s racial narrative. It is a well-known fact that at the moment Lincoln was about to sign the document, his hand was shaking so much that he postponed the signing. For critics of Lincoln’s policies and his views on African Americans, the Civil War, and slavery, his shaking hand reflected his wavering stance on liberating the approximately four million black people whom whites were enslaving at the time. Lincoln’s enemies, then and now, contend that his faltering at the signing of a document that in fact did not free all of the slaves exposed his real feelings about race relations. Historian Lerone Bennett Jr. argues that “at the last moment, something in him�
�was it his conscience, his unconscious, or his fear of what he called the evils of sudden emancipation?—revolted, and when he picked up the pen to do it, his arm trembled so violently that he stopped, overcome suddenly by a superstitious feeling.”17 He goes on to say that Lincoln had “compunctions,” i.e., regrets and maybe even repulsion at putting his imprimatur on the executive order.18
Lincoln proponents, such as historian Doris Kearns Goodwin—and Lincoln himself—offer a more favorable explanation. They state that his hand shook because he had strained it greeting visitors at the White House all day long, as was the traditional New Year’s ritual. Reportedly, Lincoln told his old friend Joshua Speed that he paused in signing the Proclamation because he did not want future generations to see any shakiness in his signature. Lincoln stated, “If my hand trembles when I sign this all who examine the document hereafter will say, ‘He hesitated.’ Yet, I never in my life felt more certain that I was doing right. If my name ever goes into history it will be for this act, and my whole soul is in it.”19
Lincoln has been the most enigmatic U.S. president, and at the same time the most popular for many African Americans. It was Lincoln’s White House that shattered an unbroken chain of presidential accommodation to the South’s racist demands. The Republican Party was established in 1854 with the express purpose of breaking the political and economic power of the South’s aristocracy by calling for an end to slavery. It would also seek the black vote.20 Forged by defectors from the Democratic Party and the Whig Party, and financially backed by the rising industrial and finance sectors of U.S. capitalism, it foreshadowed the coming split in the country. Relatively inexperienced on the national scene but a compelling writer and debater, Lincoln became the new party’s standard-bearer. The internal rupture between the Democratic Party’s Northern and Southern wings enabled a relatively easy win for the Republican Party in 1860. Lincoln’s election victory triggered the inevitable war that had been a long time coming.
There is ample evidence that at critical junctures leading up to the war, not only did Lincoln vacillate regarding how to address the crisis, his sentiments regarding freedom for black people wavered as well. On October 13, 1858, during one of his legendary senate campaign debates with Stephen Douglas, his opponent accused him of seeking “negro equality.” Lincoln responded by saying, “I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races.”21 It is safe to assume that at the moment these thoughts were expressed they genuinely represented Lincoln’s feelings regarding race and African Americans. In a sense, Lincoln’s stance mirrored that of many who opposed slavery: abolitionist sentiments, even among the most ardent white advocates, often did not include a call for racial equality.
Yet, on another occasion, Lincoln responded to race-baiting by saying, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man—this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position—disregarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”22 These conflicting statements very likely reflect the defensiveness Lincoln must have felt while campaigning for white votes in then Democratic-dominated Illinois and, at the same time, articulating a politics that was more consistent with the progressive dimension of the relatively new Republican Party’s stated objectives.
An unanswered historical question is whether Lincoln actually grew more progressive in his views on race and equality. The statements of African Americans who interacted with Lincoln during his presidency would seem to suggest that he did in fact grow in his personal perspective. This is not to say that he fully discarded all of his racist ideas about blacks, but simply that by the time he was assassinated he was not where he had started. We can study his words and the opinions of those who were close to him, but the accumulation of known information still leaves much room for conjecture.
His policies are another matter. The voluminous record on Lincoln makes it relatively easy to track his less than progressive—or perhaps less than courageous—policy tactics as he juggled the various and often contradictory options needed to win a war, save the union, and irrevocably liberate blacks from enslavement. At one point, Lincoln believed that government-sponsored emigration of blacks out of the country was the best solution to the problem of race in the United States. Lincoln had been a public proponent of black emigration from the United States since at least 1852, when, at a eulogy for U.S. diplomat, scholar, and slaveholder Sen. Henry Clay, he stated that if slavery could be eliminated and the slaves returned to “their long-lost fatherland, it will indeed be a glorious consummation.”23 In 1855, he spoke at an American Colonization Society conference.
Once elected president, he did not surrender the idea. Here again, a debate rages. Lerone Bennett Jr. argues that Lincoln had a “White dream” for the United States and that his colonization project was essentially an “ethnic cleansing plan.”24 Writers such as Robert Morgan and Allan Nevins claim that Lincoln supported black colonization until the day he died. Whether due to his belief in cultural, innate, or political differences, these writers assert, Lincoln never embraced the notion of blacks and whites living together.25 On the other side, scholars such as Michael Vorenberg, Charles Wesley, and Don E. Fehrenbacher have argued that Lincoln’s colonization schemes may have been articulated as part of a larger strategy to sell emancipation.26 According to this theory, Lincoln came to believe, at least until the end of 1862, that only by advocating the expatriation of blacks could he win support from reluctant Northerners and turn the war to save the Union into a war for black liberation.
It is quite possible, of course, that both theories contain elements of truth and are not necessarily in contradiction with each other. At one point in his life Lincoln clearly believed that the races should live apart. Privately, he may never have abandoned this belief. At the same time, he faced the practical reality of ending the war with the nation united. It was a wise and perhaps necessary strategy to advocate black expatriation in order to win support from the North even though it would have been economically impossible to expatriate millions of African Americans.
It is also important to note, similar to the situation that President Obama faces, Lincoln had to balance meeting the concerns of diverse constituencies – northerners who were tiring of the war, radical Republicans who wanted him to move faster on emancipation, African Americans who were fleeing slavery, and even southerners who did not want to leave the Union – with a war that was draining resources, political capital, and morale. It was nearly impossible to force a timetable that could meet all the interests that he had to take into consideration as he necessarily had to reunite the nation.
A Historic Gathering
One of the most significant developments during this period was black political access to the White House, including the first meetings at the White House between a U.S. president and African Americans to discuss policy. Seeking support for his project to relocate blacks to Chiriqui, an area in what is now Panama, Lincoln’s Commissioner of Emigration, Rev. James Mitchell, was delegated to bring a group of black leaders to meet with the president.27 It is telling that this historic meeting was not a discussion about the internal revolution that was under way or the emancipation of millions of black men, women, and children, but rather a hard-line sales pitch for the president’s grand plan on black colonization.
On August 14, 1862, as the war raged and emancipation was being secretly planned, Lincoln held a meeting at the White House with five African American ministers. Led by Rev. Edward M. Thomas, head of the Anglo-African Institute for the Encouragement of Industry and Art, the group included John F. Cook, John T. Costin, Cornelius Clark, and Benjamin McCoy. Instead of a thoughtful discussion of a controversial topic—black expatriation and colonization—the meeting turned out to be more of a stern, abus
ive, and patently racist lecture by Lincoln. A reporter permitted to attend the meeting published an article the next day on the front page of the New York Tribune under the headline “The Colonization of People of African Descent.”28 One of the article’s subheadings pinpointed the president’s disturbing reasoning for why the races should be apart: “He Holds That the White and Black Races Cannot Dwell Together.”29
Lincoln explained to the group why separation was desirable:
You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated.30
The president had little interest in hearing the opinions of the black leaders he had assembled at the White House that day. In clarifying the nature of the one-sided meeting, Lincoln dismissively added, “I do not propose to discuss this, but to present it as a fact with which we have to deal.”31 He then seems to hold the entire black race accountable for the Civil War, stating:
But for your race among us there could not be war, although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other. Nevertheless, I repeat, without the institution of Slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence.32
The Black History of the White House Page 16