While noodling on the internet one day, I came across an article about Mary Lincoln’s personal dressmaker, Elizabeth Keckley. A former slave from Maryland who’d bought her own freedom, Keckley was a master mantua-maker who got herself the coveted position of dressmaker to the president’s wife. There was a little link at the bottom of the article about Keckley’s memoir, and it was too enticing to pass up. Happily, even though it was published in 1868, my library had a copy of it! The […]