Few stories in
Encyclopedia Virginia are more dramatic than that of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly. Born into slavery in Dinwiddie Courthouse, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, during the presidency of James Monroe, by the time that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House in 1861, not only was Keckly a free woman, but she was also Washington, D.C.’s most celebrated dressmaker.
It was Keckly’s talent with the needle that allowed her to buy her freedom and become a leader among the free Black community in Washington. She first found a following among Washington’s elite women after a silk dress she designed for Mary Randolph Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee, was a big hit at a reception for the Prince of Wales. It was a time when upper class women were fiercely competitive about the dresses they wore to balls and teas and receptions. It may seem like all vanity now, the hoop skirts with their ruffles and flounces and the yards of lace and other trim that bedecked the dre
SUMMARY
Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly was born enslaved in Dinwiddie County in 1818. For more than thirty-seven years, she labored for three different branches of the Armistead Burwell family. At fourteen, she began ten years of bondage in the household of Burwell’s eldest son, a minister in Hillsborough, North Carolina, where she endured repeated physical abuse and sexual assaults and eventually gave birth to a son. Sent back to Virginia, she was enslaved in the household of Anne Burwell Garland and her husband, Hugh Garland. In 1847, Garland moved his household to St. Louis. By then a skilled seamstress, Keckly was hired out as a dressmaker to support the impoverished family. After several years of negotiations, Garland agreed to Keckly’s proposal to buy her and her son’s freedom. Keckly married James Keckly, with whom she lived in St. Louis for eight years. In 1860, Keckly left her husband and moved to Washington, D.C., where she established herself as a seamstress to the capital�