Behind the Scenes Formerly a Slave, But More Recently Modiste, and Friend to Mrs. Abraham Lincoln Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House

In the recent blockbuster and award-winning movie Lincoln, viewers saw in the White House a mullatto woman who was employed by the Lincoln's as Mrs. Lincoln's housemaid and attendant. This woman was no film-fiction - she was Elizabeth Keckley, who had spent thirty years of her life as a slave before ultimately working for the White House. She was in many ways closer to Mary Todd Lincoln than any other person, during the four years of the Civil War; her story is a part of American history seldom offered, seldom understood. This book, out of print for many decades but again available, tells the personal side of living and working in Washington, but also the struggles of a black woman, both as slave and as free woman, in the turbulent times of the Civil War