Elizabeth Keckley: The Dressmaker Who Bought Her Own Freedom

The Fashion Memoir · Oct 12, 2026 · 44m

Elizabeth Keckley was born into slavery in Virginia in 1818 and taught to sew by her mother. In November 1855 she paid twelve hundred dollars for her own freedom and her son's, most of it borrowed from the white women whose dresses she made in St. Louis. Six years later she was the most sought-after dressmaker in Washington and Mary Lincoln's closest confidante in the White House.

Then in 1868 she wrote a book about it, and the book cost her almost everything she had built.

This episode covers the purple velvet dress at the Smithsonian, the Contraband Relief Association she founded in 1862…