Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave.

by Jennifer Fleischner, Broadway Books April 2003, $26.00, ISBN 0-767-90258-0

As Abraham Lincolns' inaugural loomed, his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln prepared to make one of the most important decisions in her tenure at the White House. Who would make sure she was properly dressed for the role as First Lady?

One of Washington's most celebrated seamstresses was already making her way to the Lincolns' temporary quarters the day before one of history's most important figures was sworn in. There she met Mrs. Lincoln and was summoned to appear at the President's house on the first day of his term. As the day dawns, Mr. Lincoln is already grappling with the possibility of attack on Fort Sumter, and his wife is studiously interviewing seamstresses. Lizzy Keckly is dismayed to find she is only one of several waiting to be interviewed, but is chosen quickly after Mary Lincoln learns she had most recently been dressmaker to the fleeing Mrs. Jefferson Davis, wife of the Mississippi senator who would become president- of the Confederacy.

It is not an insignificant meeting for either. Mrs. Lincoln became known as much for her fashion sense as her mercurial temperament and place in history.

"For Mary Lincoln, viewed by capital insiders as a parvenu outsider from the hinterlands out west, securing Madame Keckly's services was the social equivalent of joining the right club," Fleischner writes.

The black woman who dressed her was once nearly forgotten by history but left a legacy in fashion, a biography of her employer Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, published in 1868, and at least one surviving quilt from remnants from the Lincoln dresses

"Without Mary Lincoln, Elizabeth Keckly would not be known today. For Mary Lincoln, it also was an important meeting.... Mary would quickly come to rely on the extraordinary qualities of the woman who stood before her. 'She is a very remarkable woman herself' Mary told her cousin of the freed woman who would become her couturier, friend and confidante.

In this book, Jennifer Fleischner, an Adelphi University scholar who has written several books on women in slavery, presents dual biographies of each woman. She sets them in proper historical context as women and as members of their respective races at a crucial moment in the passages of our nation. One was a Kentucky-born, slave-owning blue blood who becomes wife to a homely country lawyer who shaped and reshaped a nation; and the other was of mixed heritage, born as the property and daughter of a wealthy Virginia slave owner. By the time they meet, Mrs. Keckly has used her dressmaking skills to buy her freedom and rise to the top of free black, entrepreneurial society in the nation's capital.

Fleischner skillfully uses the tools of research and narrative to explore their separate lives and the relationship they built. Through this book she performs a valuable service in breathing life into the story of an important and fascinating figure in African American life.