Scandalous Book Review: Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly
"I was born a slave - - was a child of slave parents - - therefore I came upon the earth free in God-like thought, but fettered in action." Elizabeth Keckly While looking through my huge pile of research books while preparing this month's series on Presidential scandals, I discovered that I had an advance reader's coppy of Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Keckly that had been given to me by an old friend who has since passed away. Curiously I picked it up and began reading. While Lincoln has long been one of my favorite presidents, I didn't know a great deal about Mary Lincoln apart from the fact that like Lincoln, she was born in Kentucky, and her son had her committed to an asylum several years after Lincoln's death (dramatized in the play, The Last of Mrs. Lincoln). What intrigued me about the book was that it was a dual biography of Mary Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckly, the freed slave who became Mrs. Lincoln's dressmaker and her closest friend. I had never heard of...