Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley was an American seamstress, activist, and writer. She was best known as the personal dressmaker and confidante of Mary Todd Lincoln. After the American Civil War, Keckley wrote and published an autobiography, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House, in 1868. It was both a slave narrative and a portrait of the first family, especially Mary Todd Lincoln, and it was controversial because of information it disclosed about the Lincolns' private lives.