. >> who is elizabeth keckly? >> she is another fascinating women. elizabeth, it turns out, ended up being the best friend of mary lincoln. elizabeth's history is one of amazing serendipitous encounters. for example, this is a black woman who grew up in missouri, who was a slave, and was eventually able to buy her freedom. she had very good skills as a seamstress and a dressmaker. just to give a sense of her historic encounters, the individual who she was enslaved to was one of the lawyers who argued the dread scott decision before the supreme court, the 1857 cred scott decision, the most important supreme court ruling before the civil war regarding slavery. it basically said that slavery can exist anywhere in the country. it upset what had been this delicate balance going back to the 1820's of bringing in one slave state and one free state to try to dampen down the tensions between the -- that was in the country. but the tensions were still growing dread scott and his wife were to individuals who had spent time in a free state and they argued that th