According to American quilt historian Ruth Finley, this quilt was made by Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley from scraps of Mary Todd Lincoln's dresses. Mrs. Keckley, an African-American, was Mrs. Lincoln's dressmaker and, while living in a boarding house in Washington, taught dressmaking to African-American women. She went on to teach Domestic Art in 1892 and 1893 at Wilberforce University in Ohio, the nation's oldest, private African-American university, before suffering from a stroke that ended her teacher career.  Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley had previously bought her freedom with money earned by dressmaking.

For an outside link on Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley, see the Web site of the University Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  A digitized copy of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckley's book, Behind the Scenes, or, Thirty years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (New York: G. W. Carleton & Co., Publishers, 1868), can be found on their "Documenting the American South" Web site at http://docsouth.unc.edu/keckley/menu.html.