Distant relative no hero
Clash over Robert E. Lee statue personal for Essex County woman
The fight over removing statues of Robert E. Lee that has the U.S. at a perilous tipping point is not news Elise Harding-Davis watches from the sidelines as a Canadian descendent of slaves.
The man on the horse, the Confederate Army general, is family, if that word can be used.
Harding-Davis’ great-greatgreat-great-great-grandmother Kizzie, or Kessy, is believed to be the daughter of Lee’s father, Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, and a slave which she said would make Kessy a half-sister of Robert E. Lee.
You won’t see it on the many limbs of the Lee family tree unfurled on a glass table in the 70-year-old woman’s living room. She says it’s that pushed-out-ofhistory, non-person part of slavery that makes it necessary to get rid of the Confederate statues.
“Those men, those heroes, stood for an abomination — to enslave people and use them to death for their own personal gain. I don’t believe that’s anybody you should praise or hold up as a hero ... even though he’s a relative. Ask Hitler’s relatives what they think,” Harding-Davis said Thursday from her home in southern Essex County.
It’s a terrible thing to not exist in most people’s eyes, for slaves to have to escape just to live as human beings, she said. What’s bubbled up in the United States is not about statues as much as it is that mindset and white supremacists, she said. She expects the protests to escalate into another civil war.
“This is a war of the races once again,” she said. “Obviously, that has never completely gone away. There are still people who would secede from the United States of America to make it a pure Aryan country, which never has nor will it ever exist.”
And for that, she partially blames U.S. President Donald Trump, with the neo-Nazis and white supremacists who seem to have formed some of Trump’s voting base.
“What he stands for has opened a Pandora’s box to let hate and viciousness rear its ugly head and thrive in the streets of the United States, which is supposed to be the greatest country in the world, the most humane country, a melting pot. Well, it’s more like a boiling pot now, and I think it’s going to end in another internal civil war.”
A plan to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Va., sparked an Aug. 12 protest by white nationalists that turned deadly when a car smashed into a crowd of anti-racism protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. A known white supremacist has been charged with murder and there are now calls to replace the Confederate statue there with one of Heyer.
Since the violent clash, statues across the U.S. have been vandalized, removed or slated for removal, and the heated debate continues.
Harding-Davis was in Virginia in July, at Stratford Hall, the Lee family estate that’s now a museum. It was there that she was handed and saw for the first time a written record of a slave girl named Kessy.
In a list of slaves, like property with values hand-written beside their names, was Kessy, age 5, in a will from 1803. John Lee bequeathed her to his nephew, “Light-Horse Harry” Lee.
It was a thrilling written validation for Harding-Davis. Much of black history is oral, since slaves weren’t encouraged to learn to read and write, so researching black history means researching white history. There in writing was Kessy, the slave who the family’s oral history says is the daughter of “Light-Horse Harry” and mother of Ludwell Lee, who settled in Amherstburg.
There weren’t many Kessys born in 1798 who were listed as slaves at that time, Harding-Davis said. Kessy, listed as Keziah in other documents, likely grew up as a slave in Stratford Hall, the plantation estate where Robert E. Lee was born in 1807.
The elation of finding Kessy was tempered by the grief of seeing the slave quarters.
“It made me cry,” said HardingDavis. “When part of your family have been non-persons, persons without identity, persons without substance, persons without any right by someone else’s standards to even exist. …. it made me cry.”
Her mother’s name isn’t known, nor is it known who owned her — John or Harry Lee. Harding-Davis and her family are looking for more wills in a bid to trace what became of Kessy and Ludwell Lee, who was born in 1818 and came to Amherstburg by 1850, according to census records.
It wasn’t unusual for slave owners to keep their children on the family plantations, even if they didn’t acknowledge them, Harding-Davis said. Slave owners often gave their slave children Biblical or Greek names. It’s interesting that Kessy’s son was named Ludwell, a common name on the white side of the Lee family.
Evidence that backed up Ludwell Lee’s life in Essex County was unearthed in 2011 at Puce Memorial Cemetery when a grave marker for Elizabeth Lee, Ludwell’s wife, was found. Harding-Davis and her grandfather had gone to the Puce Memorial cemetery looking for Ludwell’s grave for years, and although they don’t have his marker, Elizabeth’s stone says “wife of Ludwell Lee.”
Harding-Davis’ daughter, Angelique Davis-Speros, said she’s proud of her slave heritage and her ancestors who survived the often deadly passage to America and slavery.
It’s heartening to see white Lee descendants also wanting the statues removed, she said.
Racism is more subtle in Canada, said Davis-Speros, who lives in Toronto. She remembers a family member asking a bar owner in Windsor to take down a Confederate flag, which he did. That’s a conversation you can have in Canada, but not so much in the Southern U.S.
Davis-Speros hopes Trump resigns or is removed from office.
“He’s given them the ability to feel emboldened and that it’s OK. When he says ‘make America great again,’ I think those white nationalists read it as ‘make America white again,’ and they seem to think it’s their country, even though they stole it from the First Nations there.”
Her mom, an African Canadian history expert and former curator of what’s now called the Amherstburg Freedom Museum, doesn’t ponder the raping of her ancestor.
Family members have talked about getting DNA to prove the link, but she doesn’t care about that. Harding-Davis was once asked why she would want to be related to Light-Horse Harry Lee, since he was a scoundrel. That only proved her point, she said.
She plans to frame the elaborate Lee family tree that a white Lee family member copied for her, but she’ll place a dot beside Robert E. Lee’s branch for Kessy.
“It’s a terrible thing to not exist in most people’s lives. We know we exist. We know who we are. We know where we belong and its needs to be respected. And for a whole other history to be built that totally eliminated us, to give present-day individuals the audacity to think that they can have a oneculture country is just insane.”
Those men, those heroes, stood for an abomination — to enslave people and use them to death for their own personal gain.