Harriette Louise Lesesne

The youngest of the Petigru children, Harriette married Henry Deas Lesesne in 1836. Already an accountant, by 1840 Henry was a partner in James’s successful law firm. Considered a lax disciplinarian by her sisters, Harriette’s household of six children was still one of the more functional families of the Petigru clan. Despite this, after their eldest son Henry’s death in the Civil War, only three weeks before its cessation, both Harriette and Henry fell into a deep depression which lasted their adult lives. Henry, like many Southerners, had invested heavily in Confederate bonds which were now worthless. He had served as a state senator during the Civil War and as a chancellor in the Court of Equity for three years after, but the rise of Radical Republicanism in the South severed his political connections permanently. The Lesesnes, along with Thomas Petigru’s wife Mary Ann, moved into the Porchers’ converted boarding house for shelter, but the less-than spacious conditions and old family conflicts proved impossible to stand. Henry’s economic fall, coupled with an increase in manic-depressive episodes and heavy drinking, alienated him from his surrounding family. Unwilling to seek treatment for his wife’s declining health, Harriette Lesesne died of congestive heart failure in 1877. The further loss of his sons Thomas and Charles, in 1881 and 1882, coupled with his estrangement from son James and the distant marriage of daughter Leila, led Henry into further alcoholism. He sold most of his possessions to maintain his addiction, and when he died in 1888, had only a $500 annual allowance to pass to Leila’s family.