Life and Times of Judge Aaron Levisee

 

Few Sandusky County pioneers led a more eventful life than Aaron Levisee. Born in Livingston County, New York in 1821, Levisee moved to Sandusky County at the age of 10. Bright, energetic, and the youngest of 11 children, Levisee was forced to find his own way in the world. He eventually attended the University of Michigan which led directly to teaching positions in Louisiana and then Alabama. Hungering for more education, Levisee came north once more to study law in New York before returning to Talladega where he became head of the Female Collegiate Institute of Talladega.

                                                                   

Judge Aaron Levisee

The following year, he married Persia Willis who had grown up at “Thornhill,” a 2600-acre cotton plantation nearby. After their marriage, the couple moved to Shreveport where Aaron opened a law practice and presented his bride with their new home, also called “Thornhill.” The couple had only one son, Leonidas.

                                                             

 

                             Thornhill Plantation, Talladega, Alabama

Aaron continued to practice law in Shreveport and was elected judge of his district. Although respected by those who knew him, Judge Levisee lost support when he took a stand against the South’s secession movement. Despite his unpopularity he remained in the South throughout the war, eventually serving the Confederacy as an attache to the Inspector General. After Persia’s death in 1862, “Thornhill” served as a Confederate military hospital.

                                                                       

                          Thornhill Shreveport, Louisiana

During the Reconstruction era, he was elected successively as a judge and state legislator from the district that includes Shreveport. Levisee presided over the trial of Ku Klux Klan members who murdered an African American for casting a vote for Ulysses S. Grant in the 1868 presidential election. He assumed his duties as a legislator in 1874 at the height of an armed conflict between Republican supporters and the White League over control of the state legislature.

He served as one of six Louisiana presidential electors during the controversial Hayes/Tilden election. Levisee refused a bribe to cast his vote for Democrat Tilden. But on the appointed December day when the presidential electors were to cast their votes at New Orleans, Levisee and another elector were snowed in at the Red River. It was not until more than a year later, when the Democratic Congress was continuing its investigation of the disputed election that he learned his signature had been forged and then sent on to Washington!

Having lost a second wife during the Civil War and another shortly after marriage, Levisee moved with his son to the Pacific Northwest and then the Dakota Territory. It was here that he again opened a law practice. He also performed a massive work by preparing and publishing an annotated edition of the legal codes adopted by the state of South Dakota. In 1893, Judge Levisee’s life came full circle. He returned to Sandusky County,where he lived out his final years, dying in 1907. The diary, detailing the eventful life of Judge Levisee can be found at the Library of Congress. The original “Thornhill” plantation and the Shreveport estate named “Thornhill,” built for his first wife Persia, still survive.