Harriet Ann Daves

Harriet Ann Daves was born June 6, 1856, near Orange Courthouse, Virginia, and insisted on being called by both names. Her mother, Mary Collins, was enslaved though she was white in appearance; Harriet Ann said her mother's father was Native American. Her father was Milton Waddell, her mother's enslaver, who never denied her. The family moved to Lexington, Missouri. She remembered a white relative at the big house admiring her curls, and her father sharply telling the young woman that Harriet Ann was his child and as good as she was.

Her father never married; he said that if he couldn't marry Mary, he wanted no one. At the surrender her white grandfather, William D. Waddell, told her mother, "Well, you are as free as I am," and her white grandmother begged to raise Harriet Ann. Her mother refused and cried. Then her mother told Waddell she was tired of living that way, that if she couldn't be his legal wife she would be nothing to him, and left for Leavenworth, Kansas, where she died in 1935.

Harriet Ann learned to read and write in a school the Union opened after the war, and later attended school in Nebraska, from which she ran away to marry Elisha Williams. He brought her to Raleigh and died in 1872, a year after their marriage; their only child died in infancy. In 1875 she married Rufus H. Daves, who had been enslaved by the Haywoods and died in 1931. She lived at 601 South Cabarrus Street in Raleigh and said Lincoln was a fine man, but that freedom turned people out with nothing to eat.