Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Lieutenant Governor Hamilton and Judge Dejean saw their roles in a different light. Operating within a gap of formal governmental oversight, they tended to settle minor disputes among residents in an ad hoc, heavy-handed, and even authoritarian manner. No regular court proceedings were held in Detroit in the transitional period between French and British rule, but Dejean did assemble a jury of twelve to hear the case of Wyley and Contencineau. Charles Landry, a third suspect in the Abbott & Finchley robbery, had escaped prosecution, having confessed to stealing “some beaver and otter skins . . . in the company of the said Jean Coutancineau.” Landry was viewed as a bit player in the crime. But Ann Wyley, according to Contencineau’s testimony, was the mastermind of the entire scheme. Contencineau testified that “he knew nothing whatever concerning the cash box that was in the storehouse; that he only saw the negress, Anne, who belonged to Messrs Abbott and Finchelay carry a little box into the kitchen, the day after the fire, but that he did not know what she did with it, and the instant later . . . the negress crushed the cash box with her foot and threw it into the fire.” While claiming no personal responsibility for the fire or missing money, Contencineau “confessed, nevertheless, and acknowledged that he stole a beaver skin, conjointly with a man named Landry who was making packs with him for Abbott and Finchelay.” Contencineau also stated that when he carried stolen items (the shoes, cloth, and handkerchief) to the house of a soldier’s wife, he did so at the direction of Ann Wyley who was “afraid that her master was about to look up his trunk.”12

  Contencineau represented himself as someone who had made a mistake in the petty pilfering of furs and knives, but who lacked the premeditation, insider knowledge, and craftiness of his black female companion. Upon further examination in a second statement to the court, Contencineau even suggested that Wyley had planned the fire, placing “some powder in a horn . . . together in a piece of cloth with a piece of tinder” and “while her master was dining” giving the kindling to Contencineau to “place it upon a piece of English cloth” in the storehouse. He stated further that “after the negress had given him the six dollars [from the cash box], the negress threw the box to him and said ‘Empty it and throw it in the fire.’”

  In the scant pages of testimony that have survived the centuries, Ann Wyley is only attributed two lines of speech: a directive to her accomplice to hide the evidence, and her own paraphrased testimony in which she “declared that she had given the four silver dollar to Mr Cenette, one of the paper dollars to Mr Chatelain and the other to Mr C Enfant” and that she “had given three pounds in paper to Jean Coutencineau, which said three pounds he carried to Samuel Denny” at her request.13 Ann Wyley, according to her testimony, was compensating Frenchmen of means with the stolen funds of her masters.14 Could she have been paying down debts, paying for silence, or purchasing the promise of future assistance in an even larger scheme, such as the theft of her own person from those who claimed her and her release from lifelong captivity?

  Jean Contencineau’s attempt to shield himself from the worst of the charges did no good. He was viewed as equally culpable with Ann Wyley. In Justice of the Peace Philip Dejean’s makeshift court, “the prisoners were found guilty only of the trivial offense of stealing property of a total value of about fifty dollars and there was grave doubt whether the woman was guilty at all.” The charge of arson could not be substantiated, as the jury only found circumstantial evidence to support it. The pair was therefore acquitted of the more serious of the two crimes. Nevertheless Philip Dejean determined that the penalty for theft in this case should be death, a decision approved by Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton. The punishment was to be carried out on the town commons (at Detroit’s present-day Jefferson Avenue) on March 26, 1776.15

  The handwritten note scribbled by Philip Dejean on the back page of the verdict in French revealed the tenor of his thinking about this harsh decision: “You shall be hanged-hanged-hanged, and strangled until you be dead,” he wrote of the pair. And then he entered more intimate words directed toward Contencineau, a fellow French Canadian and likely fellow Catholic whom Dejean addressed as “my dear brother.” “You see, my dear brother,” the justice penned on his notice of execution, “that it is neither the jury nor myself that has condemned you to death—it is the law that you violated. It is for domestic theft that you are now going to lose your life. According to the English laws, a domestic who steals a shilling, or the value thereof, merits death.” Dejean impressed upon Contencineau, in words that may have been read aloud, that even if “bad examples” had come from the servant’s own “masters,” Contencineau must “understand that God and the laws will not excuse you, and say with me the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria.”16 Dejean intended to hold the Frenchman accountable not only to the law, but also to a higher power. As a member of the servant class, Contencineau was ordained by God to mind his place in the social hierarchy. Wyley, too, would hang for her crime as part of Dejean’s final judgment, but her soul was not of interest to him, and he penned her no parting words.

  Dejean’s choice to punish Contencineau just as harshly as Wyley points to the quixotic character of slavery in colonial Detroit. This remote fort had nothing like the regimented racial systems of bondage found in larger and older slaveholding communities in places like South Carolina or even New York. A coherent system of laws organizing the practice of slavery did not exist and would never fully take shape in Detroit. The physical isolation and in-limbo jurisdictional quality of the western settlement, which lacked a stable, rationalized civilian government, led to a form of slavery that was fluid and even capricious until its eventual demise in the first decades of the 1800s. In this unusual instance, a white man faced the same punishment as his enslaved, black female codefendant. And the case would take an even more shocking turn when the day of reckoning arrived.

  No hangman could be found to put the condemned Frenchman to death, perhaps due to the extremity of the punishment in relation to the scale of the offense. Undeterred, the justice of the peace devised an ingenious solution. He offered Ann Wyley a gruesome choice in order to avoid her own death sentence. The prisoner “was released and pardoned of the said sentenced judgment of death, by the said Philip Dejean . . . on condition that [she], the said negress, would by herself as executioner, execute and put to death, the above named John Coustantininau.”17 Wyley consented, playing the part of hangwoman in exchange for her life, and according to one source, her freedom.18 If the sinister deal was solely to save her life, it may have been extended in recognition of Wyley’s value to Abbott and Finchley. If the offer did indeed include a promise of freedom, it parallels another example of a French colonial practice of bribing enslaved people with the dearest reward in order to compel them to do the government’s dirtiest work. In the same period in New Orleans, a black man named Louis Congo won and maintained his freedom as well as his wife’s by serving as the city executioner.19 Ann Wyley’s participation in this ghastly affair hints at the desperation of a life lived in slavery, a desperation that exploded into theft, possibly arson, and finally murder.

  According to the historical record, Dejean placed the noose in Wyley’s hand because no one else was willing to undertake the deed. Perhaps this is so. And just as likely, this sadistic form of retribution in which a slave was made to kill her accomplice, even an accomplice who had betrayed her in his testimony, had a secondary purpose beyond utility. Judge Dejean was no stranger to slaveholding. He had personal stakes in the practice, as evidenced by a transaction in 1777 in which a man named Thomas William had sent Philip Dejean a bill “for vending a Negro.”20 Dejean and other Detroit slaveholders would have been familiar with the toxic effects of holding people in chains. They may well have known about the New York slave revolt of 1708 when a Native man and black woman murdered their owner’s family before escaping, or about the larger New York uprising in 1712 when blacks adopted arson as a weapon.21 They would have worried about such aggressive tactics, the stuff of outright rebellion, be
ing taken up by enslaved people in Detroit. Dejean explicitly fretted, too, about the “domestic” nature of this crime. While James Abbott had been contentedly enjoying his evening meal, his servant and slave had violated the sanctity of his storehouse, testing the security of the entire merchant class. Together, these offenders represented a threat of symbolic proportions—not from outside the fort walls, but from within. Dejean’s harshly creative reprisal therefore served as a warning to slaves like Ann Wyley, who might see arson as a tool of self-liberation, as well as to poor whites like Contencineau, who might perceive an interest in common with enslaved people of color.

  On the day that a Frenchman was publicly hanged by a black bonds-woman, poor whites and indentured servants living in Detroit could glimpse, in terror, what their fate might be if they dared collaborate with slaves. As late as the 1940s, the descendant of an old Detroit family still recalled the sting of this public rebuke, writing in a family history that: “On the day appointed the Detroit Common witnessed the degrading spectacle of the Frenchman being done to death by the slave woman.”22 Racial categories linked to social status mattered and were monitored, even on the Great Lakes frontier, where a civil official skillfully deployed this social hierarchy to control the behavior of a class-stratified, multiracial populace.

  Indigenous people fell into a gray area between the racial boxes taking shape in Detroit, categorized as Negro-like if they were enslaved (as designated by the term “Panis”) but viewed as having other essential characteristics that differentiated them from blacks. Unlike individuals of African descent, Indians were members of polities in North America: politically organized groups with military might and economic influence that European imperial powers were compelled to recognize. Pontiac’s Rebellion had failed to capture Forts Detroit and Pitt, but did force the British out of several western garrisons and frighten colonial authorities. In order to improve relations with restive Native groups, British military officials restored the practice of gift giving, and the British Crown passed the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonial settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains.23 Because of indigenous political organization and the essential role of Native hunters and traders in the commercial fur trade market that spanned eastern North America and crossed the Atlantic, it was impossible for American Indians as a whole to be reduced to the degraded category of “slave” and hence racialized as a fixed, inferior caste.

  Some Natives were being enslaved, but others were free individuals of influence. This did not mean, however, that members of the Detroit elite shied away from trying to control American Indians, even those who were free. The purpose of Fort Detroit, dating back to its founding, had been the formation of a military and mercantile post that structured the presence of indigenous people, strategically leveraging these communities as a source of furs as well as a physical barrier to the advance of European competitors.24 After ousting the French from their prize western post at Detroit, the British recognized, with irritation, that the Great Lakes Indians had not been conquered or displaced. They then followed the previous prescription of Detroit founder Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, seeking to keep neighboring Indians amiable and pliable in the interest of building a trade monopoly.

  So even as town leaders made an example of Wyley and Contencineau to enforce control over colored slaves and poor white servants, they also sought to exercise authority over free Native people who did regular business in town. Most Indians linked to Detroit lived in their own villages but constantly moved through the fort to engage in trade, attend religious services, and socialize with friends and family members. In the 1770s, at least eighteen free Indians attended Ste. Anne’s Church, participating in marriages, baptisms, and burials. Most were identified simply as “Indian” in the priest’s registry; three were described as Huron, three as métis, and one as Iroquois. These individuals would have been connected to relatives whose names were not necessarily listed when a religious event was recorded, making the estimated figure of eighteen a certain undercount. The number of free Native people involved in the church amounted to less than half of the “Panis” slaves there, whose population in the church registry of 1770–79 reached forty-six.25 In a fort that imposed geographical intimacy on its residents and visitors due to its diminutive size and tightly intersecting roads, indigenous people would have made up a highly visible, as well as significant, minority group.

  The importance of the indigenous presence in Detroit was readily apparent in the plan and architecture of the town. Negotiating with Native people was so crucial to the security of Detroit that an Indian Council House would be constructed in 1779, long before the existence of a courthouse or school. The wooden building provided a place for military officials to woo Indian allies, for town officials to talk with Native political representatives, and for merchants to meet with Native traders; it also became the only sizeable social gathering spot beyond the austere Ste. Anne’s. Trader Alexander Macomb, apparently fond of a lively night out, remarked to Lieutenant Governor Hamilton that the Indian Council House, one of few public buildings other than military structures, was “a very excellent house for haranguing as well as for dancing.” Macomb’s offhand remark reveals the dependence of Euro-Detroiters on the secondary, as well as primary, benefits of the “Indian trade.”26

  Indians were essential to the mix of diverse peoples that made up Detroit. Nevertheless, church and civil officials felt anxious about having Indians so near. They balked, especially, at what they saw as the “disturbances occasioned by Indians made quarrelsome by the use of liquors.”27 These liquors consisted mainly of brandy and rum customarily provided to Native people in diplomatic exchanges and traded to Indians by European merchants, a practice that, not coincidentally, often had the effect of bettering terms for whites. In April of 1774, the same season that Wyley and Contencineau robbed the store of Abbott & Finchley, British officials compelled Detroit merchants to limit alcohol sales to just one glass per Indian and to stock all rum in a “general” storehouse in order to prevent trouble. Major firms in the town agreed to the prohibition, including Abbott & Finchley. James Abbott then joined James Sterling, Alexander Macomb, and John Porteous to form a committee charged with penalizing Indian liquor transactions. Restrictions on alcohol consumption became just one way in which colonial officials sought to control Native freedoms.

  Land Grabs in the Shadow of War

  Soon after a Frenchman was hanged by the slave of James Abbott on the orders of the justice of the peace at Detroit, the Continental Congress of the American colonies proclaimed political independence. It was early July of 1776. From Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met, to the colonial population centers of New York and Boston, news of the momentous decision to sever ties with Great Britain and throw off the mantle of King George III traveled by horseback and word of mouth. In the public houses of New York, officers of the Continental Army proceeded to “testify our joy at the happy news of Independence.” When read aloud on July 9 on the order of General George Washington, the potent words of the Declaration of Independence penned by the young Virginia planter and lawyer Thomas Jefferson reverberated across the Philadelphia Commons.28

  While rebellious residents of the eastern colonies readied themselves to defend these words that formally commenced the American Revolutionary War, Detroit merchant William Macomb was otherwise occupied, sealing a stupendous land deal. Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, William Macomb was a slaveholder. Unlike these “founding fathers” of the republic, Macomb would develop his wealth on the riverbanks and islands of the Great Lakes fur trade region rather than in the agrarian South. When William Macomb and his elder brother Alexander strode across the Detroit River’s largest island in the summer of 1776, they were aware of the fate of the black slave Wyley and the French servant Contencineau, and they knew something of the trouble brewing back East. New York traders Phyn and Ellice had complained to the Macomb brothers about the disruption that mounting hostilities were ca
using as early as June of 1775, informing them that shoes on order might not be delivered. “Such is the distressed situation of this Country that nothing can be positively promised,” they wrote. “We are not allowed to send Riffles [sic] out of the Country there are not any servants to be had.” The brothers were likely unaware, however, of the drastic escalation of the diplomatic impasse that led to the Americans’ declaration of independence. The catastrophic impact of a burgeoning revolution had barely rippled through the western populace. Great Lakes garrisons at Detroit and Michilimackinac had seen soldiers transported to Boston via Quebec in the spring of 1775, and some of these men had been present at the Battle of Lexington. But news traveled slowly to the interior, and word of America’s formally declared intention to break from Great Britain had not yet arrived.29

  For the Macomb brothers, the pressing matter in July of 1776 was securing the purchase of Grosse Ile, the largest among twenty-one islands in the Detroit River archipelago.30 In the 1770s and in the wake of increased British immigration following Pontiac’s quelled rebellion, leaders of the Potawatomi, the Detroit-area indigenous group that claimed this island, had been selling several stretches of land to newly arrived residents. These transactions were technically illegal, as only the British Crown held the authority to carry out land transactions with Native people in the West. But British settlers elbowed into off-limits areas despite the Proclamation of 1763. In Detroit, a far remove from effective British political authority, even members of the military participated in and sanctioned illegitimate land exchanges. So on July 6, 1776, two days after the American Colonies declared independence, William and Alexander Macomb signed a parchment contract made of smoothed animal skin. Along with fifteen Potawatomi leaders, who entered their signatures beside exquisitely hand-drawn animal symbols representing their clans, and in the presence of two French witnesses, the brothers entered into an agreement. The contract read: “We the Chiefs and principal Leaders of Potterwatemy nation of Indians at Detroit . . . bear unto Alexander and William Macomb of Detroit, merchants . . . that messuage or Tract of Land known by the name of Grosse-Isle, and call’d in our Language Kitché Minishen or Grand Island, situate, lying, and being in the mouth of Detroit River where it empties itself into Lake Erie.” No price of exchange is recorded in the document. Soon after this momentous, under-the-table purchase, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton gave William Macomb permission to take possession of the island. In 1780, this vague deed would be affirmed as a “voluntary act of the chiefs of the Pottawatome Nation” by the British commander in Detroit at the time, Captain Arent Schuyler De Peyster, who would later marry into the Macomb family. In 1820, Alexander Macomb would defend himself against stories that the Macombs bought the island with “only trinkets,” writing: “I had little to do on that score. We made several purchases of the Indians, which were in a manner forced on us by their importunities. Our influence with the pottawatomies was great & they were the proprietors of the lands below Detroit.”31