Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Whether or not his business associate, Sally Ainse, beat him to it, John Askin was one of Detroit’s first merchants to trek into the marshy wilds north of town. He immediately drew the Moravians into his commercial orbit, offering them credit for provisions sourced in Detroit and becoming one of few white visitors to the mission in 1782. Over the next few years, other Detroiters began to stop by to view the Christian settlement, often traveling by sleigh or “sledge” across sheets of heavy ice that connected the Detroit River to the Huron River by way of Lake St. Clair. Visitors came to take in the sights of the mission, including its 117 resident Christian Indians; they also were keen to assess the valuable lands around the establishment, to set terms of trade, and to have marriages and baptisms performed, as, in the words of Reverend Zeisberger, “there [was] no ordained preacher of the Protestant church in Detroit.” The desire for Protestant religious services was one sign that Detroit’s population was gradually shifting, becoming more Anglicized as British officers, soldiers, and traders put down roots in the former French territory. Still, there were numerous French residents within the fort proper and living on farms alongside waterways, some of whom sold corn to the Moravian Delawares in exchange for venison.33

  In the winter of 1784 British Captains Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott came “with two sleighs” to see the Moravian mission for themselves.34 Both men had accompanied Captain Henry Bird on his raids into Kentucky and come away with valuable African American slaves that they promptly moved across the river after the conflict. McKee, now an official of the British Indian Department, was among the individuals sought out by the slave-hungry Captain Alexander Harrow, who begged McKee for “a wench for kitchen and country work [or] a Black boy or man to dispose of.”35 Elliott, a trader and Indian agent for the British, styled himself like a southern planter with his stolen Kentucky bondspeople. He established a sizeable farm on the Canadian side of the Detroit River where, according to the Moravians, “an overseer and several blacks lived.” Elliott’s “Indian wife” enjoyed the niceties of an upper-class life and lived in a style even higher than that of Oneida trader Sally Ainse. Slaves attended to this Shawnee woman’s needs, and when she was out visiting, the Moravians observed, Matthew Elliott “sent his Negro” to pick her up “with a sled.”36 Trader William Macomb became friendly with the Moravians too, forwarding parcels of “letters and papers from Bethlehem, together with Scripture-verses and texts” for the missionaries. The Moravians surmised that packages from their home church town in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which brought them such “joy,” had arrived on Macomb’s ship.37

  A comfortable farmer named William Tucker was the most frequent British visitor to the Moravian mission. Like Askin, Elliott, and Macomb, he was a slaveholder deeply entangled with Indians. Originally from a Virginia family, Tucker had been taken captive by a group of Ojibwes along with his brother when they were just boys. After killing the boys’ father, the Ojibwe captors adopted the eleven-year-old William and his brother Joseph, eventually bringing the children to the Huron River where the Ojibwes had a settlement. While a young man, William Tucker served as an interpreter at Fort Detroit and worked as a trader for George Meldrum, a Scottish merchant from Schenectady, before returning south to Virginia to marry in 1773. He moved back to Detroit with his wife, Catherine Hezel (or Hazel), and, according to county history, with “a family of slaves, consisting of father and mother and several children.” William Tucker’s Ojibwe friends then bestowed on him a large tract of land along the Huron River, making him one of the first white settlers in the area. As retold in local lore, the acreage William Tucker acquired amounted to “all the land he could walk around in one day.” Tucker built a one-story log house tucked among old-growth trees near the “mouth of the river.” He planted apple, pear, and cherry orchards, kept boats for transporting his crops for trade in town, and “settled on his farm with his bride and slaves.” His route to prosperity followed the usual pattern for European settlers in the Great Lakes region: trade, government work, Indian land, slaves—except that his enslaved labor force was fully black rather than Native.38

  William Tucker made his living as a farmer on Indian land “eight miles down the river” from the Moravians, who were among his closest neighbors. Tucker befriended members of the Christian sect and acted as their advocate in tense conversations with nearby Ojibwes, who began to feel that the missionaries were overstaying their welcome on the borrowed parcel of fertile land. While Tucker served as a buffer between the missionaries and local Indians, he also found that he needed the help of Moravian Delawares. In 1783, Tucker came to the mission with his wife, Catherine, asking “for an Indian sister to be at the lying-in of their negro woman.” This unusual request revealed not only the expertise of Delaware women as midwives but also the everyday proximity of diverse peoples on the waterways: Europeans of different backgrounds, Native people of various ethnicities, and enslaved African Americans from the South. As the Reverend Zeisberger would record in the mission diary, whites as well as blacks began to attend Moravian services in the 1780s.39 One of these attendees of African descent may well have been the woman on the verge of giving birth on Tucker’s farm in 1783.

  Events that unfolded at the Tucker family homestead are hazy, yet pivotal to the larger story of slavery in Detroit. The enslaved woman who gave birth in 1783 with the aid of a Delaware woman was most likely Hannah Denison, mother of the first African American family to file a freedom suit in Michigan. The conflicting nature of limited evidence makes the Denison family’s origins difficult to reconstruct. According to probate records, William Tucker owned one black family upon his death in 1805: Hannah Denison, her husband Peter Denison, and their four children: Elizabeth (Lisette), James, Scipio (Sip), and Peter Jr. Local oral history conducted by the historian Isabella Swan in the 1960s suggests that the first child in the family, a girl called Judy, was not listed in this official record. Slaveholder Catherine Tucker would later report that William Tucker had purchased Hannah in 1780 from “Joseph Mantour” at Detroit and bought Peter for “three hundred pounds” in 1784 from “Mr. Paulding,” also in Detroit.40 After Peter’s arrival, Hannah and Peter coupled. If there was indeed a first baby within the Denison family whose name was left off the record, she may have been the child born with the aid of a Delaware midwife in 1783. The identity of this child’s father is not noted in any source. The spare existing record only reveals a description of Hannah’s owner, William Tucker, rushing to the Moravians’ farm for assistance with the delivery. The secret of the infant’s father may have been intimately known to him and, on an isolated farm, to his wife.

  Catherine Tucker’s record of the purchase of Hannah and Peter Denison tied the members of this couple to two different routes into slavery. Hannah had been sold by the Montours, in-laws of the Oneida trader Sally Ainse, and she may even have briefly belonged to Ainse.41 Hannah was therefore a woman who had lived among Native and French people and whose own family history may have stretched back multiple generations in the Great Lakes, tracing to Montreal, Quebec or some other northern urban locale.42 Peter Denison, in contrast, came from a black family not many generations removed from the Upper South. County histories of the Tuckers trace the origins of the family they owned back to a purchase in Virginia before the Revolutionary War. This information is revealing, but not in the way that it at first seems. Based on a wildly expansive 1609 charter from King James I, the colony of Virginia claimed as part of its territory lands stretching past Lake Michigan. Since Virginia “held” this land until the Treaty of Paris concluded the Revolutionary War, enslaved people born in the Michigan region could, technically, be defined as having been born in Virginia. Peter Denison may have been “Virginia-born” right in Detroit with parents who had been seized from the South. William Macomb of Detroit had among his slaveholdings a man named Scipio, valued at £130, and a woman named Lizette, “Wife of Scipio,” valued at £80. It cannot be coincidental that this man and woman bear the names of two of th
e Denison children in such a small community. The elder Scipio and Lizette were likely captured in southern raids during the war and acquired by William Macomb. They then had Peter, who was later sold to Tucker by a man named Paulding, a broker or subsequent owner.43 The origin of Peter’s surname is unclear. Perhaps his parents carried the name from the South (though Macomb’s records do not state as much), as “Denison” does trace back to Scots-Irish settlers in southwestern Virginia.44 While Hannah had compulsory ties to a French-Native slaveholding circle, Peter came from a British household in which his southern parents were held as slaves. The range in the couple’s backgrounds, together with the wide network of people their lives had touched, broadened their combined experience as well as their social connections, positioning them to face a future of drastic change.

  The Denisons were essential to the smooth operation of William and Catherine Tucker’s farm. While Hannah handled all manner of domestic and gardening chores, as well as helping to care for the Tucker children, Peter performed agricultural and manual labor. Peter may also have honed specialized carpentry and boating skills of the kind evidenced by John Askin’s enslaved men, Pompey and Jupiter Wendell. Peter probably rowed Tucker’s boats to deliver wheat and fruit to Detroit, affording mobility that allowed for the maintenance of ties with relatives on the Macomb farm. The Denisons were likely conversant in local Native languages, including bits of Anishinaabemowin spoken by the Ojibwes who originally owned Tucker’s farm as well as Delaware spoken by the Moravian Indians. Hannah probably spoke French. Hannah and Peter’s children would have been linguistically adept by necessity, growing up as the only slaves on a large farm among a diverse population in the Indian country outside Detroit.45 As a young black couple with multiple skills and cross-cultural literacy, the Denisons were well known, highly valued, and frequently sought after. During the time that William Tucker owned the pair, Captain Alexander Harrow angled to buy them, writing in his journal that he had asked if Tucker “would sell his negro man and woman and at what price for the whole.”46 Years later, Tucker’s neighbor across the Detroit River, Matthew Elliott, would also try to claim the Denisons as his property. The Denisons clearly possessed ample talents, which would prove consequential when the town of Detroit finally succumbed to American territorial rule.

  Postwar Land Dispossession

  After the Peace of Paris was signed and the war formally closed, the Ojibwes on whose land the Moravians lived intensified their complaints about the arrangement. They had agreed to host the newcomers while hostilities ensued and had continued to access the Huron River lands for hunting during that time, sometimes leading to tense competition for game with the Moravian Delawares. But now that the war was over, Ojibwe leaders pressured the Moravians to pack up their things and move on. Reverend Zeisberger was anxious about the increasing pressure, imagining that certain Detroit merchants who wished to become “masters of our settlement” were “the real instigators of the Chippewas” and using the Indians “as tools.” While Zeisberger’s hunch about merchant land lust was accurate, he too easily dismissed the Ojibwes’ own motives. In January of 1786, Ojibwe leaders warned the missionaries that this was Ojibwe land, and the settlers must depart. When the governor at Detroit advised the missionaries that prudence suggested they heed this warning, the Moravians relocated, with reluctance, to Chatham, Ontario.47

  The contest north of Detroit between the Moravians and local Ojibwes was a microcosm of larger tensions still at play in the decades after the Revolution. Native nations that had been yanked into a devastating colonial war refused to accept the outcome. Many lake country bands had sided with the British, who had been less preferable than the French but better than the Americans when it came to the protection of Indian lands. At the close of the war, the British surrendered to the Americans, whose rising power the western tribes witnessed with a stubborn rage. Native Americans recognized that with the defeat of the British, “a new era had begun.” And this transformation worked to the detriment of indigenous land claims and political independence. Groups of Indian warriors in the Great Lakes as well as in the South refused to recognize American authority in their own homelands. They led attacks on settler settlements, continuing the revolutionary fight—this time for their own nations’ liberty.

  Native people’s discontent with the shifting balance of power in North America cut into commercial transactions in Detroit. Due to overhunting and some Native men’s focus on attacking American settlements rather than hunting, the number of available pelts plummeted. Deteriorating living conditions worsened economic trials resulting from the scarcity of furs. The winter of 1784 proved relentless, described by “Old settlers” as the hardest they had ever seen. Poor crop yields and famine in 1784, 1787, 1788, and 1789, as well as a scourge of smallpox in 1785 and “pestilence and sickness” in 1789, wreaked more havoc, taking the lives of numerous Detroit River residents.48

  President George Washington and U.S. leaders in the East grew alarmed at the recalcitrance of Native people in the West, who far outnumbered white settlers in the interior and were organized as well as armed. The Moravian missionaries continued to observe developments from their new settlement on the other side of the river, recording the stealthy advance of American soldiers into the country. In 1791 Zeisberger wrote, “From Capt. Elliott, who came from Detroit, we learned that they had news that a strong army from the States was on the march out against the Indians.” In 1793 he recorded “news that those at Detroit fear the Americans under Gen. Wayne might attack.”49 Led by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, American soldiers were tasked with crushing Native military resistance, which had coalesced into a confederated, pan-Indian force centered in the Ohio Valley. In August of 1794, Wayne and his men defeated Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Iroquois fighters, whose ranks had been depleted by long-distance travel and hunger.50 One year later, in August of 1795, representatives of seventeen western Indian bands and nations signed the Treaty of Greenville with the United States. The treaty called for Native relinquishment of massive swaths of land in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, including “the post of Detroit, and all the land to the north, the west and the south of it.” This left little else in the way of Indian land in Detroit, and those portions remaining would be taken by 1807. As indigenous people had suspected throughout the long years of war, the Americans fully intended to dispossess them, as the “revolutionaries who fought for freedom from the British Empire in the East also fought to create an empire of their own in the West.”51

  Although the indigenous western resistance seemed to have been quelled after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, one final barrier stood in the way of American expansion into the inland West: the British occupation of Great Lakes forts. A new treaty negotiated by John Jay in London won the Crown’s forfeiture of these forts and signaled to Native people the final withdrawal of their British ally. The U.S. Senate ratified the Jay Treaty in the summer of 1795, just before the ink dried on the Treaty of Greenville. One year later, Jay’s treaty would take effect. The border established between the United States and Great Britain that separated territory with “lines drawn upon the water” would now be recognized by each country.52 The Detroit River was no longer a thoroughfare that joined settlers on both banks under the shared identity of Detroiters. On one side of the waterway, American stars and stripes would fly; on the other bank, the Union Jack would sway in the rippling wind.

  In 1796, thirteen years after the official close of the Revolutionary War, America would finally seize control of the Northwest Territory won back in 1783. “The States,” Reverend Zeisberger penned, “have occupied Detroit.” After his decisive victory over the western Indian nations with a force of just over a thousand men, General Anthony Wayne swaggered into town to oversee the departure of the British military. Zeisberger noted the transfer-spectacular in his mission diary: “When Gen. Wayne marched in with the garrison by water, and, when Wayne got to the city,
the English commandant discharged his cannon from the ship, and was saluted in return, in like manner, from guns great and small, whereupon the new owners moved in.”53 Despite the fanfare, British officers did not remove a great distance away. They simply resituated across the Detroit River at Fort Malden in Amherstburg, Ontario, on land cleared after the war in exchange for an enslaved woman named Esther. Their close proximity and ongoing ties with indigenous groups meant that tensions between the British and the Americans, while lessened, would not disappear until a second major war purported to settle them.