by Tiya Miles
James May became a pillar of Detroit civic society after the American assumption. He championed the rule of law and building of roads and became impassioned about bringing education to the territory. May accepted U.S. authority with little sign of reluctance, but his long tenure in Detroit and close affiliation with British loyalists made him a Tory in the eyes of eager American newcomers moving in from the East, such as Solomon Sibley and Elijah Brush. Sibley, a native of Massachusetts who had been trained at Rhode Island College (now Brown University) viewed May as a pompous Brit and referred to him sarcastically as “Sir James.” Sibley had first moved from New England to Marietta, Ohio, where he pursued the practice of law. He then relocated to Detroit in search of opportunity, and, by all indications, a wife. The move to Detroit would have made for dramatic change. Although Sibley had spent time within the Northwest Territory, he had resided in one of the areas most developed by Americans, where flagship Ohio River towns like Marietta and Cincinnati attracted settlers from New England as well as the mid-Atlantic and southern states. As a place where thousands of acres had been wrested from Native people in the Battle of Fallen Timbers and Treaty of Greenville, Ohio would soon become the first state to emerge from the Northwest Ordinance. The southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were nothing like most of Michigan, where indigenous societies still held oceans of land and the infamous Black Swamp that stretched from Michigan to Ohio made land travel treacherous. To a polished man like Sibley, the isolated fort town of Detroit was like another country. Indians, whose motives Sibley would have been unsure of, lived in large numbers in villages across the watershed; French, a tongue unknown to Sibley, was the common language of local residents. But on the bright side for Solomon Sibley, when he arrived in 1798, professional competition in the field of lawyering was slight in Detroit. His arrival made for a sum total of two lawyers working in town. He had hardly been practicing a month when the attorney general of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair II (son of the territory’s governor), took advantage of fresh talent and named him deputy attorney general for Wayne County.78 Promoted nearly upon arrival to a plum government post, Solomon Sibley, recognizing his good fortune, tried to settle in. He found Detroit rustic at first, complaining that the town was “without taste or elegance,” but he also called the bucolic scene of the fortified village at the river’s edge “exceedingly pleasing as you approach it.” Soon Sibley was writing: “I should feel myself quite contented to spend the residue of my days in this Country—But for one thing, we have no ladies here that I care a fig for—have been in company with some of the young French . . . but take no pleasure in listening to their French nonsense—They speak no English & I speak no French.”79
Major John Jacob Ulrich Rivardi, Artillerists and Engineers, March 29, 1799. Plan of Detroit, 1796–1797. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.
As one of few American civilians in town—they numbered less than twenty at the turn of the nineteenth century—Sibley found himself in a foreign cultural environment. Detroit was not yet culturally American, and the Northwest region as a whole was far from being racially white. The Second Continental Congress had set in place legislation for “a territory that had practically no white population and which, in a sense, did not belong to the United States at all.”80 Most of the 327 inhabitants within Detroit’s walls as well as those along the riverine suburbs were still predominantly French when Sibley arrived; even the British settlers who had chosen to stay and, through residency, become de facto Americans outnumbered American patriots.81 Along the banks beyond the fort’s wooden pickets, hundreds of French farmers extended Detroit’s social circles, as did indigenous families in settlements stretching beyond Lake St. Clair to the north and Lake Erie to the south.
An alliance of kinship existed between the early French and British settlers since many families were intermarried. Of the leading traders in Detroit during the British era, few wedded women who were not local. John Askin, who coupled with a French Detroiter, wrote many of his letters in the French language. But Solomon Sibley, a high-collared Massachusetts man with broad shoulders and a long patrician nose, was among an American professional class that did not care to mix intimately with the French habitants. French ladies, in turn, had their own reservations about “Yankee” men. Miss Navarre, a member of a French first family in town, had the misfortune of sitting in tobacco juice spat in her pew at Ste. Anne’s Church by young Americans Frederick Bates and George Wallace. She later opined that these men “had more ill-manners & less decency than even the Yankees generally had.”82 The cultural mosaic of Detroit confounded some Americans and delighted others. Frederick Bates, a quartermaster in the U.S. military, became smitten with the daughters of Commodore Grant, the British naval commander and slaveholder who had married a French wife. Bates, a handsome officer with wavy dark hair, thought Grant’s bicultural daughters were “the finest girls in this country.” He recognized his disadvantage, however, complaining that “the French girls” thought of Americans as “a rough, unpolished, brutal set of people.”83
Solomon Sibley had difficulty finding a spouse in the remote French and Indian town with a British influence now ruled by the Americans. If French women thought themselves too sophisticated for the Americans, Sibley thought himself too ambitious for the French. Shaped by a Protestant work ethic honed by a New England upbringing, Sibley characterized the French as “exceedingly ignorant and lazy.”84 Certainly he would not have agreed with James May that luxurious parties once a fortnight were fitting or even proper for a tiny town built of wood on muddy, narrow roads. Detroit left much to be desired when compared to the Americanized cultivation of New England, or even Ohio, in Sibley’s eyes.
Although he had been thus far unlucky in love, Solomon Sibley may have taken heart in his immediate rise in politics. The Northwest Territorial Legislature required a representative from Wayne County, where Detroit (and most of present-day Michigan) was seated. Although Judge James May seemed an obvious choice for the spot and ran with the backing of British loyalists, the Americans and, surprisingly, the French as well supported Solomon Sibley. Sibley won the seat in Detroit’s first American election, perhaps, May charged, because Sibley’s supporters provided free alcohol to voters and turned away others for being unfit for the ballot box. Victor nonetheless, the thirty-year-old Sibley began journeying back and forth to Cincinnati, Ohio, the seat of the Northwest Territory, and Chillicothe, Ohio, a second meeting place of the legislature. He once lost his way while traveling to attend a meeting, passing through forests and swamplands on buried paths.85
As Sibley’s travels southward show, Detroit reoriented politically toward Ohio (even while continuing to favor suppliers in New York). The majestic Queen City on the Ohio River that bordered the slave state of Kentucky, Cincinnati was the source of the mail in Detroit (which was extremely slow to arrive) and also the source of the news (even more sluggish). Because there was only one newspaper circulating in Detroit and the whole of the territory, the Freeman’s Journal published in Cincinnati, Detroiters posted public notices in French and English and dispatched a drummer to the streets when announcements were urgent. None of this sat well with Solomon Sibley. He saw the necessity for drastic change in Detroit, starting with the layout and position of the settlement. He felt that the picketed town was “exceedingly crowded with buildings leaving no room for further improvement.” He was aware that his constituents fretted over the proximity of Native communities on the fragments of land that they still held. They urged Sibley to ask the “U. States” to “settle the lines between them & the Indians.” These free residents also wished to see more white Americans moving to the area, being “desirous the United States would give full encouragement to the settlement of the Country on the lakes.” A fair portion of Indian lands ceded in the Treaty of Greenville had not yet been occupied by whites, and Detroiters of that stripe were anxious to see the acreage settled, thereby “enableing” their region “to defend itse
lf against their Indian neighbors, should a war take place.” Not twenty years had passed since the close of the Revolution, and Detroiters were anxious about the start of another major conflict that would set indigenous people lately dispossessed of the bulk of their land base against the village.86
Sibley took this desire for local development seriously. His first order of business as Wayne County’s representative was to see Detroit recognized as a full-fledged town. On January 18, 1802, the territorial legislature approved Sibley’s bill for Detroit’s incorporation.87 Upon returning home from Ohio after this victory, Sibley was greeted by candles lit in every window and a “general jubilee” in Detroit.88 Loyalist John Askin watched these events unfold with vigilance, wariness, and a bit of pride, writing to an associate: “This place is incorporated. Mrs. Macombs farm and mine are in the Town. The legislature honored me so far as to make me one of five trustees . . . to whom they gave great authority.”89 The French fur trading post and military fort established by Cadillac in 1701 was, one hundred years after its birth, an American town of the new Northwest.
By 1803, Solomon Sibley was scribbling sunny missives too, as he had found a fitting spouse and brought her back to his adopted hometown. “I am now settled at Detroit having removed the whole of my family, To wit, Mrs Sibley, to this place,” he wrote in August of that year. “The journey was fatiguing due to the heat of the weather & the lowness of the waters.” Despite the tiring travel, Sarah Sproat Sibley, formerly of Chillicothe, Ohio, was “pleased with the Country & its habitants,” according to her husband.90 But while Solomon Sibley no longer felt lonely in Detroit, he was vexed by crucial changes taking place in Washington. In March of 1803, Ohio became the first state to emerge from the Northwest Territory. As a result, Congress placed Wayne County within Indiana Territory, the first territory to be carved from the larger Northwest in 1800. Detroit was now even farther away from the seat of regional government. The territorial circuit court judges who traveled to various locations hearing cases rarely made it to the Great Lakes interior. Sibley himself now had to travel an even greater distance—southwest to Vincennes, Indiana, in order to attend legislative sessions.
At these regional gatherings of territorial representatives, Sibley witnessed the tension that swirled around the subject of slavery. While existing records on Detroit do not reveal internal debates over slavery among town leaders who had mainly emigrated from the Northeast, other white settlers in the Northwest Territory, especially in Indiana and Illinois, vociferously resented the legal prohibition against slaveholding. Some of these individuals already owned slaves, and many of them hoped to acquire some to work in their salt and lead mines, convoys, and corn fields. Local officials on the ground in these parts of the Territory that had closer ties to southern states therefore interpreted Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance as going into effect at some indeterminate future time. Settlers there submitted petitions to the territorial legislature and U.S. Congress pushing for a repeal or modification of the antislavery clause at the federal level. At a special convention of representatives in Vincennes in 1802, pro-slavery officials asked for the right to bring slaves into the Northwest Territory for the next decade, arguing that they should be “permitted to enjoy their property.” In 1805, Illinois residents requested their own separate territorial government and the allowance of slavery. Although acquisitive settlers did not achieve these formal means of legalizing slavery, they concocted and regularized long-term arrangements of indenture that amounted to “de facto” slave ownership in sections of the Northwest Territory.91 Territorial leaders passed laws to make a virtual system of slavery possible by leaning on the fine line between involuntary and voluntary servitude.92 Supported by the wink and nudge of local officials, residents found ingenious ways to circumvent the general slavery prohibition of Article 6, principally by filing paperwork in the courts to transform slaves into indentured servants who were said to have freely consented to their status. It was possible, these Illinois and Indiana settlers realized, to find hundreds of “voluntary” servants among the enslaved population who had very little power of self-protection. Solomon Sibley may well have attended the meeting in Vincennes where the slavery issue was most hotly debated, but his own views on slavery are not disclosed in his papers. Sibley’s New England background and later assistance to the eldest child of the Denison family suggests that he may have looked askance at underhanded attempts to extend slavery northwestward. Even if this was the case, the son he raised in Detroit, Henry Hastings Sibley, would later become a slaveholder (and the first governor of the state of Minnesota).93
Regardless of his personal views, in Sibley’s adopted home of Detroit, slavery was a system with deep roots, protected by French and British custom as well as by American law and international treaty. According to U.S. dictates, then, the eighty-four French and British families who owned slaves in Detroit before the close of the Revolutionary War had every right to continue possessing them after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance.94 Their children could also inherit this human property. The one population legally barred from owning slaves in Detroit was the very small number of newly transplanted Americans. They could not bring slaves into the territory or buy slaves once they were in Detroit without violating the Ordinance. But they could marry into slaveholding French or British families, contract slaves through indenture, and hire the slaves of other residents at will. Although they were never so extreme in the pursuit of slavery as their Northwest territorial neighbors to the south, free Detroiters with an interest in maintaining or accruing wealth also found ways to evade the constraints of Article 6. At the same time, enslaved people in Detroit were pondering what this changed legal context meant for their prospects of freedom. As rules came down from the federal and territorial levels, and in the absence of any local laws structuring slavery in Detroit, unfree blacks and Indians in the town and surrounding suburbs prepared to capitalize on the fresh set of terms.
Between the unpredictable years of the Revolution and the heady first sessions of the Northwest Territorial Legislature, borders had been established and territories occupied in the Great Lakes. New flags had been planted. Imperial rivalries had cooled. But in the wake of a movement loudly proclaiming that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” couples like Charlotte and Jerry, children like Betta, and families like the Denisons were still enslaved in Detroit.95 Today, reminders of the prominent people who stole the lives, livelihood, and labors of others dot the greening landscape of southeastern Michigan. The home of William Tucker, owner of the Denison family, still exists on the Clinton River, its original plainspoken farmhouse architecture occluded by a modern addition. Macomb County, where the Tucker home stands, carries the family name of Detroit’s largest slaveholder. Just off of Belle Isle, the Detroit River island illegally procured by the Macombs and later purchased by the Campeaus, a street named after Joseph Campau bisects the city. And Detroit itself is situated within Wayne County, named for the famously “mad” General Anthony Wayne, who proudly dispossessed southern Great Lakes indigenous peoples, laying the groundwork for American ascendance in the Old Northwest and the world.96
Detroit and surrounding area, 1799.
Detroit and surrounding area, 1800.
4
The Winds of Change (1802–1807)
Ruin, Detroit is not far from you.
—John Askin, April of 1800
When the Northwest Ordinance finally went into effect after the American occupation in 1796, Detroit had no applicable laws of its own. French civil law, overlaid by British common law, had previously operated in the settlement. And unlike many towns that would soon crop up in the sparsely populated Northwest region, Detroit stood on an international border and housed a large European settler population with rights protected by the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain. The town was also surrounded by i
ndigenous peoples, whose lands, though greatly reduced by warfare, treaties, and hasty sales pressured by the threat of a coming wave of non-Native migrants, still extended for hundreds of miles between Euro-American settlements. According to the Northwest Ordinance, these remaining Indian lands could not be taken without “consent,” except in the case of “lawful wars authorized by Congress,” language that anticipated and justified further territorial expansion by the U.S. government. Turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Detroit was a mind-boggling morass of murky rules and unspoken expectations. It was therefore a thrilling place to be a bright-eyed lawyer looking for the challenge of a lifetime, which is exactly what Elijah Brush was when he arrived, eager and unmarried, in the year 1798.1