Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Elijah Brush had been born in Bennington, Vermont, in the early 1770s and educated at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He came to Detroit to practice law and soon found fortune by making the marriage match of the season. The twenty-something Brush swiftly wooed Adelaide (also called Alice) Askin, the youngest daughter of John Askin and Archange Barthe Askin. Pampered through her girlhood, Adelaide Askin simply adored cosmopolitan fashion and finely crafted things. Despite her physical isolation from urban centers like New York City, London, and Paris, she was always in the know when it came to cutting-edge style. This was in part due to a steady flow of information from her older sister, Archange Askin, who lived in London and was married to a British military officer of the Royal Artillery Regiment. Archange penned letters to Adelaide spilling over with fashion advice and shipped them across the ocean to Detroit. Informed of the latest transatlantic trends by her sister, like the rage for gloves and turbans made of silk, Adelaide eagerly sought out premium fabrics and elegant designs. Ready-made clothing was unavailable in the shops of remote Detroit, so much of Adelaide’s wardrobe would have been imported from elsewhere or meticulously hand-sewn by enslaved black women. Beyond being fashionable, Adelaide was well educated, having studied at L’Assomption de Sandwich in Canada. She was fluent in both French and English and had grown up enjoying the domestic services of indigenous and black women who had been stripped of their freedoms.2

  Part of St. Anne’s Street in 1800. Engraving by Silas Farmer from a watercolor by Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Kingsbury or George Washington Whistler. Silas Farmer, The History of Detroit (Detroit: Silas Farmer & Co., 1884), 368. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan. This drawing of Detroit’s main thoroughfare depicts the French village aspect of dwellings prior to the 1805 fire.

  By catching the eye of Adelaide Askin, the enterprising Elijah Brush inserted himself into a well-heeled, landholding, bicultural, multilingual old Detroit family. No wonder Brush was filled with “exceeding great joy” at the “prospects of speedily being married to Miss Askin,” according to his friend, the fellow New English attorney Solomon Sibley. And Brush was equally enthused, Sibley added, about “a fair way to realize a fortune,” which Brush believed was on the near horizon at Detroit, as he had heard that a “New County” was being designated with “the County Town . . . established on the Pra[i] rie.”3 Brush’s impending nuptials and Detroit’s bright future were intertwined in the eyes of the observant Solomon Sibley.

  Elijah and Adelaide chose the festive annual celebration of Mardi Gras, observed enthusiastically in French-Catholic Detroit, as the season for their nuptials. Father Levadoux performed the service at Ste. Anne’s Church on a February evening in 1802. The newlyweds, whose wedding had been the social event of the winter, next endeavored to establish their household together. Adelaide Askin likely brought a slave with her into her home with her new American husband, while Elijah Brush busied himself with procuring imported dishware and delicacies for his bride. “I have lately [entered] into a matrimonial life with Miss Askin,” he wrote to the merchants he frequented in Albany, New York, “and find myselfe [sic] under the further necessity of troubleing [sic] you again with a further commission, which I expect to be obleiged [sic] to repeat annually.” Brush ordered, among other things, from the shop of Robinson & Martin: “one Set of fashionable guilt chinea [sic] complete with coffee cups & c One barrel of loaf Sugar and Coffee, one fourth chest of best hyson tea; 1/2 barrel of best 4th proof 1 dozen handsome knives & forks.” While most Detroiters made use of goods provided by merchants in town and could not afford personal imports, Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Brush preferred items of distinction, no matter the expense and waiting time. Elijah Brush ordered one dozen silver teaspoons engraved with his initials from New York, quipping about the low quality of local craftsmanship: “if you give a Silver Smith in this Country Silver to work you’ll never get either work or Silver.” When his wife was displeased with the color of Rusha sheeting fabric sent by Martin & Robinson’s shop, Brush “disposed of it and ordered another piece.” He sent to New York, as well, for Adelaide’s accessories and clothing, ordering a “fashionable Summer cloak,” a “fashionable Bonnet for Summer,” and enough kidskin ladies shoes for Adelaide to change her footwear twelve days in a row. When the couple’s first son, Edmund, was born nine months after the winter wedding, Elijah ordered shoes for the boy as well. For himself, Elijah requested “1 Superfine fashionable coat Dutch cloth,” “1 pair of black Striped Velvet pantaloons and Vest of the finest quality,” and “1 fashionable beaver hat” from New York, closing the loop of the fur trade that was his new town’s chief enterprise.4 Detroit produced furs and shipped them East so that cosmopolitan professionals like Elijah Brush could wear the beaver hat as a status symbol all across the coasts of the Atlantic.

  For the Brushes, the buzzword was “fashionable,” and as a leading lawyer in the town, Elijah Brush could afford to wrap his young family in luxury. In 1803, he ordered an elegant two-wheeled carriage with a folding roof, called a caléche, from Robinson & Martin’s firm in New York. The next summer two copycat carriages appeared on the narrow roads of Detroit, ordered by officers at the garrison.5 The Brushes had become the town’s “Joneses,” trendsetters who influenced norms and sparked the competitive desire to “keep up.” And in a place where slavery was still widely practiced despite the territorial law that curtailed it, the couple’s eye for the next best thing soon turned to bondspeople. Peter and Hannah Denison, an African American couple toiling away on the Tucker farm in the countryside of the Huron River, had developed a reputation in the area. Before long the Brushes would seek the same kind of distinction in their choice of servants as they did in consumer goods. They would import Peter and Hannah all the way from the sticks to work in their fashionable urban household.

  Elijah and Adelaide Brush House. Detroit, 1852 by R. Bürger. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-00350. The Brushes purchased this farm from Adelaide’s father, John Askin, before he moved across the river. Enslaved people lived here with both families.

  Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Brush calling card. Benjamin F.H. Witherell Papers, 1791–1924. The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. Adelaide and Elijah Brush were members of Detroit high society who enjoyed convivial entertainments and cosmopolitan fashion. Adelaide was the child of a British merchant and French socialite. Elijah was an American attorney from New England.

  The self-confident Elijah Brush met with approval from British-identified John Askin, who wrote to a friend about his American son-in-law: “he promises fair, has a good character and [is] reckoned a good lawyer which is not a bad profession in this quarter.”6 To a business partner, the practical Askin also expressed his approval of young Elijah, writing that Brush was “an able Lawyer, has considerable practice is sober and industrious therefore I believe Alice has made a good choice.”7 Askin’s respect for Brush would have made the dilemma that Askin was weighing a little easier to settle. Despite his positive observations that “the Gentlemen on this side” of the river treated him with “nothing but politeness and civility” and “debts are recovered here without delay which is a great Object for a Merchant,” Askin had misgivings about continuing to reside in American Detroit.8 He preferred to live in British territory and, consequently, to avoid American taxes on his business transactions across the border. He therefore elected to relocate with his wife, sell a portion of his real estate, pay off debts, and leave his youngest daughter and son-in-law behind in Detroit. “In the course of two weeks we remove over the River,” Askin soon told an associate, “but I will be a great part of my time here to attend to the lands and [etc.] on this side.”9 Near his departure date, Askin wrote to a trading partner, perhaps referring to livestock, perhaps referring to human chattel: “Part of my stock are sent over the River and in about two weeks we will move after them.” According to a traditional history of the early American period in Detroit, the town had “lost a
grand old man” upon John Askin’s leave-taking.10 Askin’s enslaved laborers, who would now become residents of Canada as well, may have thought otherwise.

  By the spring of 1802, John Askin was off to Canada, but the relocation to British turf was bittersweet. Settling in at his new abode, charmingly named Strabane after his birthplace in Ireland, meant abandoning the beloved Barthe-Askin farm along the north side of the river. Askin was therefore buoyed by the news that “Lawyer Brush” was “desirous of purchasing” the family estate in Detroit. The newlyweds lacked cash on hand to pay John Askin’s £2,000 asking price, but they moved into the home with Askin’s blessings and paid taxes on the property. In part because Adelaide Brush wished to remain in Detroit rather than relocating to the Ohio Country as Elijah had at first intended, by 1805 Elijah was planning to “sell some lands he has in the States” and pay Askin for the Detroit property. Adelaide longed to keep the French farm in the family, and Elijah sought to please his nostalgic bride. “She has the same desire of being perpetuated in it that Mrs Askin [her mother] has on account of the family tradition it has already passed through,” Brush explained to Askin, his approving father-in-law.11

  Brush finally purchased the farm at the price of $6,000 U.S. after living there rent-free for nearly four years. He would obtain the “premises with all the appurtenances, privalages and Commodities to the same.” The Askin farmland, “being on the Detroit or Streights of Lake Erie” lie “mostly in what is now called the Town of Detroit,” and boasted a royal pedigree. It had been “ceded and granted by Charles Marquis-De-Beauharnois knight of the Royal and Military order of St. Louis . . . and Gilles Hocquart Knight and member of the King’s privy counsil . . . to Eustache Gamelin . . . and Granted by Piquotee Belestre Military and Civil Commandant for the king at Detroit unto Jaques Pelet” before coming into the Barthe family. Layered into this legal record of land exchange dating back to 1747 are decades of colonial presence and the selling of land as a commodity. Nowhere in the document is an original purchase from Native people indicated. Neither does the sale of the Brush farm reveal the consent of any woman. For this coveted parcel had fallen first into the possession of a British male in-law, and then an American male in-law, the lucky Brush. Handed down in the families of French women, the land would be legally retained by English and American men. Brush could thus buy his own wife’s family farm and make this transfer of landed power seem like a gift to her. During his time on the farm, Elijah Brush built his legal practice. Brush and his father-in-law grew all the closer, and Brush began to represent John Askin in land deals that remained essential to free white men’s success in the region.12

  While Askin family members then in Upper Canada sent pleasing treats like an “Indian sack full of Cramberry [cranberry]” over to their cherished Adelaide, Elijah traversed the frozen river many a time to visit with his father-in-law in cold weather months.13 They were a tight-knit clan. And while Brush may have preferred deep down to strike out for Ohio, where he already owned land, it was plain to see that he had found a plum situation in Detroit. Just as John Askin had benefited from marrying a French wife and settling on her family’s farm beside the fort a generation earlier, Elijah Brush married into prime property when he wed Adelaide Askin, daughter of one of Detroit’s most prominent traders and largest slaveholders.

  Recalcitrance and Rebellion

  In order to improve his circumstances, John Askin only needed to sell his properties, tidy up his finances, and move to one of his other plots across the Detroit River. And while this was not a simple proposition given the losses he had taken in the fur trade as well as his failing health due to elder age, it was a readily achievable goal that did not entail the risk of life or sacrifice of loved ones. The lives of enslaved people were entirely different and considerably more constrained. Black and indigenous men and women held in bondage also carefully assessed their situations in the first American years of the late 1790s and early 1800s, scrutinizing shifting structures of governance, flows of capital, and social relationships. The transition from French to British rule at the end of the French and Indian War had meant few changes for unfree Detroiters. Raiding during the American Revolutionary War had brought larger numbers of African Americans from the South into the region, making the 1780s the high mark of slavery in the town in numerical terms. The Americans’ passage of the Northwest Ordinance had meant little in the decade when British officials had refused to relinquish western posts. But the wheels of political power, as well as the century, had now turned. What changes would the British withdrawal and the official American presence usher in for those who lived in slavery?

  British loyalists who moved to Canada, such as John Askin and Matthew Elliott, brought their bondspeople along with them, increasing the enslaved population along the border with the United States. An ordinance passed in 1793 by the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, outlawed the importation of new slaves to Canada and introduced gradual emancipation but permitted British subjects crossing the river to retain their human property. Slavery would be legal in Canada until the British parliament ended it throughout the territories of Great Britain forty years later in 1833.14 By the time John Askin arrived, former Detroiter Matthew Elliott and his fellow British military officers, Alexander McKee and Henry Bird, had already moved to present-day Ontario and established homes on land bestowed on them in 1783 by Native allies from the Revolutionary War. Elliott “was given the allocation nearest to Lake Erie, and his home and farm were soon to become a landmark for those approaching Detroit via the Lake Erie-Detroit River route.” He steadily expanded his land holdings, resulting in a “home and farm that became a show-place in Upper Canada.” An unforgettable aspect of that “showplace” to some observers was its striking resemblance to a southern plantation. Matthew Elliott, a British Indian agent with a Shawnee wife (one of several Native women he partnered with in customary marriages or informal liaisons over the years), possessed more than eight hundred acres by the early 1790s and presided over a magisterial farm where “he did not directly engage in farming himself, but ran it as a plantation with a steward or overseer to supervise his Negro and Indian slaves.”15 To a commander at the nearby fort in Amherstburg, Captain Hector McLean, this slaveholding Indian agent was infamous for his wealth. McLean wrote that Elliott “lives as I am informed in the greatest affluence at an expense of above a thousand a year. He possesses an extensive farm not far from the garrison stock’d with about six or seven hundred head of cattle & I am told employs fifty or sixty persons constantly about his house & farm chiefly slaves.” Another, more favorable observer traveling through the area enthused: “The farm belonging to our friend, Captain E . . . contains no less than two thousand acres. . . . His house, which is the best in the whole district, is agreeable situated, at a distance of about two hundred yards from the river; there is a full view of the river, and of the island of Bois Blanc, from the parlour window.” Elliott’s bucolic riverside farm was the setting for whippings of enslaved people who were secured to a locust tree with an iron ring and shackles.16

  On the American side of the Detroit River, slavery also continued apace. The federally appointed governor of the Northwest Territory and slaveholder, Arthur St. Clair, had widely publicized his view that the provision of the Northwest Ordinance limiting slavery was ideational and meant to curtail future, rather than present, activity. He had written in 1793, and announced to Illinois residents prior, that “the declaration that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory . . . was no more than a declaration of principle . . . but could have no retroactive operation whatever.” In the Northwest Territory, French and British residents still owned slaves, and Americans had access to bondspeople owned by prior settlers. Some free residents across the Northwest Territory took advantage of this flexible situation, attempting to acquire slaves. But ambiguity had its costs. Would-be slaveholders in Detroit felt discomfort about whether their intentions would be legal. They
carried the angst of residing in a gray area between the letter of congressional law and common practice on the ground. Governor St. Clair’s statements about the “principle” of the Ordinance had been intended to allay such anxieties, but in Detroit, a northerly border town with a stream of New Englanders trickling in, such worries could not be fully assuaged.17 Slavery in American Detroit was persistent but unstable, reflecting the “fragile legal constructions” that characterized northern slavery in the post-Revolutionary “gradual emancipation era.”18

  Enslaved people in the town and closest farmsteads, counted at thirty-one in the 1796 Wayne County census (after many had been removed by their masters to Canada), saw little immediate improvement to their situations following the passage of the Jay Treaty. But a few years later, by 1800, unfree people were doubling down on their acts of defiance. Just as they had before the Americans took charge, enslaved men and women fought the injustice of exploitation with the limited mental and physical weapons available to them: withholding compliance, pilfering property, battling members of the master class, and stealing themselves away. Attempts at escape increased in both number and boldness. The papers of Detroit merchants who were dissatisfied with their slaves, as well as of Solomon Sibley, who managed local legal complaints, offer glimpses of the range of rebellious actions unfree people took at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1801, a “Pawney man” belonging to the Frenchman “Mr Barth” was accused of assault against a J.B. Nadau. In March of 1802, Jaco, “a Pauni” owned by Frenchman Simon Campau, acted “contrary to the obedience due to [Campau] as his master.” Jaco had “absented himself and doth still absent himself from his said Masters Service.” Campau entered a formal complaint in the matter, seeking the territorial circuit court’s intervention. Toby, a “Panisman,” was arrested and jailed in 1807 for absconding and was returned to George Cotteral, who “claim[ed] the Said Toby as his Slave, and acknowledge[d] that he hath humbled himself to his Satisfaction.” Mary Abbott, an Englishwoman, complained in the summer of 1802 that “her slave Susan a Panie has resisted and refused to obey her lawful Command contrary to the obedience due her mistress.” Mary Abbott turned to the courts as did other slaveholders, with the result that constables equipped with a warrant were ordered to “apprehend the said Susan a Panie . . . to be further dealt with according to Law.”19 It was a difficult stretch of years for Abbott women in terms of trouble with recalcitrant bondspeople. Elizabeth Audrain Abbott, wife of Robert Abbott, found herself threatened with a whipping by her slave. A black woman named Mary, described as a “negro wench” in the court record, was jailed after “beat[ing] and abus[ing] her mistress, the same Mrs. Abbott.” Robert Abbott then endeavored to sell the black woman to Thomas Jones, who declined another offer of a “Pawny Boy” from Mr. Pattinson in order to buy this woman who had been promised as having “no fault except beating his [Abbott’s] wife.” However, when Jones discovered that the jailed Mary “was rotten with the pox,” he took Abbott to court in order to break the contract.20