Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Woodward rendered a complicated ruling that drew on the Jay Treaty, the Northwest Ordinance, gradual emancipation schemes in the Northeast, and British Canadian slave law. He issued a partial, graduated emancipation decision in which some slaves and slave descendants would never be free, others would be free after twenty-five years, and some—those born after the American assumption of control in the Northwest Territory—would be born free. The ruling stipulated:

  The Laws of France and Upper Canada ceased to have any effect in this Territory almost immediately after July 11, 1796, but under Jay’s Treaty settlers continue to enjoy their property of every kind. The term property as used in Jay’s Treaty includes slaves, as slaves were recognized as property by the countries concerned. Slaves living on May 31, 1793, and in the possession of settlers in this Territory on July 11, 1796, continue such for life; children of such slaves born between these dates continue in servitude for twenty-five years; children of such children, and all born after July 11, 1796, are free from birth.117

  Because the eldest Denison children had been born between 1793 and 1796, they were consigned to slavery for life; their younger brother, Peter, would be relegated to slavery for another twenty-five years.118 The devastation in the aftermath of that court session must have been profound. Elijah Brush had lost the case, and Peter and Hannah Denison had lost their sons and daughter to a lesser demon politely deemed “qualified slavery.”

  Word traveled swiftly along the banks of the river. Catherine Tucker’s success in court spurred other slaveholders on. It was only three weeks after this decision that the Detroit slaveholder George Cotteral used the writ of habeas corpus to have the runaway Native man Toby arrested and returned to him. One week after Toby was apprehended, on October 19 of 1807, Judge Woodward had before him another slavery case. Canadian merchant Richard Pattinson petitioned the court to forcibly return his runaway slaves who were living in Detroit. Jenny, a mixed-race woman of African descent, and Joseph Quinn, a Native man, had run away from Pattinson’s home in Sandwich, Upper Canada, a year earlier, in the fall of 1806. The two had made it to safety across the river and managed to evade recapture for months. Pattinson described Jenny as a “certain Mulatto girl . . . about the age of twenty years about five feet Six inches high straight and well made.” One wonders what the relationship was between Pattinson and Jenny, a young woman whose figure he admired and who, in his words, “refuse[d] to return to his services.” Joseph Quinn, the young man Jenny absconded with, was close to her age, at eighteen. He may have been a friend, lover, or relative of Jenny’s, such that the two vowed to make their break together. Pattinson asked the Michigan court to arrest both young people and return them to his possession.119

  Pattinson likely expected a positive outcome given the precedent of the Denison case. But that situation was entirely different in Judge Augustus Woodward’s view, which was filtered through a lens of upholding American sovereignty. In the Pattinson case, Woodward emphasized that while the Jay Treaty compelled the recognition of British property rights in Michigan, no such treaty existed between the United States and Canada regarding Canadian slaves. He decided the court had no obligation to return persons held as property who were fugitives from a “foreign jurisdiction.”120 Woodward’s decision in this case set important precedent for slavery law in the territory and the strength of U.S. jurisdiction at the border. He later received notice from the postmaster of New York City that copies of his decision on the Pattinson case were circulating in New York, where it was printed in The American Citizen and Republican Watchtower newspapers and sent to the Speaker of the House.121

  On the same day that the Pattinson case reached the court, a slaveholder in similar circumstances filed a petition. Matthew Elliott, who “had remained at Detroit until about the time of surrendering said Post to the American Government, when he removed to Amherstburg,” had lost several of his slaves. He claimed that “Hannah, Peter, Abraham, Scipio, Candus, and James who were born the slaves of said Matthew Elliott of female slaves belonging” to him, had run away to Detroit “last winter and spring.” In addition, Elliott stated that Pompey and Jane, whom he bought from John Stockwell, who bought them from George Meldrum, had also “deserted” at the same time.122 Elliot brought suit for the arrest and return of eight people. Given the replication of several names from the Denison family and the vague time window in which these slaves were said to have escaped, Elliott may have been chasing financial gain by claiming people he did not actually own and taking advantage of what he saw as an opening signaled by the Denison decision. Judge Woodward denied Elliott’s request, citing the Pattinson ruling that he had issued that same day.123 Woodward saw no legal obligation to find, arrest, and return the slaves of British Canadian subjects. Elijah Brush, who argued and lost all of these cases, first on behalf of the Denisons’ freedom and then on behalf of Pattinson’s and Elliott’s right to recover their slaves, confessed he had never been “Sanguine” in his “expectation of Success” in any of the suits.124 The relationship between slavery and the law in Detroit had been too hazy for Brush to predict an outcome. And Woodward’s supreme court decisions may have added still more confusion, as he protected the right to hold slaves for the class recognized as old British settlers, but rejected the right of British-Canadians to recover their slaves with the aid of the court.

  Despite his previously expressed views of black inferiority, Augustus Woodward criticized slavery severely in these decisions. In Pattinson’s case, he empathized with the runaways as “human beings escaping from chains and tyranny” who “Could find no place in the whole earth to rest.”125 In the Denison case, he approved of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery, writing: “Nothing can reflect higher honor on the american government than this interdiction. The Slave trade is unquestionably the greatest of the enormities which have been perpetuated by the human race. The existence at this day of an absolute & unqualified slavery of the human Species in the United States of America is universally and justly considered their greatest and deepest reproach.” These ardent feelings, which seem to represent a change for Woodward over time, had no practical bearing on his decisions for the Michigan court. In the end, he addressed these cases legally rather than morally, or rather, with a view of maintaining American sovereignty as the highest form of his moral duty.

  The Denisons surely had little regard for the subtleties of Judge Woodward’s musings on the ugliness of the slave trade and assuredness of America’s failing. For them, the judge’s final decision that stole the liberty of four of their members was what mattered most. The next generation of their family would remain enslaved, most for their entire lifetimes. The Denisons would not abide this. By late October, the Denisons knew Tucker would have trouble recovering the children from Canada, just as Pattinson and Elliott had failed to recapture fugitives who had crossed the international border into Michigan Territory. This was all the incentive the Denison family needed. In the fall of 1807, they fled across the river to Sandwich, Upper Canada, keeping their family unit intact against all odds.126

  As the Denisons ran from Detroit in search of liberty and security in their personhood, other black and Native captives ran to Detroit from Canada. The river that had once connected two sides of a single settler community but now divided two adversarial nations was being used as a bridge yet again—this time for fugitives escaping the grip of slavery. Detroit saw a surge of freedom suits and runaway slave cases between 1807 and 1809, as enslaved people, and those who claimed them, watched to see how the legal winds would blow. Denison v. Tucker was the first slavery case decided in Michigan Territory, but it would not be the last fight for freedom at the riverside. Before long, Peter Denison would return to his birthplace of Detroit, armed and politically dangerous.

  5

  The Rise of the Renegades (1807–1815)

  The whole territory is a double frontier.

  The British are on one side. The savages on the other.

  —Memorial of the Cit
izens of Detroit, 1811

  Maybe the story was inside out. Perhaps Peter Denison, the black man formerly enslaved by William and Catherine Tucker, was never really a servant indentured to Attorney General Elijah Brush. The legal record of the Michigan Supreme Court tells us otherwise, explicitly stating that Catherine Tucker indentured both Peter and his wife, Hannah Denison, to Elijah Brush following the death of William Tucker in 1806. But the odd events that soon ensued on the heels of that contract indicate a more intricate and unusual course of events that unfolded in the borderland vortex of turn-of-the-century Detroit.

  The onset of the 1800s was difficult for Detroiters. A raging fire had destroyed the old town within the walls and scattered residents across the countryside in search of shelter. Political leaders for the newly designated Michigan Territory, mostly hailing from more refined eastern cities and townships, struggled to find their footing in a frontier environment peopled by inhabitants who spanned a cultural range, including, most especially, indigenous North Americans and French Canadians. The first session of the Michigan Territorial government, led by Governor William Hull, was held two months in the wake of the fire in the corner tavern of Richard Smyth, who, in addition to selling spirits, crafted hats.1 Enslaved people, often in groups, were making bold bids for freedom by crossing the international borderline that was the Detroit River, a movement that led to a series of controversial cases in Chief Justice Augustus Woodward’s outland court. French-speaking habitants harbored suspicions of the radical plan for rebuilding the town put forward by American leaders. Because of the need of constant translation between French residents and the governor, “the intercourse of the heart,” Judge Woodward wrote, “seldom pass[ed] through.” Neither the British nor the French actually liked easterners, Woodward confessed. The British referred snidely to Americans as “Yankees,” while the French maligned them as “Bastonnois,” “Sacre Bastonnois,” or “sacre cochon de Bastonnois” (Bostonians, blasted Bostonians, or filthy swine of Boston).2 Eastern newcomers, for their part, often viewed the old western settlers as uncouth and “half savage.”3 The landed elite, many of them from longtime merchant and slaveholding families, pushed for a federal government that they distrusted to recognize existing land claims and mark a fixed boundary between white and Indian territory that would swell the former and shrink the latter. And even as Detroit dragged itself out of the ashes of manmade disaster and negotiated internal social as well as political strife, new threats gathered on the horizon that presaged the possibility of yet another imperial war.

  Incoming governor William Hull may have once thought that he was equipped to untangle such a tight knot of conflicts and pressures. Hull was a man possessive of an imposing physique, as well as an impressive military and judicial background. His full girth, patrician nose, and slightly downward turned eyes might even have intimidated those who worked with and beneath him. His history of outstanding service in the Revolutionary War helped him win the appointment as governor of Michigan Territory. Hull had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in that conflict and was roundly recognized for his brave and brutal handling of the bayonet, even receiving a personal commendation from General George Washington. After retirement from the military in 1786, Hull served as a common pleas court judge in Newton, Massachusetts, and as a member of the Massachusetts state senate. Being a Democrat and staunch supporter of Thomas Jefferson also buoyed Hull’s rise, as it was President Jefferson who tapped Hull for the gubernatorial post that included responsibility for Indian Affairs in the region. For a salary of $2,000 per year, William Hull made plans to move “to a rough frontier society made up of French-speaking settlers intermixed with a sprinkling of Americans who were primarily westerners of an independent spirit.” After taking the oath of office in Albany, New York, in the spring of 1805, Hull set off for Detroit with his family by way of a water route. Travel across Lake Erie was unpredictable, with the speed of the crossing entirely dependent on the winds. Nearly two long months after their departure, the Hulls had arrived to find Detroit “vanished.”4

  Sarah Hull, William Hull’s wife of twenty-four years, entered a waking nightmare when she arrived with a son, Abraham, and two daughters, Nancy and Maria, by way of the Detroit River. Four years later, she would describe the arduous trek from the Northeast as “a long and perilous journey through the wilderness of six hundred miles.” Responsible for the management of her upper middle-class household in a period that elevated white women’s roles as Victorian wives and mothers of the Republic, she was expected to create a proper and uplifting home while her husband attended to politics. But there was no home to make in Detroit. The settlement was an ash bin. Sarah Hull and her children were virtually homeless, living with a farm family a mile out of town in crowded conditions worse than those suffered by her husband’s headstrong chief justice.

  Sarah had not been groomed to live in a refugee zone on the western edge of American expansion. The daughter of a judge in Newton, Massachusetts, she would have been expected by fellow ladies of the genteel class to instill virtue in her children, host teas and charm guests, and lubricate the social wheels of her husband’s bright political future. Frontier Detroit promised nothing resembling this picture. The people there were isolated, insular, ethnically oriented toward French and Indian ways, and accustomed to making do in the most extreme of circumstances. In 1805, the population amounted to just 274 souls within the walled village, and most of those residents had been displaced to makeshift lodgings. Outside the central footprint of the riverine fort, farmers, “almost exclusively French,” dug in along the various waterways. Sarah Hull could not have missed the precarious nature of Detroit Town: “a long, narrow column of settlers . . . flanked by the British on one side and by the woods and the Indians on the other.” But she had shown fortitude in accompanying her husband to military encampments during the Revolutionary War. She had been present at the Battle of Saratoga and helped to tend the wounded. This was exactly the kind of grit that she would need to muster, and more, in adjusting to her new environs of Detroit.5

  While Sarah Hull struggled to keep her family fed, clean, and morally upright in their temporary, substandard quarters, she observed her husband weighing out the innumerable threats to the territory he now governed. Indians, their large and persistent populations and outstanding claims to Detroit area lands, plagued William Hull. His most active supporters, merchants of an American cast, wanted Native people pushed back and contained. Even more foreboding than the Indian encampments outside Detroit were the hundreds of clans, tribes, societies, and confederations of indigenous people spanning the Great Lakes region from New York to Minnesota and into British Canada. These original inhabitants of the inland seas, chain-linked rivers, fertile coasts, and forested hunting grounds had shown themselves to be fierce protectors of their lands and life ways. Indians had attacked this very settlement and held it hostage in the 1760s. Then they had fought with their former foes—the British military—against the Americans not twenty years later. During the Revolutionary War, Indian warriors had gathered at Detroit in order to collude with British officials and plan attacks on patriot settlements. They were everywhere, the indigenous people of the Great Lakes. These Indians had their own minds. They had a generation of young men itching to retake what had been lost in the Treaty of Paris in which they had had no representation. They also had the friendship of the British who lay in wait, ready to use them as a first line of offense against their former American colonies that had dared to break away. While William Hull pondered the Indian threat that never quite receded, he anxiously watched as tensions between the United States and Great Britain simmered to boiling.

  The main issue was impressment. Great Britain boasted the greatest navy in the world and depended upon its ferocious fleet for global financial primacy as well as homeland security. The British navy enabled the small island nation to dominate much of the globe in international trade. But as Britain fought a protracted war with France during the French
Revolution and Napoleonic Wars that followed, the country’s navy was severely overstretched. The British navy desperately needed more sailors even as British subjects and Irish resisters were defecting to American ships in the hope of better wages, greater independence, and shorter terms at sea. Determined to preserve its military might on the oceans and to put the upstart United States in its place, Great Britain got its back up. The navy ramped up a program of impressment led by burly “press gangs” that searched port town pubs and social spaces, and even private homes, for British defectors. These men were taken aboard British ships and compelled to work for the navy in conditions that approached indentured servitude, with low pay, long terms lasting until the ends of wars, and little if any shore leave. After 1803, the British navy became even more aggressive in its impressment practice, challenging American merchant ships, searching the decks for defectors, and forcing into military service men who claimed American identities by way of affiliation, naturalization, and birthright.6

  This was the cast of William Hull’s mind when an incident foreshadowing the War of 1812 unfolded in the summer of 1807. On June 22 of that season, an American warship floated near the Virginia shoreline with no military mission and only light weaponry. The frigate U.S.S. Chesapeake captained by Commodore James Barron was simply scheduled for a routine commercial trip to the Mediterranean. The deck was loaded with cargo, the ship’s cannon stowed away. So neither the captain nor the crew saw the blow coming when the British warship Leopard attacked by cannon at close range. The Leopard struck the Chesapeake thrice as the American captain tried but failed to launch an effective defense. Commander Barron had no choice but to surrender while a party of British naval officers forcibly boarded the ship, physically inspected the bloody crew, and kidnapped four men accused of desertion from British service. Only one of these prisoners, Jenkin Ratford, had actually been born in Britain. Three Americans were killed in the Leopard assault; eighteen were wounded. The Chesapeake was a bundle of shattered boards when finally released to limp back to port. The British defector, Ratford, was punished for his crime with a hanging on board the ship that he had fled months prior. The captured Americans from the Chesapeake crew soon joined the six thousand American men who had already been impressed by the British.7