Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Not surprisingly, the territorial special committee (made up of the judges and Hull himself) sided with Hull, but, remarkably, the committee heaped praise on the discipline and patriotism of black men. The committee’s response went on to assert that Woodward’s emphasis on these men’s status as slaves was an irrelevant point: “With respect to any of them being slaves, the committee only observes that they were black persons, who resided in the Territory, and were not claimed as slaves by any person or persons in the original States.” The committee members had decided against Judge Woodward, but by using the same logic as Woodward’s own legal decisions in the Pattinson and Elliott cases: if these black militiamen were runaway slaves of British owners, it was not Michigan Territory’s affair. Michigan was only beholden to slaveholders from their own nation: the United States. “Under this view of the subject,” the committee report concluded on this matter, “the committee is of the opinion that the conduct of the executive in availing the country of the services of their black people, was not only proper but highly commendable; especially as it was at a period when the safety and protection of the Territory appeared to require all the force which could be possibly collected.” Black men formerly from Canada would now be considered “their,” meaning Michigan Territory’s, “black people,” members of “the country.” Woodward was not convinced. He rebutted this finding in a letter to the federal government, noting again his doubts about the “propriety of organizing a military company composed of slaves who had run away from gentleman residing opposite” and of “negroes commanding the company as officers being alike unauthorized by the town and the gen. [general] gov. [government] .”26

  Augustus Woodward’s pointed criticism of the formation of a black militia in Detroit exposed the issues of racial bias, slave status, international relations, and military readiness in a way that forced a clear and revealing response from territorial representatives. These men, like Governor Hull, viewed the defense of the border as utmost in importance and would not protect human property rights of British slaveholders on Michigan soil. Black men in Michigan Territory were presumed free unless an American owner from the slave states made a claim. Despite this deference to U.S. slaveholders regarding fugitive slaves that meant the continued, legalized threat to black people in the Northwest, the committee’s response was an avowed rejection of slavery as an assumptive state for all black men. These legislators affirmed Michigan’s fledgling political identity as a free American territory and lauded black men as responsible and even patriotic. No other city, state, or territory within the nation had yet made such a bold defense of black men’s collective honor. It happened first in Detroit.

  But also central to this story is why it happened in Detroit, an environment characterized by frontier conflict and borderland contingencies. The violent threat of Indians was assumed to be so great that black men not legally freed should be armed to fight against them. While their recognition of the talents of African American men might be viewed as progressive, if self-serving, William Hull and the territorial committee at the same time reinforced an oppositional ideology of “Americans” versus “Indians.” Indigenous people were perceived as bogeymen in the wilderness, a terrifying, outsized threat requiring radical containment. At least these militiamen of color were not prone to taking scalps, territorial leaders may have thought, in a slanted view of reality that failed to recognize Euro-American brutalities against Native people. Here, in this circumscribed imaginative space of the colonial psyche, black men had an advantage. They could be viewed as co-combatants rather than age-old enemies. A conceptual line was now being drawn between Native Americans and African Americans that favored blacks in the pre–War of 1812 years. Black men had one thing the Michigan Territory needed more than almost anything else: the willingness and strength to defend Detroit and America’s borders. But the effective difference between being “black” versus being “red” was far from clear cut in every interaction or circumstance. Members of each group were still enslaved in Detroit, sometimes within the same households. And the racialized categories (“negro,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “panis”) used to serve as shorthand for their naturalized subjugation were sometimes viewed as overlapping or interchangeable by officials. In 1808 John Askin recorded his contract of indenture with Charlotte Moses, “a mulatto or pawnee Girl of Detroit,” who signed her X mark to “truly observe and obey” him as “her Said Master.”27 Another example of multiple or confused racial identifiers appears in a criminal case that wound through the Michigan courts in the summer of 1814. Monique, a woman charged with stealing a valuable bedspread from the shop of Andrew Elliott, was found guilty by a grand jury in the territorial supreme court. The district court record in Detroit, where Monique resided, describes her as “a certain Black woman,” while the supreme court record describes her as “a Pawny Woman.” Notably, both the district and supreme court sessions were held in Detroit where Monique was personally known. Perhaps Monique was mixed-race; perhaps her sliding racial identification signaled her enslaved status more than any concrete racial designation. Precisely recording her racial identification was clearly not essential to the case or a matter of importance to the court. Similarly, individuals of Native ancestry or of mixed-race Afro-Indian descent were very likely to have been present in the so-called Negro Militia.28

  Judge Woodward thought the risk of Indian attack was being exaggerated and said as much in his critique of Governor Hull. Colonel Grant on the British side of the river also expressed disbelief at William Hull’s fired-up rhetoric: “They have picketed in the whole town of Detroit,” Grant wrote. “Every military preparation is going forward there, and every violent declaration against this side . . . the Governor of Detroit declares, if an Indian fires a hostile shot in Detroit or in the Territory, he will treat the Canadians with the utmost severity. The apprehensions circulated at Detroit appear to me to proceed more from Policy to freighten the Inhabitants into labour without food or reward, than from any real sense of danger from Indians.” Grant went on to disclose to his superior that any alliance between the British at Fort Malden and western tribes was unpredictable. “The Aid I should expect there from Indians and Militia is of a very precarious kind,” he wrote. “Indians can never be brought to act within pickets.”29

  Grant’s canny analysis painted a picture in which Hull was using the fear of Indians to compel undercompensated military labors, and in which Native people hardly stood at the ready to passively take orders from the British regarding designs on Detroit. As progressive as William Hull’s actions seem with regard to black militiamen, they were also strategic in a way that furthered the consolidation of American authority within the town and beyond. Hull could use the deep desire for freedom among men of color to entice them to work for little or no pay, even as he used the specter of a Native assault to pull French farmers into town from thirty miles distant. William Hull’s stated terror of Indians may have included an element of cold calculation, but he was right on one score—Native people had not yet been contained and could not be controlled. Just as American and British relations were a seething cauldron of suspicions, American and indigenous relations were far from settled in the Northwest.

  The black militia authorized by Governor Hull remained active in Detroit for years, prepared, according to the territorial committee, to defend “the country.” But which country would those men favor as they considered their political allegiances? Did they subscribe to any national identity at all when both countries that warily met at the Detroit River border held blacks and Native people as slaves? Peter Denison, the sole member of the black militia whose story we can access through the documentary record, demonstrated loyalty to his family rather than to Michigan or the United States. He had agreed to lead William Hull’s unconventional military unit in exchange for freedom. But in the summer of 1807 while his men drilled in plain sight at the fort in Detroit, Peter Denison’s children were still being held as slaves by Catherine Tucker. Peter and his
wife Hannah took the case to court that autumn with the aid of Peter’s fellow militia leader, Elijah Brush. Judge Woodward, who had never approved of the black militia, issued the writ of habeas corpus as Brush requested but refused to free the children of the militia’s well-known leader. Peter Denison must have felt that his trust had been betrayed—by the town of Detroit, the territory of Michigan, and perhaps Governor Hull himself. But he did not settle for this theft of his family’s natural rights, any more than the Native peoples who continued to live around Detroit settled for the theft of their land base. Peter knew the rough terrain of the border; he had already crisscrossed the river in order to gather his men. In the fall of 1807, he abandoned Detroit’s black militia, and likely his formal protection of freedom issued by the governor, to flee with his family to Canada.

  The Denisons had held, and lost, a legitimate route to freedom. Now they were on the run as fugitive slaves. But Peter Denison had won a partner in Elijah Brush, not resulting from Brush’s sympathy or guilt, or even an antislavery stance adopted by the attorney. These men had spent months as comrades in arms, serving in segregated units of the Michigan militia. Peter Denison and his wife had lived with Elijah and Adelaide Brush, in the intimate quarters of the couple’s urban farm. Although Elijah could not have felt the anger, fear, and humiliation experienced by Peter Denison, whose children were counted as chattel, he could have shared Peter’s sense of moral outrage. Hadn’t Peter been willing to risk his life for Detroit, the capital of Michigan Territory? And yet the court of that territory refused to protect his children as full-fledged persons. When Peter Denison rowed the river with Hannah, his daughter Lisette, and his sons James, Sip, and Peter Junior, he was not without friends. A note in the Michigan Supreme Court record indicates, in just one line, that Denison family members “took refuge with Mr. Askin.” Elijah Brush came through for the daring Denison family, convincing his father-in-law, once among British Detroit’s largest slaveholders, to extend a hand.30

  Red-Lining Detroit Lands

  Immediately following the series of territorial supreme court suits that tested the limits of slavery in Michigan, Governor Hull set his mind to the problem of Indians and land. Local white property holders had been complaining about Native Americans living too close to town and had expressed worry about a lack of formal federal recognition of their preexisting land claims. The loss of more than three hundred buildings to fire and the unsettled issue of how to reapportion lots within the town pickets raised the stakes of land competition all the more.31 And the shadow of possible war with the British placed a continuous pressure on the military readiness of Detroit, which, in the view of U.S. officials, entailed managing where Indians were on the landscape and what actions they engaged in.

  In his dual capacity as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan Territory (a conflict of interest when considered from the indigenous standpoint), William Hull started on the difficult task of reorganizing Detroit area lands by wresting more ground from Native people on the direct order of President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had been desirous of extending America’s hold at Detroit beyond the immediate fort town. He informed the senate that “the posts of Detroit and Mackinac” had been designed as “mere depots for commerce with the Indians” by “the government which established and held them.” Jefferson, in contrast, wanted to extend the land base around these forts for military purposes. Hence, he “thought it would be important to obtain from the Indians, such a cession in the neighborhood of these posts as might maintain a militia proportioned to this object.” Already a veteran of the Louisiana Purchase with a keen understanding of the power of holding contiguous terrain for settlement and economic advancement, Jefferson had in mind acquiring lands in Michigan “so as to consolidate the new with the present settled country.”32

  In December of 1807, Jefferson’s secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, conveyed the order to William Hull to “hold a treaty with the chiefs of such Indian tribes or nations as are actually interested in the lands hereafter described.” While Dearborn pointed out that it would be “difficult” for Hull “to ascertain, with any tolerable degree of certainty, the quantity of acres,” Hull should expect to net in the ballpark of six hundred thousand acres, for which he was “not, on any condition, to exceed two cents per acre” and should endeavor to find it unnecessary to “exceed one cent per acre.”33 Hull was convinced of the soundness of this aim and began to plan the treaty council. “I probably shall not hold the treaty until about the first of June,” he wrote to Dearborn, “They are now on their hunting grounds, will soon be employed in making their Sugar, and in the month of May, will be engaged in their planting—In the meantime, I shall be making the preparatory arrangements.” Hull’s reply conveyed his own implicit awareness of Native people’s wide-ranging use of their lands—for maple sugaring, hunting, and farming—necessities of cultural meaning and subsistence. Still, he expressed in his letter to Dearborn, in the interest of progress and economics, this land should be finagled for the United States at less than the cost Dearborn had set. “If the treaty can be effected,” Hull penned, “and the lands can soon be opened for sale, it will be of vast advantage to this Country, and likewise to the United States—The more I see of the Country, the more valuable I consider it.” Hull added in a postscript to his missive that he thought it advisable to extend the boundary “so as to include the islands” in the land cession.34

  Governor Hull called a meeting of Ottawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi leaders in the Wyandot village of Brownstown, south of Detroit, later that year. On November 7, representatives of the various tribes gathered and agreed to cede what is now all of southeastern Michigan and a sliver of northwestern Ohio. The payment for these lands was set at $10,000 in “money, goods, and implements of husbandry.” Native people were to retain fishing and hunting rights and to receive “two blacksmiths,” provided to the tribes as evidence of the U.S. government’s “liberality.” Several small portions of land, ranging from one to six miles square, were to be “reserved to the said Indian nations” for their villages and agricultural pursuits. William Hull reported to Thomas Jefferson in December of 1807 that all had gone smoothly, and that he had “heard of no complaint from a single individual of the Indians” regarding the treaty. He attested, too, with his jacketed chest puffed slightly out, that he “believe[d] a treaty was never made on fairer principles.”35

  Governor Hull accomplished his objectives in this carefully orchestrated treaty council, and his description of the outcome may have faithfully reflected how he felt about the negotiations. But these treaty proceedings were not as pleasant as Hull’s description implies. While the treaty itself details only land, monies, objects, and expertise to be exchanged, Hull’s speech to the gathered Native leaders in advance of the treaty signing focused on an entirely different subject: warfare. When addressing representatives of the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi nations who held land and interests in Detroit, Hull highlighted themes of weapons, conflict, death, and danger. He addressed the gathered leaders as “My Children,” and directed them to listen “with attention” for “the good of [their] women and children.” Hull then offered his talk as a representation of the views of “Your father, the President of the United States” who “desires to recall to your minds the paternal policy pursued towards you by the United States.” Referencing the mounting tensions between the United States and Great Britain, Hull explained that “a misunderstanding having arisen between the United States and the English, war may possibly ensue.” In the event that war did break out, it was the president’s wish that “the Indians should be quiet spectators.” Hull’s purpose in this speech, in addition to attaining land, was to keep Native people from fighting with the British against the Americans. He assured his listeners that if they did not express “intentions hostile to the United States,” they would be left unmolested by the United States, and indeed, protected by the nation. But if they did harbor ill intentions, the United
States would “lift the hatchet” and “never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” He warned them that if the Indians dared to challenge the U.S. militarily, they “will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” He then summarized these pertinent points by emphasizing “the interest your Great Father takes in your welfare; how anxious he is to promote your happiness; how desirous he is to prevent you from taking any measures, which will involve you in ruin.” Hull concluded with the disclosure that this degree of candor was actually an act of kindness, “warning you of the fate of any tribe, who shall have the hardihood to raise the hatchet against us.” He then advised the leaders to render “a plain and decided answer” on their political allegiances.