by Tiya Miles
In the years before the next conflict with Great Britain that Detroiters were anxiously anticipating, various members of the Denison family depended upon and renewed personal ties around Detroit steeped in a vexed history of slavery. In 1810, Elijah and Adelaide Brush were raising four boys in Detroit. Several people of color also resided with them, according to the Detroit town census. Six free “colored” people and one “slave” were listed by tally (with no names given) beside Elijah Brush’s entry. There is no indication of that single enslaved person’s identity, but precedent suggests this was an indigenous woman, a personal servant of Adelaide’s dating back to the Askin family slaveholdings. The free people of color in the Brush household were the Denisons, who also appear in Detroit account ledgers in these same years. An anonymous merchant’s sales ledger locates Peter Denison in town, describing him as “Peter Tucker’s negroe man” in 1808. Over the next two years, Peter purchased “Sundries” and flour from this shopkeeper, regularly settling his account “in full.” He also purchased 1¼ yards of “Humhum,” a cotton textile used for lining coats. Peter’s procurement of this fabric is a telltale sign that the Denison women were sewing for the family and perhaps for market. In 1809, the anonymous shopkeeper refers to Peter Denison as “Peter, Brush’s black man,” a shift indicative of the local acceptance of the Denisons’ separation from the Tuckers two years after the pivotal freedom suit. The Denisons acted like and were treated as free people despite Judge Woodward’s decision, benefiting from what legal historian Rebecca Scott has described as “the alchemy of creating status out of circumstances.”53 But what had not changed in the time since the family fled to Canada and circled back to Detroit again was an insistence on the dependent attachment of black residents to white merchant elites. The use of possessive grammar and racial terminology to describe Peter in both ledger entries underscores the social hierarchy rooted in race and class that was still firmly in place in early 1800s Detroit.54 Looking for work, for respect, and for the best hope for their future, the Denison family spanned the border, living at times in Sandwich under the auspices of the Askins and living at times in Detroit with Elijah Brush. For this African American and Afro-Canadian family, Detroit was experienced on the ground as a place that bridged the river, regardless of differing national claims to lands on each side. In both locations, white patronage was a necessary element of the Denisons’ personal security and livelihood. Their act of rebellion in taking Catherine Tucker to court and refusing to let the border box them in to slavery could only get the family so far in a larger society shaped by notions of racial difference and territorial conquest.
The Denisons returned to a place of compromised familiarity within the old town of Detroit, finding steady work with the Askin family, once among the largest slaveholders around. From 1808 to 1811, the Askin family ledger of credits and debits includes several mentions of the Denisons. Lisette (Elizabeth) is the most visible Denison family member in this record, followed by her next younger brother, James. Born in the mid-1780s, Lisette was in her twenties by this time. Her baby brother Scipio appears in the ledger too, as does her father, Peter. The absence of her mother’s name suggests that Hannah worked from home at the Brush farm rather than crossing to the Askins’ nearby property to provide domestic services. In the course of his accounting, John Askin carefully recorded the racial and caste status of the Denisons. In 1808, “James Dennison Negro Boy” is listed. In 1809, “Lisette negroes man & woman” appear, followed in that same year by an entry for “James and Lisette servants.” In 1810, an entry for “Lissette & Jm. Denniston formerly slaves” simultaneously reveals John Askin’s heightened awareness of the family’s past state of bondage and his acceptance of their current status as free people. Despite Judge Augustus Woodward’s legal affirmation of Catherine Tucker’s right to the children in the 1807 court battle, his decision was not being applied on the ground where human relations played out in the nuanced exchanges of the everyday. The Denisons were treated like free people in Detroit, albeit free people of color with a lower standing than whites that upper-class community members took pains to inscribe in the cramped pages of their ledger books.
The Denison family, especially the children, did all manner of paid work for the Askins. Lisette Denison was compensated most often for spinning and sewing work; various entries noted items she produced with “thread,” “purple cloth,” and “gray coating,” a fabric used for making coats. For a mixed variety of products, Lisette was paid in wages, sums for set purchases, as well as in bartered material goods. In June of 1809 she was due two months’ worth of pay, a frustrating situation that may have influenced the care she took later in life with her finances. In August of that year the Askins gave Lisette “cash” to “buy shoes.” In 1809 John Askin registered frustration with Lisette in a rare ledger entry composed in complete sentences rather than dry lists of services, credits, and debits. Lisette had managed to make herself unavailable to Askin, who complained that Lisette was: “Employed in the whole of the winter nights for herself & Brother without [permission] having refused to twist worsted saying she must mend her Brother’s clothes which time must be [nearly] 3 Hours Every night in winter.” Although John and Archange Askin wanted Lisette to spend time making the tightly twisted “worsted” yarn that the family could use or sell, they found that Lisette “has only spun or twisted yarn three times this winter though frequently desired to do so.” During the cold winter months when days were short in the Great Lakes, Lisette was spending her evenings as she chose, helping her brother—or at least, that is what she told the Askins. Lisette possessed three quite valuable skills that she must have learned in apprenticeship to her mother, Hannah. She could spin; she could sew, and she could also bake. Recognizing that her specialized labor was prized enough that she would not be let go by the Askins even if they grew frustrated with her, Lisette controlled her own productivity. When it came to meeting her employer’s intense demands, Lisette demonstrated a self-protective and even stubborn streak that would continue to characterize her personality into late adulthood and set her on a path to owning fine apparel of her own.55
The Denisons provided essential services for the Askins. Under an 1810 ledger subheading titled “Lissette & Jm. Denniston formerly slaves,” John Askin entered a note with a tally of the payments owed the Denison family: “James his credit for services with 4 [1/2] Bushells of corn . . . his father . . . & Lisette.” James was performing agricultural labor on the Askin farm, and his father likely did the same. John Askin sometimes paid Peter in “bushelles of wheat,” “whiskey,” and “brandy.” At times he paid Peter, as well as Lisette, by way of Elijah Brush. Twice he paid Lisette in “alms,” church contributions that went to the pastor. Sometimes he paid in cash. John Askin regretted, though, that he was paying James more for fewer days of work than the slaveholder Captain McKee was paying “Geo” (George).56 The Denisons, as a family, were skilled and versatile laborers who knew how to drive hard bargains after years of experience with the Tuckers, not to mention the Brushes, the Askins, and even Governor Hull.
In addition to their exchanges with the Denisons, the Askins maintained a series of economic relationships with people and families they had once owned or who had been previously enslaved in Detroit. John Askin recorded trades for labor with “Mary,” “Tom,” and “George formerly my slave.” Mary was paid an “allowance” and found herself in a similar situation as Lisette Denison when John Askin fell behind in paying her. In response, Mary, who was provided with leather supplies to make “shoe packs,” “said she would work for nothing” during this period, suggesting that she occupied an ambiguous status between slavery, indentured servitude, and freedom, much like the Denisons. The Askins also continued to own enslaved people, though fewer than before, in these years. In 1810 John Askin recorded paying “4.8” in “expenses for Jim my negero.”57 The Denisons and other liminal laborers in Detroit of black or Native ancestry and ambiguous or former slave status were intertwined within
a web of community economic relationships that allowed them to make a living but continued to privilege the European and American elite. “Negro” workers and former “slaves” constructed, baked, fixed, and made all manner of things on Detroit farms, at Detroit shops, and inside Detroit households. They cut wood and planks, worked with ice and powered through snow, sewed textiles, and made durable shoes for the harsh weather conditions. Peter Denison likely resumed leading the black militia once he was back in the home of Elijah Brush. By 1809, Peter had purchased a muff, three blue handkerchiefs, more than thirty yards of blue flannel, and one pair of “worked mockasons” for which he paid in full. The bulk flannel order may have been for uniforms. Peter also bought “8 plain flat plates,” butter, snuff and tobacco that year. Peter often paid cash for his items, and he accepted cash intended to go “to Hannah,” and “to wife,” for seamstress work. Peter’s expenditures were recorded in the anonymous merchant’s ledger among a mix of purchases made by diverse Detroiters. French old settlers like Pierre Chêne and Madame Macabe appeared in this record book, buying tobacco and calico, as did American professionals like Solomon Sibley, who purchased a lady’s parasol for his wife and two pairs of “fine kid gloves.” An indigenous man listed as “Na’auguaijigue Chief” paid for ten plugs of tobacco with “muskrats in full.” And two African Americans besides the Denisons were listed in the ledger: a woman described as “Mary Ann Negroe Wench,” who was paid for one month of “services” and a boy called “Jack the little Negro,” who was paid for his “services” of delivering green tea and sugar. While procuring household goods as “Brush’s black man,” Peter Denison seems to have been ever mindful of his unstable status. In the winter of 1810, Elijah Brush wrote to John Askin, explaining that “Peter goes across to see if he can get any allowance from Lisette to assist in the purchase of his liberty if you should happen to owe him anything and wish it I will endeavor to furnish the money.” That season, Elizabeth Denison borrowed £14 from Askin, which Askin passed along to Brush “on acct [account] of Lisette my letter.” Peter and Hannah, aided by their industrious and effective daughter, moved out on their own, leaving Adelaide Brush to bemoan to her brother: “Peter and his wife [left] us this fall therefore, I have nobody to depend upon.”58
Formerly enslaved people—many of them now viewed as free people of color—were an integral part of the social and economic fabric that knit Detroit together in the years before the next war. The legal conditions of Detroit’s location in Michigan Territory of the Northwest, together with the town’s continued geographical isolation, meant that relationships had to be carefully negotiated. Such mediations provided a legally vulnerable family like the Denisons with the cover to live as free residents. At the same time, formerly enslaved people’s need for cover created opportunity for merchants and landowners, who could contract work for delayed pay or no pay at all, lend money or withhold it, to continue exerting significant influence over disadvantaged people’s lives. The Denisons met this overlay of obligation and control with a remarkable creativity and adroitness that simultaneously bespeaks their own aspirations as well as those of Detroit’s liminal working class of color for whom detailed accounts do not survive.
The Black Militia and the War of 1812
Governor Hull first said no when asked to accept the position of brigadier general of the Northwestern Army. He repeated his refusal upon the second request from Secretary of War William Eustis. Hull was not eager to take the highest western military commission on the eve of America’s second war with Great Britain. Perhaps age was an issue uppermost in his mind. A local hero of the Revolutionary War for his brave bayonet work, Hull was now fifty-nine years old and far less nimble. His wife Sarah’s warning must also have rung in his head as he weighed this momentous decision. She had told him three years before to beware the manipulations of Washington insiders. Or maybe Hull was feeling miffed, as he had offered to serve in the military during the preceding winter and was told his service was not necessary. A final barrier to Hull’s acquiescence was his reluctance to relinquish his gubernatorial post. But upon the third request of Secretary Eustis in the winter of 1812, and with the promise that he could hold both the civilian and military titles, Hull relented, agreeing to lead the forces of all federal troops in Michigan against a concerted British and Indian assault that was sure to come before long.59 War had not yet been declared, but tensions were rising feverishly in hot spots around the country. First the attack of the Leopard upon the U.S.S. Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia had dramatically symbolized the campaign of British impressments and the Crown’s practice of bullying American ships and blockading American trade. Then the striking, Ohio-born Shawnee leader Tecumseh had gathered influence among several western and southern indigenous nations.
Tecumseh was organizing a coalition around the spiritual vision of his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet, in which indigenous people renewed their cultures, reclaimed their faiths, and took back their homelands. Tecumseh’s aim, fed by Tenskwatawa’s vision, was for Native independence won through a confederation of tribes, but he would ally with the British in order to achieve this goal. The Prophet had received permission from Potawatomi and Kickapoo residents to found a multi-tribal village of proponents on the Tippecanoe River in their territory of Indiana. A spiritual, intellectual, and organizational hub of the Native revolution, Prophet’s Town was a bright red flag waving in the face of a bullish American government. As Prophet’s Town drew adherents, Tecumseh, whose mother was Creek, traveled south into Cherokee and Creek territory sharing his two-pronged message of “prophetic nativism” and “intertribal unity.”60 Watching the spread of Tecumseh’s message and the political and spiritual gathering of nations in the western interior pushed the Americans to the offensive. In 1811 troops led by Indiana governor and future U.S. president William Henry Harrison had closed in on Prophet’s Town, the source, Harrison believed, of a series of raids on Indiana settlers.61 Aware of Harrison’s approach, the warriors struck first and were counterattacked by Harrison’s men, who then burned the empty settlement to the ground, making Harrison into a frontier folk hero for segments of the American populace and inspiring the future pro-Harrison campaign rallying cry: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” Tenskwatawa would not be deterred by American reprisals; he rebuilt Prophet’s Town and grew its size to eight hundred warriors. Tecumseh, who had been traveling during the battle as an ambassador of the Native resistance, had survived to fight another dawn against the Americans.62
Governor Hull had been keeping track of these dire developments from the capital in Detroit, as had been local residents. As Tecumseh and the Prophet’s notoriety mushroomed with news of the Battle of Tippecanoe traveling across the forests and prairies, Detroiters were growing ever more fearful of an Indian attack on their town. In 1811, leading citizens drafted a memorial to the “president, senate, and house of representatives” in Washington, voicing their fears and urging “an increase in military force.” The memorial writers described “dissatisfactions with the aboriginal inhabitants of these countries,” which had “been kindled into an open flame.” They begged the government not to allow “conflagration” to spread “along the whole line of the frontier,” as “the Savage mind, once fully incensed, once diverted from the pursuit of their ordinary subsistence, once turned upon plunder, once inflamed by the loss of their kindred and friends, once satisfied with the taste of blood, is difficult to appease, and as terrible as subtle in vengeance. The horrors of savage belligerence description cannot paint. No picture can resemble the reality.” But paint it these authors did, and with a self-focused, stereotyping brush that refused to see the legitimacy in Native people’s defense of their original homelands and ways of life. This memorial, signed by Solomon Sibley, Augustus Woodward, George McDougall, Harris Hickman, and Richard Smyth, was the work of Anglo American professional and working-class men, who stressed the need for government “protection” in “their exposed and defenceless situation.”63<
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Governor Hull, who may not have exactly appreciated the pattern Detroiters had set of going over his head with their letters and memorials, agreed with the townspeople’s diagnosis and prescription. The borderland northwest, Hull predicted, would be a front line of the international altercation to come. The British had already shown a willingness to abuse the power of the Royal Navy while carrying out their impressment policies. As a peninsula surrounded by coastline, Michigan was especially exposed to maritime attack, far more vulnerable than southern territories like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A terrestrial threat also existed, deep inside the western woodlands. Although indigenous people had been pushed beyond a boundary in treaties at Greenville, Fort Wayne, and Detroit, they were inspired by spiritual renewal and outraged at the continual loss of land, and they were increasingly organizing across tribal lines. Hull, as historian Michael Witgen has put it, was “painfully aware that the United States, in stark contrast with the Canadians, had a troubled and violent history with the Native peoples living within the borders of the territory he claimed to govern . . . and assumed that the peoples of Anishinaabewaki [Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi country] would turn against the United States.”64 Back in 1807, a wary Governor Hull had ordered the Michigan militia to rebuild the pickets surrounding the town to a height of eighteen feet. Lately, he had been fixated on the notion that the government should immediately build a naval fleet to patrol the Great Lakes. In March of 1812, he wrote to Secretary of War Eustis recommending that “A force adequate to the defense of that vulnerable point [Detroit], would prevent war with the savages, and probably induce the enemy to abandon Upper Canada without opposition. The naval force of the Lakes would in that event fall into our possession.” In April of 1812, Hull accepted his commission as brigadier general, but he never received the enhanced naval force he longed for.65