Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  The War of 1812: Indian Involvement 1811–1816. Map originally published in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, edited by Helen Hornbeck Tanner. Copyright © 1987 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

  While Hull was lacking in full support from the federal government on the waterways, he did have at the ready Ohio militiamen, Michigan militiamen, and, one rare source suggests, the black militia of Detroit.66 Hull first had to gather his scattered troops from Ohio before preparing a defense of the northwestern border. According to a dispatch from New York written on July 18, Hull “arrived at Detroit, with 2,300 men, after a tedious march through the wilderness.”67 In order to get there, Hull and his troops had been compelled to cut a trail through a portion of the thick and formidable marshland of northern Ohio’s Black Swamp, watered by the Maumee River and greater than one hundred miles in length.68 Facing the acute challenge of traversing a difficult landscape weakened Hull’s army before the war had officially begun. At the Miami River, Hull chartered a private boat, the schooner Cuyahoga, to transport the wives and children of officers as well as trunks of records and medical supplies to Detroit. Because the War Department sent notice that the United States had formally declared war on Great Britain via the sluggish regular post, Hull found out the news days after British military leaders knew of it in Canada. Thus prepared to engage, officers at Fort Malden on the British side of the Detroit River dispatched a longboat, which captured the ship Hull had commissioned and commandeered Hull’s supplies. Even as a Washington writer cheered Hull’s arrival in Detroit, exclaiming Governor Hull “had arrived at Detroit on [July] the 5th, with his army amounting to nearly 2,500, all in good health and high spirits,” Hull had been disadvantaged by geography and his own government and bested by the British command.69

  The fate of the Cuyahoga foreshadowed the nature of this off-kilter conflict that tested, but in the end left in place, territorial boundaries established by the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 was a series of odd engagements, missed opportunities, unfortunate accidents, and unanticipated atrocities, especially in Michigan Territory. Governor Hull, as well as the town of Detroit, would suffer from both mistakes and misfortune in a war that many Americans, especially Federalists in New England, were not even in favor of. But in the Great Lakes, from New York to Michigan Territory, fear of a Native alliance with the all too proximal British troops in Canada, fed a hawkish orientation. In New York, rumors circulated about the rise of an Indian force in league with the enemy. “Great exertions were making by the British at Fort Malden, to array the Indians against us,” a letter writer exclaimed, “Previous to the declaration of war, a tomahawk, stained with blood, had been sent from Malden to all the neighboring tribes.”70 The United States planned to forestall attack by launching an assertive invasion of Canada from Detroit. Directed by Secretary of War Eustis to prepare to wage an offensive war, Hull and his officers began to plot a frontal assault on British targets. Eustis commanded: “By my letter of the 18th inst. You were informed that war was declared against Great Britain. Herewith enclosed, you will receive a copy of that act, and of the President’s proclamation, and you are authorized to commence offensive operations accordingly. Should the force under your command be equal to the enterprise, consistent with the safety of your own posts, you will take possession of Malden, and extend your conquests as circumstances may justify.”71

  Hull and his men made an auspicious beginning for the American strategy by crossing the Detroit River and occupying the tiny town of Sandwich in July. Black militiamen may very well have been among this force. On July 20, 1812, an unsigned journalist’s dispatch written in Ohio described the scene at Sandwich based on an eyewitness account: “We are further enabled to inform our readers, that we have since our last learned from a gentleman direct from Sandwich . . . that the army crossed the river without opposition; that the inhabitants generally fled, but on receiving the proclamation they returned to their houses, and resumed their businesses.” After giving the account of the Sandwich campaign in which Hull had posted a proclamation inviting residents to join the American cause and assuring their protection, the writer of this piece made the following observation: “Previous to the army’s leaving Detroit, a company of the black infantry associated and requested to accompany the army in support of America and freedom. Governor Hull accept[ed] the offer and gave commissions. The captain is said to be a very intelligent man, and the company perform well.”72

  In a dispatch full of precise detail about troop movements, artillery pieces, and the eighty barrels of flour secured from the king’s commissary at Sandwich, the black militia was entered into the written record of the War of 1812. The “intelligent captain” must have been Peter Denison, who had spent ample time in Sandwich but had resettled in Detroit with Elijah Brush, colonel of the First Regiment of the Michigan Volunteer Militia, before the war began. The reporter from Ohio noted in his commentary that these black men offered to fight for “America” and “freedom.” However, the history of the Denison family, and of all enslaved people in the Detroit border zone, whether of black, indigenous, or Afro-Native ancestry, indicates a strategic lack of national allegiance. These were “revolutionary renegades,” who fought for freedom, for independence, and for dignity of life, in ways that could sync with or diverge from the aims of any particular colonial or state power.73 As the first black military company on American soil authorized by a government official and commanded by black officers, the men of the black militia fought for the right of their families to be free from tyranny in any form.

  Hull’s taste of victory in the occupied Detroit River town did not last long. On July 17, the British along with Ojibwe and Ottawa allies captured the American fort on Mackinac Island. Hull heard this portentous news from two Ojibwe travelers whose route took them through Detroit. Judge Augustus Woodward wrote about the loss of the fort in the concluding lines of his July 28 letter to Secretary Eustis: “You will, no doubt, have received, through other channels, the information which has arrived here of the capture of Michilimackina by the enemy.” It was in this same letter that Woodward complained about Hull issuing “three commissions to captain Denison, lieutenant Burgess, and ensign Bosset, black men.”74 Would not these black soldiers have continued on through the next engagement of the war that unfolded in the town where they were stationed? In all likelihood, former slaves and men of color based in Detroit fought in the War of 1812.

  On August 12, a British force led by Colonel Isaac Brock together with a Native force led by British Indian agent and slaveholder Matthew Elliott set sights on Detroit. At 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 15, Brock sent a message to Hull by way of a small vessel demanding Hull’s relinquishment of the fort. “The force at my disposal authorizes me to require of you the immediate surrender of Detroit,” Brock insisted, catching Hull by surprise. And then Brock’s letter included a line meant to stoke the latent fears of Hull and his constituents. “It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination,” Brock wrote, “but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be beyond controul the moment the context commences.” Hull stalled, hoping for reinforcements that never came from troops that he did not realize were located just miles outside of town. At 3:00 p.m., Hull rejected Brock’s demand. By 4:00 p.m. the British were firing canons across the river. The Northwestern Army counterfired from artillery positioned in the heart of downtown Detroit. Hull directed Elijah Brush to guard the northern edge of the town, backing into the woodlands. If the black militia was activated, they were likely assigned a similar duty, positioning Peter Denison to coordinate with his colleague, Elijah Brush.75

  The British assault continued unabated into the night. Fitful residents who dared not sleep may have recalled stories of the siege of the village by the Ottawa warrior Pontiac two generations prior. The terrified occupants of Detroit Town desperately buried money and silver, or
directed their slaves to do so. Women and children fled to the enclosed stockade at the fort as cannonball shots splintered the wooden walls, killing two soldiers.76 Lisette and Hannah Denison would have been among these women, clustered, perhaps, with Adelaide Askin and her children. Resourceful and independent, Lisette may have joined local women in nursing the wounded. Her brothers, James and Scipio, may have been defending the fort with her father, Peter, and other men of the black militia.

  With ammunition running low, no reinforcements, and the threat of Indian reprisals against the civilian population that he was duty bound to protect as governor, Hull decided, in a fateful choice that military historians continue to analyze and debate, to surrender the town. Elijah Brush was among the four officers who drafted the statement of Detroit’s capitulation, an American defeat that resounded across the country and brought harsh recriminations for Hull. Within forty-eight hours of the commencement of Colonel Brock’s attack, old Fort Detroit was British once again. Imagine the fear of fugitive slaves who had escaped from Canada, the rage of Richard Smyth and the men who frequented his tavern. As the outlying farmhouses along the river were plundered by Native warriors, the disgraced Governor Hull moved into his former brick home, now occupied by his daughter and her family, where he was placed under armed British guard.77

  On the following Monday, August 17, Hull, his officers and staff, and members of the regular army were taken as prisoners of war to Quebec. Elijah Brush was among them. The military historian Gene Allen Smith has written that “Peter Denison was taken off with other white and black prisoners to Canada before being paroled.” Although no apparent document directly points to this outcome, it is certainly plausible, as the British paraded nearly four hundred prisoners seized at Detroit.78 If Peter was taken to Quebec but released early, he died just days later. On August 27 of 1812, Reverend Richard Pollard of St. John’s Church entered into the registry: “Peter Dennison . . . departed this life and was buried.”79 The archival trail of Detroit’s black militia ends here, with him.

  But the war went on after the death of Peter Denison in 1812 and after the death of Elijah Brush in 1813. The families of these men lived through the British occupation of Detroit that lasted for more than a year, during which time Augustus Woodward intervened on behalf of the populace and won protections from the British commanding officer. In the winter of 1813, British troops and Tecumseh’s warriors attacked French Town on the River Raisin in Michigan, a settlement that had formed when several French families migrated from Detroit in the 1780s. American troops were defeated, captured, and tortured there, a low point for American morale and a rallying point for demoralized U.S. soldiers who would take up the cry: “Remember the Raisin!” But by the next summer, U.S. forces were landing significant blows against the British. In 1813, after hanging his battle flag commemorating a quote by felled captain James Lawrence—“Don’t give up the ship!”—naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry won a dramatic sea contest against vessels of the British navy on Lake Erie, a body of water where William Hull had first said an American force was needed. In 1814, General William Henry Harrison, who directed the Northwestern Army in Hull’s wake, led troops to recapture Detroit for the United States. A series of clashes ensued in which British troops, Native forces, and American soldiers confronted one another but did not score victories decisive enough to tip the scales of war. In the Battle of New Orleans, which took place in January of 1815 just after American and British diplomats meeting in Belgium had signed the Treaty of Ghent in December, Commander Andrew Jackson amassed a multiracial force, including black and Choctaw soldiers, that prevented British troops from entering the city.

  It was not until February of 1815 that Congress ratified the treaty and most Americans heard the good news that the war had formally ended. But neither the United States nor Great Britain had been victorious in the conflict. No territory had been gained or lost by either nation, though Canadians could take pride in having successfully fended off multiple American incursions. Native Americans in the region saw their influence severely reduced with the death of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 and the reinstatement of American power at western forts at the war’s end. The War of 1812 would be the last moment when indigenous forces allied across multiple tribal lines to challenge the United States militarily. In the northern reaches of Michigan, western reaches of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and great west of the high plains and Rocky Mountains, hundreds of Native populations still organized autonomous societies outside the reach of American colonialism.80 But in the Ohio Valley, the lower peninsula of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and the Southeast, the outcome of this war was “most ominous to the Indians.”81

  While devastating for indigenous people, the conflict was a virtual “draw” for Great Britain and the United States, which has caused it to fade in memory for citizens of both these nations. But the War of 1812, often called the “forgotten” war of American history, marks a watershed moment for the story of slavery in Detroit.82 By the time war began, the number of enslaved people in the town and riverine suburbs had shrunk to a handful of individuals listed in the Ste. Anne’s Church register. In 1812, a black woman named Nansey was described as the slave of Jacques Laselle, as was her son, Jean Baptiste Rémond, conceived with an “unknown father.” Abraham Ford, a black man, was married to Marie Louise, a free Native woman of French and Native parentage, whose mother was “of the Sauteur nation” (Ojibwe); they had a child, Julie Ford, born in 1813. Abraham Ford is described in the register as “negro of Colonel Matthew Elliott.” By the end of the war, slavery in Detroit had nearly met its demise. In 1820, no enslaved people were listed in the Ste. Anne’s Church register or the Detroit census. The 1830 census noted one enslaved person within the borders of Michigan. Two years prior to Michigan statehood, in 1835, two enslaved people lived in Monroe and Cass Counties, Michigan.

  Warfare, political struggle, and territorial laws had weakened the practice of slavery in Detroit during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but enslaved people themselves dealt the final blows. Adopting a renegade politics, traversing the border in pursuit of freedom, and fighting against those who claimed to own them with legal as well as lethal weapons, enslaved people undermined the corrupt, fraying, suspect system until it snapped. They no doubt shared the view of fugitive slave J. Levy, who wrote a letter back to his master from Canada in 1852, boldly proclaiming that “liberty is ever watchful” and “security” to “self” “demanded the sacrifice.”83

  During the War of 1812, hundreds of black men fought for the British as well as for the Americans, seeking freedom and respect for the priceless risk they took with their lives and futures. In the United States, African Americans sailed with Perry’s troops on Lake Erie, spying Canada just across the waters.84 What these men learned about the secrets of the border, what enslaved Detroiters and black militia members had long known, became prized information for disparate black communities, especially after 1833 when Britain abolished slavery in its colonies and Canada became free soil. The stories shared by these revolutionary renegades traveled with military men of color and fugitives from slavery, adding a shimmering thread of hope to the collective consciousness held by African Americans and other oppressed peoples.85

  Conclusion:

  The American City (1817 and Beyond)

  The drama continues, but it does so with wrenching twists and turns, fervent disjuncture, and dizzying prospects.

  —June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, Mapping Detroit, 2015

  After the dust in Detroit had settled following the War of 1812, Elizabeth Denison, known to her family by the nickname Lisette, continued on in the household of Adelaide Brush, widow of militiaman Elijah Brush. Lisette and her siblings lived as free residents of the city. But limitations that the Denison family and all free people of color had faced continued into mid-century; theirs was a hard-won and consistently compromised freedom. Lisette would spend the rest of her working life in the most comm
on employment for free black women in the 1800s: as a domestic laborer in the homes of white Americans. In August of 1816, Lisette shared the joyful occasion of her brother Scipio’s marriage to the seventeen-year-old Charlotte Paul in Detroit. In December of that year, Scipio and Charlotte had a daughter, Phoebe, who was baptized in 1817 across the river at St. John’s Church in Sandwich. Lisette served as a sponsor for her baby niece’s baptism, as she and the rest of the Denison family’s younger generations continued their frequent crossings of the U.S.-Canadian border in what was, essentially, a transnational way of life. In 1819, a son named James was born to Scipio and Charlotte and baptized at St. John’s, sponsored by his aunt Lisette, his uncle James, and his father Scipio. The absence of Hannah Denison’s name in these church records of the 1810s suggests that she followed her husband, Peter Denison, into her final rest before these new grandbabies entered the world. If so, Hannah Denison missed Detroit’s surge of growth in what one privileged Detroiter called an “auspicious era.”1 Like Hannah and Peter Denison, and Elijah Brush, many of the most prominent figures in Detroit’s slaveholding history had passed away or relocated by the 1820s. William Macomb, the town’s largest slaveholder in the eighteenth century, had died before 1800. In 1817, his widow, Sarah Macomb, and son, David Macomb, were advertising nearly five thousand acres of land for sale, including plots in Upper Canada, “most excellent Land, on Grosse Isle,” and an “elegant and pleasantly situated farm on the border of the Detroit River.” The two other Macomb sons, William and John, had begun the process of selling their Detroit River and island lands in 1810, with John and his nephew William preferring to run a coffee plantation on the Caribbean island of Cuba where slavery was still patently legal. John Askin would pass away in 1818 at his home on the river, and James May would leave this life in 1829.2