Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  An Auspicious Era

  As Lisette Denison searched the deep brown eyes of her baby nieces and nephews who just one generation ago would have been born into slavery, she may have cast her mind to the shadowed reality of that past, and then to the possibilities of a brighter future in Michigan. Certainly other talented Detroiters, especially those who enjoyed racial privilege, social position, and a reassuring measure of wealth, scanned the eastern horizon for signs of opportunity. In the newly launched Detroit Gazette newspaper, established in July of 1817, tavern owner Richard Smyth was announcing a “meeting of the citizens of Detroit” to discuss “important matters relating to trade and the general prosperity.” The Abbott family’s merchant business, established in the 1770s and burgled back then by the company’s slave woman and servant man, was still going strong in the fall of 1817, when James Abbott advertised blankets, sundry cloths, and “fine” flour for sale on credit in the Gazette. In the spring of 1817, John R. Williams, also a merchant in Detroit and descendant of the slaveholding Campaus on his mother’s side, wrote to Samuel Abbott, a lawyer at Mackinac, to conduct business and share big news. Williams’s letter bridged the old and new character of the city—the Detroit of colonial and Revolutionary War times that relied on systems of unfree labor and the post–War of 1812 Detroit that was increasingly modernizing and expanding its economy. In his missive, Williams solicited “Panis” labor and at the same time sounded a ring of ebullient optimism about industrial development and growth. Williams opened by disclosing his “difficulty of procuring servants” in Detroit and telling Abbott: “I am informed they can be procured at Mackinac, of the Panis Nation of both sexes.” Specifically, Williams “would be glad to have a boy and girl from 12 to 18 years of age, Bound under indentures to serve for a limited number of years, say to the age of 30.” If Abbott would do Williams the service of sending him a “boy and girl . . . of good moral habits and tractable disposition,” Williams would clear the account on Abbott’s “draft at sight.” John Williams’s request bespoke his close association of Native people with servitude, such that he believed the French term for an Indian slave, “Panis,” designated a particular tribe of people. In the 1810s, Williams’s entreaty smacked of old patterns. Many an indigenous person defined as property had been ordered from the straits of Mackinac by Detroit merchants in the century past. While Williams did not propose to buy these children outright, and could not have done so under Michigan law, he could pay Abbott a sizable fee in the form of debts eliminated for procuring their indentures such that they would be bound to him until mid-adulthood. Williams made no mention of indigenous parents or tribal leaders in his letter. A complacent consumer of Native labor, he fully expected these children to be easily plucked from their families and offered up for his use.3

  After dispensing with the prosaic business of getting hold of “Panis” servants, Williams turned readily to the “news.” He informed Abbott that “The President of the U.S. has signified his determination to visit us this summer. I look upon the event as an auspicious aera in the prospective improvement of this country, and anticipate more alteration within the next five years than the country has undergone since its first settlement. The projected canal to connect the waters of Lake Erie with those of the Huron, will no doubt greatly acclimate the population & prosperity of this country.” John Williams, who would become the first formally elected mayor of Detroit seven years after writing this letter, had the keen eye of a futurist. The Erie Canal, completed in 1825, would indeed open the floodgates of Euro-American settlement in Michigan and set Detroit on the path to becoming “a truly American city.” For Williams, this modern version of Detroit would, and should, coincide with an older colonial order in which “tractable,” or readily managed, indigenous children could be ordered like items in a catalogue. When President James Monroe visited the city for five days that August, “a period of great glorification for the small city,” he might have witnessed the enduring imprint of this colonial history inscribed in the menial class status of Detroit’s residents of color.4

  Beyond the growth of the white population and support of trade through federal infrastructure, residents of John Williams’s ilk looked toward higher education as a means of uplifting Michigan Territory to the level of existing states. Citizens began rallying for the formation of a local university and launched into avid fundraising. Leading men stepped immediately forward in a “rapid and liberal manner,” according to the Gazette.5 On the first day that subscriptions were collected, more than £1,000 of funding had been pledged for the cause that all upheld as worthy. Judge Augustus Woodward, who had always been fond of serious interdisciplinary study, and who, according to two nineteenth-century chroniclers, still kept one “pawnee” servant as “one of the last slaves in Detroit,” introduced a bill to establish the school and delved into the development of a “System of Universal Science” to organize areas of study for the university.6 James May, the merchant whose wrecked ship in 1801 had killed a man he owned, made a payment of $5, the initial installment toward an overall pledge “to be paid in money.” According to the record of the university treasurer, May agreed to pay this amount each year over five years in “the aid of the University of Michigan.” James Abbott, also a slaveholder, pledged $315.32. Attorney Solomon Sibley, whose son would later own slaves and rise to political prominence in Minnesota, promised $625.67. The Detroit freemasons, in which slaveholder Joseph Campau served as treasurer, contributed an undisclosed major gift to the school. The university also drew support from a public relief fund dating back to the fire of 1805 that had not been fully exhausted. Hybrid from the outset, the school’s financial foundation was sourced from both private and public wealth. Tuition was set at “a small sum,” but “certified” students unable to pay would be supported by the territorial treasury.7 Members of Detroit’s old slaveholding network were among those who contributed the earliest designated contributions, making public education in Michigan possible. The original list of trustees for the school included surnames of some of Detroit’s earliest and largest slaveholding families: the Campaus, the Abbotts, and the Macombs. Organized as a “Primary School” linked to a “Classical Academy” with training through the high school level, the University of Michigania (also known as The Catholepistemiad) was formally established by territorial Governor Lewis Cass with the Reverend John Monteith serving as president and Father Gabriel Richard serving as vice president. Augustus Woodward, the main mover behind the ambitious initiative, laid the first cornerstone for the inaugural campus building in September of 1817. Two decades later, in 1837, the institution would spread its wings, gliding southwest to the forested hamlet of Ann Arbor.8

  This relocation to Ann Arbor, and the university’s institutional and intellectual maturation there in the second half of the nineteenth century, depended on a large swath of land acquired through an unexpected chain of transactions. An agreement known as the Treaty of 1817 had cemented a transfer of approximately 4.2 million acres of land from indigenous to Euro-American hands in the aftermath of the War of 1812. The story was by then a familiar one in the Detroit River region and Ohio Valley: land speculation and government pressure pushed indigenous peoples to treat or sell, lest they be smothered by incoming settlers or driven out following violent battles with militiamen and military officers. But in the negotiations of this particular treaty, leaders of the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi nations specified that they wanted a portion of their land to be directed toward a certain purpose. They granted territory along the River Raisin in southeastern Michigan to the state, to be used or sold in order to support educational opportunities for their children. These Native leaders wished to see an extension of Ste. Anne’s Church in Detroit and the “corporation of the college of Detroit” (Michigania) in order to better prepare their own children in a moment when territorial administrators had their minds set on statehood and a citizenry defined mainly as white. Michigan officials would later trade a portion of this original 1817 la
nd grant on the River Raisin for acreage in Ann Arbor near the Huron River. Here, the college was relocated from its original site in downtown Detroit and expanded to offer advanced courses of classical study.9

  An iconic Midwestern and American educational institution, the University of Michigan was born of a compromise made by Native people in the context of a century of colonial warfare and land dispossession in the Great Lakes. Built on ill-gotten lands and funded, in part, by family wealth derived from slave labor, the University of Michigan system now shines as a cultural star of the state. In 1976, the Michigan State Legislature adopted Public Act 174, a law authorizing tuition waivers for tribally enrolled Native Americans who reside in Michigan and have been admitted to any of the state’s public universities. This redistribution of public resources to citizens of indigenous nations is an ethical response to troubled historical relationships. Tuition for Native people has been, in the words of an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan from the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa Indians in northern Michigan, “prepaid in land and blood.”10

  The Mammon of Unrighteousness

  Lisette Denison may have wondered, as talk of a university bolstered town pride, whether her nieces and nephews would ever study there. Records indicate they would not. The first African American student, Samuel Codes Watson, was admitted to the University of Michigan medical school in 1853; the first African American woman, Mary Henrietta Graham, was admitted to the college of literature in 1876.11 In the 1810s and 1820s, the livelihoods of Lisette and her family members still depended upon domestic labor and close connections with prominent white Detroiters. But Lisette had shown in her dealings with John Askin, when refusing to twist worsted yarn for hours on end, that she was capable of shaping the terms of such domestic employment. In the early 1820s, Lisette left the household of Adelaide Askin and began working for the family of prominent attorney Solomon Sibley. Lisette cooked for the Sibleys and provided care for their children. When Solomon Sibley’s daughter, Catherine, left Detroit to attend Emma Willard’s finishing school for girls in New York, she wrote back to her mother: “Tell Lisette I often wish I could visit her cookie jar.” The Sibleys appreciated Elizabeth Denison’s finely honed skills in the kitchen. And Lisette, by all appearances of what transpired over the next decade, appreciated Solomon Sibley’s facility with the law.12

  Elizabeth Denison had grown up enslaved on a farm in the Detroit River hinterlands. She had no formal education and never learned to read or write. She had come of age during the era of Detroit’s transformation into an American town and watched as Detroit area lands were extracted from indigenous people, divided up into lots, and sold for government profit. With the growing influx of eastern and southern settlers, Lisette saw Detroit transform into a small city with three thousand residents by 1817.13 She recognized the value of land and, like many white citizens around her, sought to acquire it for herself, even though moral title, she might have realized in her heart, belonged to the Native peoples who increasingly lived on small parcels of reservation lands north of Detroit near the Saginaw River, at the straits of Mackinac, and toward the western banks of Lake Michigan. As she matured, Lisette managed to redefine herself as a financially savvy urbanite at the dawn of Detroit’s industrial metamorphosis. Beginning in 1825, Solomon Sibley’s papers show a series of land purchases made by Lisette Denison and facilitated by Sibley. She bought 48.5 acres (four lots) in the town of Pontiac, due north of Detroit, from Sibley’s business associate Stephen Mack, becoming the first black landowner in the city. She then leased these lands to her brother Scipio. Scipio and Charlotte Denison soon had another daughter, who was baptized in Pontiac. When their family needed a loan of $5, Scipio turned to his sister Lisette, who had herself married by then, in 1827, to a man who shared her brother’s first name: Scipio Forth.14

  Lisette’s marriage was short-lived. Her husband vanished from the historical record and, presumably, from her life soon thereafter. The mystery of her husband’s disappearance was likely a source of sadness for Lisette, but she rebounded, taking a job in 1831 in the home of the president of Farmers and Mechanics Bank, former Detroit mayor, and War of 1812 veteran John Biddle. Lisette grew and diversified her investments throughout the 1830s. After her brother vacated the Pontiac land, Lisette rented it out. She then bought stock in the steamboat Michigan and shares in Farmers and Mechanics Bank. In the spring of 1837, Lisette acquired land in downtown Detroit from Solomon Sibley’s son, Ebenezer Sibley. She paid her mortgage off in full in 1842. Like her father before her, Elizabeth Denison had a knack for bartering desired skills that brought her support from prominent whites and then pushing that support to access new and sometimes radical opportunities. A notable cook and seamstress, Lisette had channeled the goodwill and connections of her influential patrons to become a woman of invested wealth. Whether to continue the benefit of these key relationships, to procure liquid assets in the form of cash payments, or to maintain caregiving responsibilities for children she had helped to raise, Lisette continued to work for John and Eliza Biddle as a cook, nanny, and housekeeper into the 1850s. But Lisette did not make her long-term domestic employment with the Biddles easy for the prominent couple. Recognizing her importance to the family, she continued to negotiate her own labor terms. In 1839, a visitor to the Biddle’s elegant new home in Wyandotte, Michigan (fifteen miles south of Detroit), commented that she “[did] not know how [Mrs. Biddle] would get on but for Lisette who, notwithstanding her frequent threats of leaving, seems as firmly established as ever.”15

  Fifteen years after this observation was made by a guest in her home, Eliza Biddle was still dependent on Lisette in what was an interdependent, often strained relationship. In 1855, Lisette accompanied Eliza on a trip to Paris in order to “keep house” for her employer. According to Eliza, who mentioned Lisette’s cooking and penchant for fine gloves frequently in her letters to relatives and friends, Lisette created buckwheat concoctions that astonished and delighted Parisian high society. Almost forty years before Quaker Oats marketed Aunt Jemima pancake mix, making the stereotyped image of black women’s domestic servitude a nostalgic American sensation, Biddle wrote the following about Lisette’s cakes: “Lisette is making us quite celebrated in Paris by her buckwheat cakes and I expect some of these days to be invited to come to the Tuileries [Palace] and bring my black cook & her griddle that the Empress may enjoy the American luxury.” Eliza Biddle proudly reported that the “Ambassador” himself requested Lisette’s cakes. Rather than sending a parcel containing the treats, Eliza Biddle sent Lisette, who startled the “indignant” French chef “when she produced a fire in the furnace and produced her griddle.” Eliza Biddle did not forget Elizabeth Denison’s race, or shed her sense that a formerly enslaved African American woman could be viewed as a personal possession to be sent around town like a package. Lisette was too sharp to have been unaware of these racially biased attitudes on the part of her employer, or of Parisians’ view of her as a folksy relic of America’s quixotic slaveholding past. She even allowed her resentment to slip to the surface so that Biddle could glimpse her feelings. Eliza Biddle wrote about Lisette: “She thinks when she is sent for by the Emperor she will not return to our modest ménage but remain at court & perhaps have a carriage of her own.” Eliza Biddle recognized Elizabeth Denison’s ambition to do something greater than cooking for the Biddles, but she quickly squelched any critical introspection that such recognition might have raised for her. The next line of her letter celebrated the fame of Lisette’s cakes while erasing Lisette’s name as the creator of the delicacies: “Wherever we go we hear of these famous buckwheat cakes and of course when we invite company it is to sit round the table & enjoy them.”16

  Elizabeth Denison made her griddle cakes, accepted her pay, and saved her Paris earnings. She kept close watch on her house in Detroit with the help of the Biddles and their associate, Mr. Campau, checking on whether the house was rented and if the rent was equal to the value. Eliza Biddle fou
nd Lisette’s careful habit of saving money to be excessive; she wanted Lisette to hand over control of her earnings to the Biddles and accept a yearly allowance of $25 instead. Eliza Biddle’s stated reason for this change was that Lisette was living too frugally and, worse, embarrassing the Biddles by “asking charity when she has really more than she can spend if she were to live till she is a hundred & no one she cares for to leave it to when she dies.” Revealing the fissures in her relationship with her “black cook,” Eliza complained that Lisette was telling people that she had been “badly used by everybody.” The resentment Lisette felt after years of laboring as a domestic and being treated like a mere functionary showed even more in her elder age. Eliza Biddle tried to have her son William, Lisette’s favorite among the Biddle children, “cheat” Lisette (Biddle’s own choice of words) in order to gain control of her finances. Instead of receiving the Biddle’s money in the paid allowance as she would be led to believe, Lisette would be receiving and spending down her own funds. But Eliza Biddle’s financial scheme did not work. Lisette Denison maintained her savings and, contrary to Biddle’s condescending expectation, made a plan for her bequest that included those she cared for.17