by Tiya Miles
Elizabeth Denison Forth. Photo courtesy of Saint James Episcopal Church, Grosse Ile, Michigan.
Mrs. John Biddle (Eliza Falconer Bradish). By Thomas Sully, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York. Available at www.metmuseum.org.
One year after the close of the Civil War in 1866, Elizabeth Denison’s life ended in Detroit. Her file in the historic Elmwood Cemetery record indicates that she died on August 7, 1866, and was buried in the “Stranger’s Ground.”18 She had composed a will (and revision) with Solomon Sibley’s assistance and selected William Biddle, who had completed his law degree at Harvard and was then working as an attorney in Detroit, to serve as executor of her estate. In her will dated January 1860, Lisette Denison acknowledged that she was “unable to read and write.” She left various sums of money (between $50 and $100) to all of her living relatives: at that point only nieces and nephews, as she had lost her siblings and in-laws and never had children of her own. Finally, she authorized her trustee, William Biddle, to devote the remainder of her estate toward “the erection of a fine chapel for the use of the Protestant Episcopal Church.” This chapel was to be a remedy for “the poor in our house of worship . . . humble followers of the lowly Jesus . . . excluded from those courts . . . shut out from those holy services by the mammon of unrighteousness.” When Lisette dictated her intentions to Solomon Sibley, she spoke from experience. Lisette had been force-fed “the mammon,” or riches, of “unrighteousness.” She knew the bitter taste of poverty and the withering touch of slavery. A free woman who had stolen her own life with the loving aid of her family, she now wished to help others who suffered in want. Lisette signed this will, the only surviving document generated by an enslaved resident of Detroit, with her X mark.19
In the modern city fashioned by American consolidation and expansion, Elizabeth Denison became a landowner and a shareholder before the onset of the Civil War. Her family’s story is the most documentable case of slavery in the city of Detroit. Her will is a rare record of the consciousness and intentions of a member of that long-forgotten group. But even as Elizabeth Denison charted new paths for formerly enslaved residents of Detroit as well as for African American women, she negotiated the circumstances of her life in an environment shaped and colored by a history of slavery and indigenous land dispossession. Despite her noteworthy earnings, Lisette had been unable to prevent the indenture of her own nephew, Eastman Denison, aged eleven, to the son of Elijah Brush, Charles R. Brush, in 1834. She had not been able to avoid patronizing treatment on the part of her employers, or to break through the barriers of race, gender, class, and station that steered her into service as a “black cook” instead of earning her living as the brilliant businesswoman that she might have been a century later. And it is essential to this story that Lisette derived much of her wealth later in life from investments in land that Michigan governors William Hull and Lewis Cass had wrested from the families of the Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi, and Ojibwe nations.
For all the limitations of her choices, of her times, and of her community, Elizabeth Denison’s will reflects one clear value, one ethical commitment to be upheld even in death. She believed that it was paramount to tackle poverty, to welcome and tend to the poor who were excluded even in houses of worship. And so she dedicated the bulk of her wealth to the founding of a church that would respect and care for all people.20 William Biddle, Lisette’s trustee, selected Grosse Ile for the site of the church. This was the island vacation spot preferred by his family, where Lisette had once worked as their housekeeper. Saint James Chapel on the island was established as a result of Elizabeth Denison’s generosity, which was then enlarged by other contributors. The only existing original portrait of Lisette still hangs today in that house of worship, though Lisette herself had attended Mariners’ Church on Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit in the last years of her life.21
Is it ironic that a church made possible by a woman once enslaved in Detroit was built on Indian land illegally purchased by Detroit’s largest slaveholder? Is it unexpected that two of the cities where Lisette Denison labored as a servant and invested as a landlord—Pontiac and Wyandotte—bear the names of an historic Ottawa figure and a tribe removed by the state of Michigan? At the conclusion of this patchwork quilt of an historical chronicle, perhaps not. These apparent contradictions reflect the difficult compromises as well as the unsettling outcomes that abound in the history of slavery in Detroit. While slavery was never the driving force behind Detroit’s economy (based on animal pelts and land speculation), enslaved people’s labor proved critical to domestic, business, and social functions, even as challenges to slavery were formative for some Detroiters’ identity as Americans. A particular kind of society with slaves in early America, Detroit was a remarkable place where a northwestern frontier environment led to flexibility and creativity, even as the town’s location along a liquid international border made it more porous than many other slaveholding spaces. As a region where indigenous enslavement was a long and continuous practice, Detroit produced an unusual cross-section of African American and Native American experiences of slavery, revealing slavery’s adaptability to various natural and cultural environments and the interwoven processes of black and red racialization.22 At the same time, the trajectory of the narrative in these pages—from French colonial enslavement of mostly indigenous people to the life of a free black woman on the eve of the Civil War—suggests that even while Native slavery was always more prevalent in Detroit, black slavery emerged as more prominent in the documentary record. As black freed-people like Lisette Denison made their way in the nineteenth-century city, and as free Native Americans such as members of the Saginaw Chippewa Tribe at Mt. Pleasant (in mid-Michigan) and members of the Ottawa Grand Traverse Bay and Little Traverse Bay Bands (in northern Michigan) fought to maintain their tribal identities and reservations, those indigenous people who were held as slaves faded from historical records but continued to live and “make generations,” hidden in “plain view,” in and around the City of the Straits.23
The Bouquet of Roses
Along the central riverfront, the footprint of colonial Detroit is snug as a vintage pin cushion. Here, where silver spires pierce the powder blue of sky, shiny high-rise office buildings reflecting the cool shades of water, it is difficult to imagine a prior world of French shingled homes and fruit orchards, of canoes and bateaux plying the waters, of Red Coats marching down the roads, of human slavery and beaver frenzy. But these are the same streets, now paved and more densely populated, where an enslaved indigenous woman was forced to give birth in a prison cell, where an enslaved black woman joined with an indentured white man to rob her master’s storehouse, where the black family owned by a local merchant mourned the death of a father at sea, where Peter and Hannah Denison were purchased and later fought in the courts for their children’s freedom. These striking individuals and their stories have long been erased from the collective consciousness of the city. The physical markers of colonial Detroit, which might have aided in memory, have all but faded from the surface of the landscape. The Macomb farm has disappeared. The home of the Brushes is gone now, too, with only a sign for Brush Street and the square of Brush Park keeping silent vigil. The earliest surviving home in the city, built for Charles Trowbridge and his bride, Catherine Sibley, only dates back to 1826.24 Lisette Denison would have visited there, as Catherine was the same Sibley daughter who missed Lisette’s cookies while off at school in New York, and Charles Trowbridge helped to steward Lisette’s papers late in her life. But Lisette’s own house in Detroit has now vanished. In its place stands an empty lot, forlorn and riddled with glass shards.
There is currently no historical marker acknowledging slavery in Detroit—revealing that people were bought, sold, and held as property there. And yet, for more than a century spanning French, British, and American rule, Detroit was a place that saw unconscionable bondage, elicited inventive bids for freedom, and shaped lives not devoid of heroism. Where the human-made bui
ldings and memorial plaques have long gone or never existed, the river that first called to Native hunters and French adventurers remains. The waters still flow between the lakes, narrowing at the earthen bend where Detroit City rises into the clear and open atmosphere. The strait stood as witness to all that transpired in this place. We can rely on that river now as a road to history, even as residents in the past rowed across it to survive.
These were the thoughts ice-skating across my mind as I toured Detroit with my friend and colleague, the legal historian Martha Jones, and other scholars invited by Martha to take her informal but much lauded tour of the city in the winter of 2013. It was a frigid day, snow packed and dazzling white, with sun rays gleaming off the blanketed sidewalks and skyscrapers. As I thought these wandering thoughts about rivers and histories, I walked across Hart Plaza to the windy riverbank, where a riveting sculpture now stands in bronze and granite. Built in 2011 for the occasion of Detroit’s three hundredth birthday, the International Underground Railroad Memorial, sculpted by Ed Dwight, has a sister sculpture across the river in Windsor, Ontario. Each work of art represents a cluster of figures. On the Detroit side, African American freedom-seekers and underground activist George DeBaptiste gaze across the waterway to freedom; on the Windsor side, a family who has accomplished the crossing stares into each other’s eyes and toward the heavens.25 As I walked a slow circle around the Detroit monument, breaking from the tour group, I came across the statue of a woman at the side of the ensemble. She wore a scarf on a head tilted downward as if weary from the journey that had brought her this far; she grasped a small boy lovingly about the shoulders, and from her hand dangled a sculpted basket woven of bronze. The artist had shaped the basket as an empty vessel, perhaps symbolic of want and need, but on this day the bronze container overflowed. A stranger, another admirer of this moving, metal piece, had left behind a dried bouquet of red and white roses. Already touched by the artwork itself, the faces and forms of those silent figures, I was affected upon seeing the petals, gleaming blush and glowing pearl in a coating of snow and winter sunlight. Some visitor to the city or, more likely, a resident, had left a bouquet for a monument. Those roses transformed the sculpture into beautiful still life: Freedom-Seekers with Flowers. I imagined this bouquet was a gift not only for those we remember—the thousands who crossed this river in the celebrated Underground Railroad—but also for those we forget, the hundreds who were enslaved right here, on the streets of old Detroit, and the countless unseen victims of human trafficking at the border today. The disjuncture and even discomfort of the fact of slavery in this place made the gesture of the roses all the more magical. Human connection blooms in the toughest of circumstances. Communities persevere. Resilience triumphs over ruin. In this way, as in many others, Detroit is signpost, symbol, and story—for its denizens, a region, a nation, a world.
Gateway to Freedom, International Underground Railroad Memorial, author photos.
A Note on Historical Conversations and Concepts
Every project has more than a single origin story. This one has several, all shaped by a number of influences stemming from my experience as a resident of Michigan and professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor for nearly fifteen years. Teaching a capstone senior seminar for the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies on representations of slavery that included an Underground Railroad tour presented by the African American Cultural and Historical Museum of Washtenaw County led me to discover, along with my students, the rich local history of southeastern Michigan abolitionism. It was delving further into this local history in an investigation of Adrian, Michigan, abolitionist Laura Smith Haviland that led me to review Michigan’s 1855 personal liberty law. This protection for Michigan residents who were runaways from the slave states undermined the national Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Reading it set me on a quest to find earlier laws, opening my eyes to loopholes in the Northwest Ordinance that left legal room for slavery and indentured servitude to exist in Michigan. Intrigued and also disappointed by this latter fact that was at odds with my own ideas about the state, I wanted to pursue the subject focusing on Detroit, where Michigan’s practice of slavery was the most concentrated. Serendipitously, an interdisciplinary group of faculty members and graduate students at the University of Michigan began meeting to jointly explore the notion of introducing a new field of scholarly enquiry called the Detroit School of Urban Studies, in line with the Chicago and LA schools coined in previous decades. Our Department of Afroamerican and African Studies was centrally involved in this activity along with faculty in Social Work, Sociology, Urban Planning, and the Residential College, so I sat in on these discussions with urban planners, sociologists of the city, and twentieth-century urban historians, which heightened and sharpened my interest in Detroit. Although my peers were discussing postindustrial society, food deserts, green spaces, mass incarceration, and the pitfalls of gentrification, I could see links between this modern (and postmodern) Detroit and the Detroit of the colonial and early American eras when slavery was practiced. I began to visit Detroit museums and historic sites in southeastern Michigan to try to feel the outlines of a story I might tell even as my imagination was captured by a quotation by a colleague involved in the Detroit School discussions, the historian Charles Bright, who had written the following about Detroit history in an article in the Journal of American History:
The dominant historical discourse [on Detroit] is one of rise and fall, spiked by an immense nostalgia for the city that once (briefly) was. The recent past is often deployed as a cautionary tale about what goes wrong with urban spaces when racism, white flight, and industrial evacuation undercut a city’s viability. Such a historical construction places Detroit in a past that is now lost and irretrievable and leaves current residents . . . dangling at the end of history with little hope and no agency.1
Bright’s passage prompted a number of questions for me. Was Detroit’s history really lost and irretrievable? What did it mean to be “dangling at the end of history”? And what kind of historical evidence or narrative would provide the impetus for those dangling on the end to pull themselves back up, into a fuller knowledge of history, community, place, and power relations? It so happened that my considering of these questions coincided temporally with the War of 1812 bicentennial and the Civil War sesquicentennial. There were a number of related events taking place in the Detroit area, and what I observed at the ones I attended indicated to me that the historical thread about slavery and Detroit that the public wanted to hold on to was a story of Detroit’s role in the Underground Railroad. I sat in on sessions in which speakers extolled the bravery of their UGRR conductor ancestors and freedom-seeker ancestors, and sessions in which performers dramatically reenacted the feats of locally famous Michigan abolitionists. I also visited a new exhibit unveiled at the Detroit Historical Museum that celebrated the valiant organizers of the Detroit Underground and proclaimed the Northwest Territory to be a free space dating back to its founding in 1787. All of this interest in local history was exciting and even contagious, but there was something missing. Detroit was not only a place that fostered freedom bids as part of the Underground Railroad; it was also a place that fostered slavery throughout the second half of its colonial history and well into the American period. I wanted, then, to explore and share the stories of those who were enslaved in Detroit and to trace the form of slavery that took shape in a northern interior locale with a significant Native American presence. I wanted to understand how slavery and race intersected in early Detroit, how conditions of bondage and the extraction of unpaid labor intersected with gender roles and women’s experiences, how enslaved people undermined their condition of unfreedom, and whether remnants of Detroit’s history of slavery still existed in the city’s landscape.
After beginning research on this project in the spring of 2011, I was stunned to learn just how few scholarly works had been written on the subject of slavery in Detroit. The sum total of dedicated secondary source mater
ials that I uncovered with the help of my talented student research assistants consisted of a 1938 master’s thesis completed by Therese Kneip at the University of Detroit, a 1970 article titled “Black Slavery in Michigan” published by David Katzman in the journal American Studies, a chapter on “Black Slavery in Detroit” by Jorge Castellanos in the 1981 edited book Detroit Perspectives, and an article titled “The Fluid Frontier” published by Afua Cooper in the Canadian Review of American Studies in 2000. Cooper’s work in particular emphasized the importance of both natural and political borders along the Detroit River and put forward the notion of “the border as a significant unit of analysis” for Canadian-American transnational black history. “One discovers,” Cooper asserted about the border, “that Blacks who lived at its edges consciously manipulated it in their ‘search for place.’” Cooper’s insights about the material and metaphorical role of the border have influenced multiple studies, including my own. But in the year 2000, Afua Cooper’s approach was rare; few other works were picking up on the important themes and questions she presented, especially on the U.S. side of the border.2
More than a decade later, in 2012, Detroit journalist Bill McGraw released a well-researched newspaper story provocatively titled “Slavery Is Detroit’s Big, Bad Secret.” I had begun my research just a year earlier and wondered if McGraw had been drawn toward this topic, as I had been, by the groundswell of local talk about the Underground Railroad in Detroit’s history during public events marking anniversaries of the Civil War and the War of 1812. Two of these gatherings took place at the Detroit Historical Museum and were the result of a long-term collaboration between scholars based at the museum and at Wayne State University. The historians Denver Brunsman and Joel Stone were central to these endeavors and published edited books in 2009 and 2012 featuring the work of graduate students and linked to museum-based symposia. These detailed edited collections on Detroit during the Revolutionary Era and War of 1812 years touched on the dynamics of slavery and contributed to the small body of existing literature. In addition, David Lee Poremba’s scrupulously annotated chronology of Detroit completed for the city’s tercentennial in 2001 includes a wealth of detail about key events that contributes to the reconstruction of the context in which slavery unfolded.3 In fact, the three hundredth anniversary of the city’s founding was an important moment that inspired the production of a wider range of Detroit histories and chronicles than had been published since the early and mid-1900s; most of these anniversary works were geared toward popular audiences and fostered an energetic local public awareness of Detroit’s long and fascinating history.