Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  Near the end of the eighteenth century, a black slave woman belonging to James Abbott, a partner in one of the largest trading firms in the city, was at the center of an episode that has been given conflicting interpretations by historians.

  Among the oldest accounts collected by historian Clarence Burton, considered the dean of Detroit’s history, is the story of Jean Baptiste Contencineau, a Frenchman, and a black slave woman, Ann (or Nancy) Wyley. The two concocted “a plan to rob the storehouse and firm” of the man’s employer, Abbott & Finchly, and “then set fire in order to avoid detection.” Their purpose, according to Burton, was to gain possession of the contents of a box kept in the storehouse. On June 24, 1774, Contencineau, “at the request of the woman, set fire to the building and carried away from it . . . the plunder he wanted in a small box containing six dollars (piasters) of which four dollars were silver and two dollars paper.”14

  The prisoners confessed, but each attempted to blame the other. They were tried before Justice of the Peace Philip Dejean of Fort Detroit, himself a slaveholder, possibly with a jury and certainly with the approval of Henry Hamilton, the region’s lieutenant governor. Both were found guilty and sentenced to be hanged, but there was such a public outcry against the sentence that it became impossible to find an executioner. “Hamilton agreed to free the woman from the penalty about to be inflicted upon her, if she would act as executioner of the Frenchman. Of course, she agreed and the Frenchman was accordingly swung off.”15 The execution unsettled the local population and they protested the act as unjust and illegal.

  Professor McRae cited the case in his dissertation but concluded that both Contencineau and Wyley were “apprehended, tried and hung.” Errin T. Stegich, in his essay on the incident in the anthology Revolutionary Detroit, spells the woman’s name as Wiley and one of the employers as Finchley, but his narrative is very similar to Burton’s and McRae’s, citing both of them. A wildly divergent account occurs in Stephen Middleton’s The Black Laws in the Old Northwest, in which he concludes that the pair conspired to flee from bondage posing as master and slave, a ruse reminiscent of the one used by William and Ellen Craft in their 1848 flight to freedom. Light-skinned Mrs. Craft dressed in male clothing and passed as a Southern planter traveling openly with her husband, who pretended to be her personal slave. However, lacking the money for travel, Contencineau and Wiley plotted to rob the master. “They agreed to break into their owner’s home to steal the cash and clothing they needed before embarking on their journey.” Middleton doesn’t mention any apprehension or trial, stating that the conspiracy delayed them long enough for the owner to make them examples by reclaiming them and then hanging them in front of the other slaves.

  A noted chronicler of Detroit’s early days, Friend Palmer, supplies a coda to this incident. In his version, Ann Wyley, despite the strong plea for her manumission, was sentenced to death by a justice of the peace, and was buried on Larned Street. “When in 1817 the foundations of the church [Sainte Anne de Détroit Roman Catholic Church, the city’s oldest church] were being excavated, the body of this unfortunate woman was found face downward,” Palmer wrote. “It was supposed she was in a trance at the time of her burial.”16

  During the Revolutionary War, the settlements in Detroit were repeatedly attacked by the British with the help of allied Native Americans. A number of black Americans often found themselves between the combatants, a rock and a hard place that offered them little comfort and safety. Such was the situation of Jean Baptiste Pointe Du Sable, a fur trader who had been born in Haiti and later founded Chicago. Du Sable was arrested by the British, who charged him with being sympathetic to the Americans. In a letter, a British officer on September 1, 1779, observed that Du Sable was brought in custody to Detroit but apparently was a model prisoner. “The Negro, since his imprisonment, has in every respect behaved in a manner becoming a man in his situation, and has many friends who give him a good character.” This “good character” may have allowed him permission to travel to various parts of the state under British supervision, and possibly spy for them.17

  By the end of the war in 1783, Du Sable regularly traveled back and forth between Michigan and Illinois and was clearly a man of substance, according to historians. “Undoubtedly he owned one of the most complete establishments in the Middle West outside of Detroit and St. Louis.”18

  The 1782 census showed there were 179 slaves in Detroit, 101 of them females; thus over a nine-year period, the number of blacks in bondage had nearly doubled.19 At this rate of increase, the next census counted more than 300 slaves in the city, representing about 5 percent of the total population. One of the city’s largest slaveholders was John Askin. An inventory of his property in 1787 lists 6 slaves—3 black males, including Jupiter, whose estimated value was $450, much higher than the others; 2 “wenches,” and 1 Panis. One of those women was Monette or Manette, with whom he fathered three children. On average, a good male slave could be purchased for £50, or $150, the price Askin received for the sale of his slave Pompey. According to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, slavery was not permitted, and so Askin and many others were in violation of the law, including William Macomb and Jean Cecot, each of whom owned 4 men and 4 women. (By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Macomb would own 26 slaves.) Simon Compau, William Forsith, and Thomas Cox owned 5 each. Even a woman, Alexis Maisonville, owned 4 slaves.20All told, seventy-eight families were slaveholders, about one in every four families in the city. Given that the majority of the slaves were women, it is obvious that domestic and household workers were more in demand than field hands or manual laborers.21

  In 1795, Detroit was still under British jurisdiction, and the city was a de facto part of Upper Canada. Despite being illegal, slavery was in practice, and some black freedom seekers were not about to succumb to the order of the day. One such man was William Kenny, who formerly belonged to Alexander McKee, the deputy superintendent of Indian affairs. At some point, Kenny, a mulatto, had escaped from Detroit. David Tait was hired to find him and return him to his owner. Tait’s search was frustrated at every turn, so much so that he resorted to expressing his exasperation in letters. Kenny was also adept with the pen and wrote a response to his former owner:

  Dear Master—I embrace this opportunity to let you know that I am well and where I am. Likewise the reasons of my coming away (which I am very sorry I came away I did) it was occasioned by Capt. Elliots taking the liberties he did and abusing me in your absence the things which was left in my charge he took from me. I am in the North Western Territory living with a gentleman by name of Turner one of the judges of this Territory and he uses me extraordinary well.

  Kenny goes on to relate with obvious sarcasm that he has encountered another man who was acquainted with his former master and who sends his regards. He closes by saying, “No more at Present. But still remains your obedient servant, William Kenny.”22

  In contrast, there were a number of enslaved blacks who were incredibly attached to their masters and found it extremely difficult to depart from them. The Jay Treaty forbade any more slaves to be brought into the territory, but total emancipation was way over the horizon.

  There was no centennial celebration in Detroit in 1801, but if there had been one for its more than three thousand citizens, it would have hardly been a festive occasion for the city’s uncounted black residents. Most of them were still caught in the throes of a legal system that left them languishing in limbo, a no-man’s-land between freedom and slavery. Though Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance prohibited slavery, it was ineffective when it came to liberating those blacks already in captivity. Given their small population, any thought of a revolt would have been unrealistically naive and futile, though there were certainly a few who felt as Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, and Nat Turner did when they plotted their uprisings in the South. Only those slaves bold enough to paddle to the center of the Detroit River and drop anchor were safe from the ambiguous laws that made it precarious to be on either side of th
e river. Whether in Detroit or Canada, slaveholders had the upper hand, and in 1802 they sent a delegation to William Henry Harrison, the territorial governor, to insist that slavery was a necessity to fill the shortage of laborers, even though the shortage was diminishing.23 An indecisive Harrison, an advocate for slavery and later the ninth president of the United States, did little to remedy the situation, thereby leaving any sort of repeal of Article VI to the electorate.

  The first five years of the new century brought little change for black Detroiters. They were as chained to servitude as they were in the past, hammering at the anvil in the blacksmith shop, laboring on the construction of Sainte Anne’s, weaving baskets, and preparing furs for their owners—endeavors for which they were not compensated. They could be sold for cash, traded for goods, and “even used as collateral for large purchases and debt resolution. In this way, they provided financial security to their owners and to the settlement at large.”24

  During the summer of 1805, a fire virtually leveled Old Town, the core of the city, leaving only one stone building standing. There were no fatalities, though one young boy was crippled. A careless pipe smoker was the source of the fire. He was tending his horses when a spark from his pipe ignited a nearby stack of hay. The stable was quickly engulfed in flames. Attempts to douse the fire with water from a furrier’s vat proved futile after bits of fur clogged the firemen’s hoses. A bucket brigade was summoned, including a number of blacks in the city, and they hurried to the scene but could not halt the spread of the fire. To salvage some of their goods, particularly the more expensive furs and other valuable items, storeowners loaded them in canoes and paddled out on the river away from the fire.25

  A destructive four-hour fire was only a temporary setback for the resilient Detroiters, and the slaves were assigned the task of helping to rebuild the city under the guidance of Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who had designed Washington, DC, and who perhaps was assisted by his friend, black inventor and innovator Benjamin Banneker.

  Not long after the building began, Peter Denison in 1807, was seeking freedom for his children. Held in captivity by William Tucker, Denison was allowed a lot of latitude by his owner, who resided in what is today Michigan’s Macomb County, named after the wealthy slaveholder. When Tucker died, his will specified that Peter and his wife, Hannah, would be free upon the death of his widow, Catherine. Tucker bequeathed Denison’s four children to his sons, but Denison sued to annul this provision. The case for his children’s freedom was based on the federal law that established the Michigan Territory and outlawed slavery in it. The petitioners lost the suit, but Judge Augustus Woodward, for whom the city’s major street would be named, ruled that three of the children must be consigned to slavery for life but the other one would be emancipated upon reaching his twenty-fifth birthday. Judge Woodward stipulated in a later ruling that if black Americans were to acquire freedom in Canada, they could not be returned to slavery in the United States. “Two of Denison’s children, Scipio and Elizabeth, took advantage of this ruling by escaping to Canada for a few years and then returning to Detroit as free citizens.”26 Theirs was a landmark case and would be cited as a precedent in a number of appeals for emancipation by enslaved African Americans.

  This was just the beginning of Peter Denison’s celebrity. In 1808, the same year in which Thomas Jefferson signed a bill ending the US involvement in the international slave trade, Governor William Hull formed a militia to protect citizens and property against the local Native Americans, and Denison’s role as a leader in it earned him further acclaim. Equally celebrated was African American slave James Robinson, among the most decorated soldiers in both the War of 1812 and the Revolutionary War.

  Hundreds of African Americans served in the US Navy or were aboard privateers that plied the Great Lakes during the War of 1812. Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry extended a warm welcome to blacks who were desirous of being a part of the fleet that he was building. When his fleet defeated the British warships at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie, he was effusive in his comments about the performance of black sailors. This battle marked a turning point in the war, and “the victory forced the British to pull out of Detroit, and much of what is now Michigan came under U.S. control, allowing Major General William Henry Harrison to cross Lake Michigan and defeat the retreating British at Canada’s Battle of the Thames.”27 At this time there were approximately 144 blacks living in Michigan Territory and 24 of them were listed as slaves, 10 of them held in Detroit. After the war, a large influx of fugitive slaves entered the territory.28

  Five years after the war, Lake Erie was again in the news with the building of the Erie Canal. By 1825, when the more than 350-mile canal was completed, it opened an international portal that facilitated the flow of white Easterners into the territory. As a result, that event was followed by the passing of a territorial law in April 1827 that restricted the entry of black migrants. It required all “Negroes in the territory to have a valid court-attested certificate of freedom and to register with the clerk of the county court.” More grievous, a $500 bond guaranteeing good behavior was required to be filed by all black immigrants.29 These onerous regulations had much to do with keeping the black population in check and limiting its growth in the city. The census of 1820 recorded 1,355 whites and 67 blacks in Detroit; by 1830 both groups had practically doubled to 2,096 whites and 126 blacks, of whom 32 were slaves.30 During these early years, the black population in Detroit fluctuated between 2 and 5 percent, but it was always a vigorous and resourceful community.

  2

  THE BLACKBURN AFFAIR

  Detroit in 1830 was a city in flux, where whites were primarily troubled by a wave of recent arrivals from the South, “blues people” seeking freedom from bondage. It was a warm summer night on July 6, 1831, when a young mulatto couple—Thornton, nineteen, and Ruthie or Lucie, as she was later called, who was a few years older—arrived, refusing to be relegated to lifelong bondage. They escaped from slavery in Louisville, Kentucky, without the help of the Underground Railroad and briefly resided in Detroit before moving to Canada. At the time of their escape, Lucie had already been sold for $300 and was to be sent down the river for resale in New Orleans or Natchez, where her fair skin made her much more valuable than in Louisville. Thornton knew time was not on their side, and with the nation in the midst of July Fourth celebrations perhaps among the celebrants they could move less conspicuously toward freedom. Traveling as a couple presented an additional challenge.

  There were hordes of bounty hunters, who were ever watchful; they lurked in the shadows of docks, around train stations, and at other points of entry and departure, ready to grab an unsuspecting fugitive slave in order to earn the reward. A $25 bounty was set for the capture and return of Thornton to his master; it was a price far less than the $400 he could command on the auction block. Exhausted from a harrowing four-day trip by boat and stagecoach, the couple was invited to stay at the home of James Slaughter, a local black businessman.

  Many Southern families were settling into Detroit’s black community. It was an easy transition for the Blackburns. At the time, in Detroit, there were some discussions here and there about antislavery activities. It seemed familiar to them, especially the waterfront setting, which was much like the one they knew in Louisville. The black population was smaller but no less energetic, hardworking, and enterprising. It was only a matter of days before Thornton found a job as a stonemason.

  “The Blackburns had settled in Detroit in hope that their troubles were behind them, but two disturbing events had occurred within their first two months in the city,” Karolyn Smardz Frost wrote in I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land. “First came the news that a bloody slave uprising had been launched in Southampton County, Virginia. Originally planned for the same weekend as Thornton and Lucie’s flight from Louisville . . . it had been delayed until August 22 because of the illness on the part of the riot’s organizer. This was an educated and deeply religious slave named Nat Turner, a visionary with a gift fo
r oratory.”1

  People received the news of Turner’s revolt much as they had received David Walker’s Appeal, a Christian manifesto to end slavery that was widely circulated in 1829. From city to city, even in the North, the racial tension was palpable. When he and his “army” were finished, the massacre of fifty-nine whites sent a chilling effect across the nation. Prophet Nat, as Turner was called, was pursued relentlessly by the law and outlaws. When they finally caught him, he was hanged and decapitated, and his head was posted near the uprising as a warning to others who considered violent means of liberation.

  “The second incident had very serious personal implications for the Blackburns, although they would not realize it for some time.”2 Practically one year after their arrival in the city, as Thornton was walking through town, he bumped into a white man he knew from Louisville. They exchanged a few words, and Thornton left the acquaintance with the impression that he was now a free man.

  On June 14, 1833, Sheriff John Wilson appeared at the Blackburns’ home with an order to arrest them as fugitive slaves. He and his deputy, Lemuel Goodell, were to receive fifty dollars each after the trial, which was a legal requirement under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793. The Blackburns were to be delivered to the dock at the foot of Randolph Street, then the primary business point in the city.3 It took some legal maneuvering to bring them both before the judge. They were shocked to learn that James Slaughter, the black man who befriended them and with whom they lived upon arriving in Detroit, testified against them in court, recounting what they told him about their means of escape. Despite being a man of dubious reputation—it was said that he ran a bordello—his testimony was damning. Word of the trial spread fast among the city’s fugitive slaves. The trial would be a test case on how free African Americans actually were in the territory.4