Black Detroit

by Herb Boyd

  A supportive black community filled the courtroom.5 Key to the case was the extent to which the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 would be applied. If the defendants could present their papers of manumission, then they were beyond the reach of the law. But no such papers were offered in evidence by the Blackburns; certainly they knew that forgeries, if discovered, would doom them to even graver sentences.6

  A group of outraged black citizens was no longer content to sit passively by and allow the wheels of justice to creak along. There were whispers of torching the city. “They met at the home of Benjamin Willoughby, a real estate speculator, financier and owner of a lumber business, who came to Detroit from Kentucky sometime between 1817 and 1830,” journalist and author Betty DeRamus wrote. “He had worked as a laborer and acquired some money, often lending it to others. At his home, participants hatched a plot to free the Blackburns; the plan put Willoughby’s own property and even his life at risk.”7

  The plan was part charade and deception. Once Sheriff Wilson allowed Mrs. Blackburn to receive visitors, Mrs. Caroline French and Mrs. Tabitha Lightfoot were chosen to enter her jail cell. While they chatted, Mrs. French changed clothes with Lucie. As Mrs. Lightfoot and Lucie left the jail under cover of night, they faked convulsive weeping, covering their faces. By the time the sheriff caught wind of the ruse, Lucie was across the river in Canada.8 Changing places, however, left Mrs. French in the clutches of the law, and she faced the prospect of taking Lucie’s place permanently. Fortunately, her father, Cornelius Leonard Lenox, a man of considerable wealth and clout, interceded and was able to get her released on a writ of habeas corpus. While out on bail, she fled to Canada, where she spent several months.9 She would ultimately return to the city and resume living with her family. Meanwhile, with Lucie safe, her husband became the center of attention and retribution.

  While Sheriff Wilson and the jailer transported Thornton from jail to a waiting steamer, they were attacked and their prisoner escaped. Apparently, the sheriff was intimidated by the crowd of angry black citizens who had gathered outside the jail when they discovered Thornton was being returned to Louisville.10 To placate the enraged citizenry, “Blackburn requested that he speak to the crowd in order to allay their fears and to appease their anger. As the people crowded in to hear Blackburn, someone slipped him a pistol which he brandished and ran into a coach where he locked himself in, and promised to kill whoever attempted to recapture him.”11

  In the melee, with the assistance of several black Detroiters, Blackburn slipped from the coach and fled to a boat that took him to Canada. During the altercation, Sheriff Wilson was hit in the head with a blunt object, knocking his teeth out and fracturing his skull. He died a year later. There was one other fatality. Lewis Austin was shot in the lung and died two years later from the wound. Reunited with his wife, Thornton decided that living across the river from Detroit was not far enough from the greedy slave catchers. The couple continued their flight farther from Detroit.

  In the wake of their capture, festering anger grew to a full-scale riot. On July 11, 1833, the jail was set on fire, and a few days later, the stables abutting the jail went up in flames killing a number of horses.12 Blacks were accused of setting this fire, but there was no evidence they were involved. The situation had escalated to the point that two weeks later Mayor Marshall Chapin sent an urgent letter to Secretary of War Lewis Cass, requesting troops to stabilize the city. “The recent excesses committed in this city by the black population within its limits, and particularly the repeated attempts to fire the town,” Chapin wrote, “have so far excited the apprehensions of our citizens for their property and lives. That I am instructed by the common council . . . to ask that a detachment of the United States troops may be stationed at this place, to act under the directions of the municipal authority until the excitement has subsided and tranquility is restored.”13

  Cass, a former governor of the Michigan Territory and a former slaveholder, acceded to the mayor’s wishes, and martial law was declared. The heavy deployment of US troops and a complement of local militia suppressed the riot, and a sizable contingent of blacks bolted to Canada, leaving only about fifty or so to withstand the harsh indictments. Most burdensome was the posting of a $500 bond in order to remain in the city. Not since the British replaced the French as a dominant force in the city had there been such a dramatic change in the black population.14

  According to historian David S. Reynolds, “Canada had abolished slavery but it did not have a firm policy on fugitive slaves. Imprisoned again, the Blackburns faced the bleak prospect of a forced return to the United States. In a landmark trial, however, a Canadian court ruled that they had committed no capital crime and could not be extradited to America. Canada was thereafter regarded as a protective home for fugitive blacks who wanted to live without fear of being recaptured and sent south.”

  The effects of the riot of 1833 lingered for nearly four years. It had created an immutable chasm between black and white Detroiters. This tension was in part responsible for the flight of many African Americans to Canada and other parts of the country. When Michigan gained statehood in 1837, there were only eleven blacks listed in the city’s directory, the same number that arrived in New Amsterdam in 1626.15 But as with most enumerations of blacks, this one was by no means accurate, because it included only the most prosperous citizens, not the majority who worked the docks, cleaned the streets, or were otherwise menially employed. In fact, the census of 1840 counted nearly two hundred African American residents. Whatever the number, they were resourceful and resilient in withstanding the blatant hostility of the white community.

  Among these stalwarts were Madison Lightfoot and his wife, both of whom were pivotally involved in the Blackburns’ escape; Benjamin Willoughby; Robert Banks, who owned a haberdashery that sold used clothes; Peter Copper, a teamster who operated his own cab service; and one woman proprietor, Ann Butler, a laundress and possibly the widow of William Butler, a barber and activist.16 The Butlers’ freeborn son, who accompanied the Blackburns to Canada, was threatened with extradition along with the others.17 By 1846, they were joined by such notables as Henry Bibb, the publisher whose slave narrative is among the most anthologized in the African American literary canon; the Rev. William C. Monroe, an abolitionist; William Lambert; and George DeBaptiste. These citizens were charter members of the burgeoning antislavery society that in 1837 had been forged by Shubael Conant, a white silversmith and watchmaker.18 This organization had continued the antislavery activity begun in 1832 by a group of Quakers led by Elizabeth Margaret Chandler in the Raisin River Valley in Adrian, Michigan. At the top of their agenda was the boycott of any product produced by slave labor, particularly cotton. Historian Silas Farmer claimed that by 1836 “all the slaves were either dead or manumitted,” so any movement against slavery was forged to protect those recently in flight from bondage.19

  On October 24, 1839, a fugitive slave was abducted and claimed by bounty hunters from Missouri. Upon hearing about the capture, black and white abolitionists quickly assembled outside City Hall to prevent the US marshal from delivering the man from the courthouse to the jail. Fearing an attack from the abolitionists, the marshal called on the troops stationed nearby, and they were able to halt the demonstration. They apprehended one white and three blacks, placing them in a cell with the slave. After some pressure from the black community, the protesters and the slave were released, and the runaway’s freedom “was purchased from his owner by citizens of Detroit who contributed the amount placed upon him by his owner.”20

  Although slavery was outlawed in the state, there were many instances in which slave catchers and bounty hunters ignored the law. There were also too many cases in which the government had to be pressured to enforce measures in protecting blacks that had been in place, more or less, since the enactment of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787. In addition, the Detroit Free Press, the city’s first daily, along with headlines about the cholera epidemic and the financial panic of 1837,
ran a rash of ads offering rewards for fugitive slaves. These factors were instrumental in the forging of a great abolitionist movement.

  3

  BLACK ABOLITIONISTS

  Born in Trenton, New Jersey, William Lambert was twenty-one when he arrived in Detroit in 1838. He had visited the city on two previous occasions while working on boats that plied the lakes. With an activist background inculcated by Quakers, he wasted no time getting acquainted with like-minded abolitionists. When he wasn’t working as a tailor, he could be found among the leaders of the city’s antislavery organizations.1

  His main preoccupation was working as a conductor on the Underground Railroad, assuring the safety of runaway slaves during their stay in Detroit and then escorting them to freedom across the river. He was a phenomenal conductor, and while he may have exaggerated the number of fugitives he guided to Canada, the general consensus among historians is that some forty thousand men, women, and children in flight from bondage passed through his gentle and caring hands.2 His prominence as a conductor was soon superseded by his skills as an orator when in 1840 he addressed the Michigan legislature demanding a constitutional franchise for an increasing black population that had grown to 707 in the state and 193 in the city.3 These migrants often arrived with only the clothes on their backs. The churches were the most accommodating sanctuary for them.

  Nowhere were the doors more open and the sanctuary more protective than the historic Second Baptist Church, the oldest black congregation in Michigan, founded in 1836 by thirteen former slaves. It was Detroit’s seventh major church. Though not an ex-slave, Lambert was among the leaders of the congregation and worked closely with the church’s first pastor, the Rev. William C. Monroe. Monroe had led a contingent of black members from First Baptist Church. Their departure was reminiscent of the action taken by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones in Philadelphia when they were dissatisfied with being consigned to “nigger pews.”4 In 1843, the Rev. Monroe presided over the first State Convention of Colored Citizens, held at his church. Lambert stirred the assembly with his eloquence.

  By the time George DeBaptiste arrived in Detroit from Indiana in 1846, he had served as a conductor on the Underground Railroad for more than five years. The successful businessman was also a civic leader and a trusted friend of Monroe, Lambert, and a host of other antislavery advocates. A native of Virginia, where he was born free in 1815, DeBaptiste had traveled widely and was the steward and valet for President William Henry Harrison.

  Given DeBaptiste’s close association with Lambert, it’s likely that they conspired in the usage of renegades, known as the McKensyites, who took slaves from their owners in order to resell them. “Sometimes they sold slaves three and four times before bringing them north.” Lambert said he used these scoundrels, concluding that the ends justified the means.5 DeBaptiste and Lambert created an elaborate system of communication that combined secret handshakes and passwords that they defined as the African American Mysteries: the Order of the Men of Oppression. This system made it possible to convey information from passengers to conductors on the Railroad, thereby facilitating safe passage. DeBaptiste, during his tenure as a conductor in Indiana, also devised a complicated way of switching horses and wagons to throw slave catchers off the trail of his horses, all of whom knew how to get from station to station in pitch darkness.6

  Henry Bibb was born in 1815 in Kentucky. In his slave narrative, published in 1849, he mentions Michigan only in passing to indicate that he had spent the summer in the state in 1845. Although he didn’t spend a great amount time in the city, his popular newspaper, The Voice of the Fugitive, was widely circulated after the Fugitive Slave Act became the law of the land on September 18, 1850.

  The newspaper mainly focused on black folklore, slave superstitions, marriage, and escape episodes. It also revealed Bibb’s literary skills. He was a consummate storyteller with a keen eye on politics and on the legal ramifications of slavery and the issue of property:

  A slave from the State of Virginia, for cruel treatment left the State between daylight and dark, being borne off by one of his master’s finest horses, and finally landed in Canada, where the British laws recognize no such thing as property in a human being. He was pursued by his owners, who expected to take advantage of the British law by claiming him as a fugitive from justice, and as such he was arrested and brought before the court of Queen’s Bench. They swore that he was, at a certain time, the slave of Mr. A . . . and that he ran away at such a time and stole and brought off a horse. They enquired who the horse belonged to and it was ascertained that the slave and horse both belonged to the same person. The court therefore decided that the horse and the man were both recognized, in the State of Virginia, alike, as articles of property, belonging to the same person—therefore, if there was theft committed on either side, the former must have stolen off the latter—the horse brought away the man, and not the man the horse. So the man was discharged and pronounced free according to the laws of Canada.7

  From his base in Canada, just across the river from Detroit, Bibb continued to agitate for freedom, often in concert with such luminaries and fellow authors as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown. Abolitionists, black or white, found it extremely perilous on the antislavery circuit in 1850.

  When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed by Congress, it was essentially a compromise, allowing California to enter the Union as a free state. The balance between slave and non-slave states, which had been maintained since the Missouri Compromise of 1820, was tilted by the entry of California in favor of non-slave states, but in return the act empowered slaveholders by giving bounty hunters unlimited leeway in the capture of runaways. An affidavit from a slave owner to a federal marshal was all that was required for the return of their escaped “property.” Suspected slaves had no legal standing whatsoever and no right to a trial. They were stripped of any means to defend themselves. The kidnapping of Solomon Northup nine years earlier was now government sanctioned. This was just the measure Bibb needed to push him more decisively to the emigrationist movement that was gradually galvanizing.

  Bibb was soon one of a host of leaders who believed that being north of the “Cotton Curtain” was not enough to protect one from the “soul stealers.” That group included Mary Ann Shadd, who was based in Chatham, Ontario.

  There was no consensus about assimilation among the eminent emancipationists. Bibb and Martin Delany agreed on the need for a separate black identity and culture, but Shadd believed, as her father had taught her, that full equality could be achieved only by integrating with the larger white society. Their differing views on integration set them apart and created a heated rivalry, a schism over who would be the leader of the black community in western Canada.8

  The integrationist/separatist dichotomy between Shadd and Bibb soon spilled over into their educational pursuits. Shadd, an unrepentant integrationist, vehemently rejected any form of caste system, whether based on race or any other characteristic, while Bibb’s separatist philosophy anticipated a political vector that would later gain traction. More important, they disagreed on how funds should be raised to assist former slaves. The rivalry ceased, however, when Bibb’s office was torched and burned to the ground in 1853. One year later he was dead.

  After Bibb’s death, a number of his associates in Detroit continued this struggle against caste, including the ever resourceful clothier Robert Banks, who had come to the city from the West Indies via New York City.9 When Bibb and other members of the antislavery society were able to travel to various conventions, much of the financial burden was defrayed by Banks. In 1844 he was the only African American businessman listed among the economic elite. It was reported that he had twenty-five employees, including at one time or another Lambert and DeBaptiste.10 Banks, along with the Rev. Monroe, was a vital conduit in the distribution of information from the East Coast; Banks was an agent handling subscriptions of The Mystery, a publication founded by Martin Delany, which later merged with Frederick Douglass’s
North Star.

  The arrival of Wilbur Fisk Storey as the editor and publisher of the Detroit Free Press was not good news for black Detroiters. He wasn’t behind the desk very long before he was hit with two libel suits. “His attacks on abolitionists, his denunciation of Negroes, and his eventual excoriation of Abraham Lincoln—particularly . . . after the Emancipation Proclamation—were so bitter that his legacy is a cruel caricature of editorial responsibility.”11 From his pen flowed a relentless surge of vitriol. He found a perfect whipping boy in black Republicans; the party in his estimation was a “monster of frightful mien . . . made up of white abolitionists, black abolitionists, and fugitives from slavery—this rabble of discord and destruction.”12 He was obsessed with race, and he wrote with the singular intention of ridiculing black Detroiters and those like John Brown, devoted to their emancipation.

  Storey had no love for President Lincoln, either, or for the members of the Colored Vigilant Committee of Detroit, notably Lambert, DeBaptiste, and Monroe, who in 1858 gathered at William Webb’s home when Brown passed through the city in transit to a convention in Chatham where he would present his Provisional Constitution, a document he had composed while living with Frederick Douglass for three weeks in Rochester, New York. During this meeting, Lambert agreed to be treasurer of what Brown envisioned as an antislavery government.13