The Dawn of Detroit

Ruin, Detroit is not far from you.

—John Askin, April of 1800

When the Northwest Ordinance finally went into effect after the American occupation in 1796, Detroit had no applicable laws of its own. French civil law, overlaid by British common law, had previously operated in the settlement. And unlike many towns that would soon crop up in the sparsely populated Northwest region, Detroit stood on an international border and housed a large European settler population with rights protected by the Jay Treaty between the United States and Great Britain. The town was also surrounded by indigenous peoples, whose lands, though greatly reduced by warfare, treaties, and hasty sales pressured by the threat of a coming wave of non-Native migrants, still extended for hundreds of miles between Euro-American settlements. According to the Northwest Ordinance, these remaining Indian lands could not be taken without “consent,” except in the case of “lawful wars authorized by Congress,” language that anticipated and justified further territorial expansion by the U.S. government. Turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Detroit was a mind-boggling morass of murky rules and unspoken expectations. It was therefore a thrilling place to be a bright-eyed lawyer looking for the challenge of a lifetime, which is exactly what Elijah Brush was when he arrived, eager and unmarried, in the year 1798.¹

Elijah Brush had been born in Bennington, Vermont, in the early 1770s and educated at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. He came to Detroit to practice law and soon found fortune by making the marriage match of the season. The twenty-something Brush swiftly wooed Adelaide (also called Alice) Askin, the youngest daughter of John Askin and Archange Barthe Askin. Pampered through her girlhood, Adelaide Askin simply adored cosmopolitan fashion and finely crafted things. Despite her physical isolation from urban centers like New York City, London, and Paris, she was always in the know when it came to cutting-edge style. This was in part due to a steady flow of information from her older sister, Archange Askin, who lived in London and was married to a British military officer of the Royal Artillery Regiment. Archange penned letters to Adelaide spilling over with fashion advice and shipped them across the ocean to Detroit. Informed of the latest transatlantic trends by her sister, like the rage for gloves and turbans made of silk, Adelaide eagerly sought out premium fabrics and elegant designs. Ready-made clothing was unavailable in the shops of remote Detroit, so much of Adelaide’s wardrobe would have been imported from elsewhere or meticulously hand-sewn by enslaved black women. Beyond being fashionable, Adelaide was well educated, having studied at L’Assomption de Sandwich in Canada. She was fluent in both French and English and had grown up enjoying the domestic services of indigenous and black women who had been stripped of their freedoms.²

Part of St. Anne’s Street in 1800. Engraving by Silas Farmer from a watercolor by Lieutenant Colonel Jacob Kingsbury or George Washington Whistler. Silas Farmer, The History of Detroit (Detroit: Silas Farmer & Co., 1884), 368. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan. This drawing of Detroit’s main thoroughfare depicts the French village aspect of dwellings prior to the 1805 fire.

By catching the eye of Adelaide Askin, the enterprising Elijah Brush inserted himself into a well-heeled, landholding, bicultural, multilingual old Detroit family. No wonder Brush was filled with “exceeding great joy” at the “prospects of speedily being married to Miss Askin,” according to his friend, the fellow New English attorney Solomon Sibley. And Brush was equally enthused, Sibley added, about “a fair way to realize a fortune,” which Brush believed was on the near horizon at Detroit, as he had heard that a “New County” was being designated with “the County Town . . . established on the Pra[i] rie.”³ Brush’s impending nuptials and Detroit’s bright future were intertwined in the eyes of the observant Solomon Sibley.

Elijah and Adelaide chose the festive annual celebration of Mardi Gras, observed enthusiastically in French-Catholic Detroit, as the season for their nuptials. Father Levadoux performed the service at Ste. Anne’s Church on a February evening in 1802. The newlyweds, whose wedding had been the social event of the winter, next endeavored to establish their household together. Adelaide Askin likely brought a slave with her into her home with her new American husband, while Elijah Brush busied himself with procuring imported dishware and delicacies for his bride. “I have lately [entered] into a matrimonial life with Miss Askin,” he wrote to the merchants he frequented in Albany, New York, “and find myselfe [sic] under the further necessity of troubleing [sic] you again with a further commission, which I expect to be obleiged [sic] to repeat annually.” Brush ordered, among other things, from the shop of Robinson & Martin: “one Set of fashionable guilt chinea [sic] complete with coffee cups & c One barrel of loaf Sugar and Coffee, one fourth chest of best hyson tea; 1/2 barrel of best 4th proof 1 dozen handsome knives & forks.” While most Detroiters made use of goods provided by merchants in town and could not afford personal imports, Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Brush preferred items of distinction, no matter the expense and waiting time. Elijah Brush ordered one dozen silver teaspoons engraved with his initials from New York, quipping about the low quality of local craftsmanship: “if you give a Silver Smith in this Country Silver to work you’ll never get either work or Silver.” When his wife was displeased with the color of Rusha sheeting fabric sent by Martin & Robinson’s shop, Brush “disposed of it and ordered another piece.” He sent to New York, as well, for Adelaide’s accessories and clothing, ordering a “fashionable Summer cloak,” a “fashionable Bonnet for Summer,” and enough kidskin ladies shoes for Adelaide to change her footwear twelve days in a row. When the couple’s first son, Edmund, was born nine months after the winter wedding, Elijah ordered shoes for the boy as well. For himself, Elijah requested “1 Superfine fashionable coat Dutch cloth,” “1 pair of black Striped Velvet pantaloons and Vest of the finest quality,” and “1 fashionable beaver hat” from New York, closing the loop of the fur trade that was his new town’s chief enterprise.⁴ Detroit produced furs and shipped them East so that cosmopolitan professionals like Elijah Brush could wear the beaver hat as a status symbol all across the coasts of the Atlantic.

For the Brushes, the buzzword was “fashionable,” and as a leading lawyer in the town, Elijah Brush could afford to wrap his young family in luxury. In 1803, he ordered an elegant two-wheeled carriage with a folding roof, called a caléche, from Robinson & Martin’s firm in New York. The next summer two copycat carriages appeared on the narrow roads of Detroit, ordered by officers at the garrison.⁵ The Brushes had become the town’s “Joneses,” trendsetters who influenced norms and sparked the competitive desire to “keep up.” And in a place where slavery was still widely practiced despite the territorial law that curtailed it, the couple’s eye for the next best thing soon turned to bondspeople. Peter and Hannah Denison, an African American couple toiling away on the Tucker farm in the countryside of the Huron River, had developed a reputation in the area. Before long the Brushes would seek the same kind of distinction in their choice of servants as they did in consumer goods. They would import Peter and Hannah all the way from the sticks to work in their fashionable urban household.

Elijah and Adelaide Brush House. Detroit, 1852 by R. Bürger. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-DIG-pga-00350. The Brushes purchased this farm from Adelaide’s father, John Askin, before he moved across the river. Enslaved people lived here with both families.

Mr. and Mrs. Elijah Brush calling card. Benjamin F.H. Witherell Papers, 1791–1924. The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. Adelaide and Elijah Brush were members of Detroit high society who enjoyed convivial entertainments and cosmopolitan fashion. Adelaide was the child of a British merchant and French socialite. Elijah was an American attorney from New England.

The self-confident Elijah Brush met with approval from British-identified John Askin, who wrote to a friend about his American son-in-law: “he promises fair, has a good character and [is] reckoned a good lawyer which is not a bad profession in this quarter.”⁶ To a business partner, the practical Askin also expressed his approval of young Elijah, writing that Brush was “an able Lawyer, has considerable practice is sober and industrious therefore I believe Alice has made a good choice.”⁷ Askin’s respect for Brush would have made the dilemma that Askin was weighing a little easier to settle. Despite his positive observations that “the Gentlemen on this side” of the river treated him with “nothing but politeness and civility” and “debts are recovered here without delay which is a great Object for a Merchant,” Askin had misgivings about continuing to reside in American Detroit.⁸ He preferred to live in British territory and, consequently, to avoid American taxes on his business transactions across the border. He therefore elected to relocate with his wife, sell a portion of his real estate, pay off debts, and leave his youngest daughter and son-in-law behind in Detroit. “In the course of two weeks we remove over the River,” Askin soon told an associate, “but I will be a great part of my time here to attend to the lands and [etc.] on this side.”⁹ Near his departure date, Askin wrote to a trading partner, perhaps referring to livestock, perhaps referring to human chattel: “Part of my stock are sent over the River and in about two weeks we will move after them.” According to a traditional history of the early American period in Detroit, the town had “lost a grand old man” upon John Askin’s leave-taking.¹⁰ Askin’s enslaved laborers, who would now become residents of Canada as well, may have thought otherwise.

By the spring of 1802, John Askin was off to Canada, but the relocation to British turf was bittersweet. Settling in at his new abode, charmingly named Strabane after his birthplace in Ireland, meant abandoning the beloved Barthe-Askin farm along the north side of the river. Askin was therefore buoyed by the news that “Lawyer Brush” was “desirous of purchasing” the family estate in Detroit. The newlyweds lacked cash on hand to pay John Askin’s £2,000 asking price, but they moved into the home with Askin’s blessings and paid taxes on the property. In part because Adelaide Brush wished to remain in Detroit rather than relocating to the Ohio Country as Elijah had at first intended, by 1805 Elijah was planning to “sell some lands he has in the States” and pay Askin for the Detroit property. Adelaide longed to keep the French farm in the family, and Elijah sought to please his nostalgic bride. “She has the same desire of being perpetuated in it that Mrs Askin [her mother] has on account of the family tradition it has already passed through,” Brush explained to Askin, his approving father-in-law.¹¹

Brush finally purchased the farm at the price of $6,000 U.S. after living there rent-free for nearly four years. He would obtain the “premises with all the appurtenances, privalages and Commodities to the same.” The Askin farmland, “being on the Detroit or Streights of Lake Erie” lie “mostly in what is now called the Town of Detroit,” and boasted a royal pedigree. It had been “ceded and granted by Charles Marquis-De-Beauharnois knight of the Royal and Military order of St. Louis . . . and Gilles Hocquart Knight and member of the King’s privy counsil . . . to Eustache Gamelin . . . and Granted by Piquotee Belestre Military and Civil Commandant for the king at Detroit unto Jaques Pelet” before coming into the Barthe family. Layered into this legal record of land exchange dating back to 1747 are decades of colonial presence and the selling of land as a commodity. Nowhere in the document is an original purchase from Native people indicated. Neither does the sale of the Brush farm reveal the consent of any woman. For this coveted parcel had fallen first into the possession of a British male in-law, and then an American male in-law, the lucky Brush. Handed down in the families of French women, the land would be legally retained by English and American men. Brush could thus buy his own wife’s family farm and make this transfer of landed power seem like a gift to her. During his time on the farm, Elijah Brush built his legal practice. Brush and his father-in-law grew all the closer, and Brush began to represent John Askin in land deals that remained essential to free white men’s success in the region.¹²

While Askin family members then in Upper Canada sent pleasing treats like an “Indian sack full of Cramberry [cranberry]” over to their cherished Adelaide, Elijah traversed the frozen river many a time to visit with his father-in-law in cold weather months.¹³ They were a tight-knit clan. And while Brush may have preferred deep down to strike out for Ohio, where he already owned land, it was plain to see that he had found a plum situation in Detroit. Just as John Askin had benefited from marrying a French wife and settling on her family’s farm beside the fort a generation earlier, Elijah Brush married into prime property when he wed Adelaide Askin, daughter of one of Detroit’s most prominent traders and largest slaveholders.

Recalcitrance and Rebellion

In order to improve his circumstances, John Askin only needed to sell his properties, tidy up his finances, and move to one of his other plots across the Detroit River. And while this was not a simple proposition given the losses he had taken in the fur trade as well as his failing health due to elder age, it was a readily achievable goal that did not entail the risk of life or sacrifice of loved ones. The lives of enslaved people were entirely different and considerably more constrained. Black and indigenous men and women held in bondage also carefully assessed their situations in the first American years of the late 1790s and early 1800s, scrutinizing shifting structures of governance, flows of capital, and social relationships. The transition from French to British rule at the end of the French and Indian War had meant few changes for unfree Detroiters. Raiding during the American Revolutionary War had brought larger numbers of African Americans from the South into the region, making the 1780s the high mark of slavery in the town in numerical terms. The Americans’ passage of the Northwest Ordinance had meant little in the decade when British officials had refused to relinquish western posts. But the wheels of political power, as well as the century, had now turned. What changes would the British withdrawal and the official American presence usher in for those who lived in slavery?

British loyalists who moved to Canada, such as John Askin and Matthew Elliott, brought their bondspeople along with them, increasing the enslaved population along the border with the United States. An ordinance passed in 1793 by the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, outlawed the importation of new slaves to Canada and introduced gradual emancipation but permitted British subjects crossing the river to retain their human property. Slavery would be legal in Canada until the British parliament ended it throughout the territories of Great Britain forty years later in 1833.¹⁴ By the time John Askin arrived, former Detroiter Matthew Elliott and his fellow British military officers, Alexander McKee and Henry Bird, had already moved to present-day Ontario and established homes on land bestowed on them in 1783 by Native allies from the Revolutionary War. Elliott “was given the allocation nearest to Lake Erie, and his home and farm were soon to become a landmark for those approaching Detroit via the Lake Erie-Detroit River route.” He steadily expanded his land holdings, resulting in a “home and farm that became a show-place in Upper Canada.” An unforgettable aspect of that “showplace” to some observers was its striking resemblance to a southern plantation. Matthew Elliott, a British Indian agent with a Shawnee wife (one of several Native women he partnered with in customary marriages or informal liaisons over the years), possessed more than eight hundred acres by the early 1790s and presided over a magisterial farm where “he did not directly engage in farming himself, but ran it as a plantation with a steward or overseer to supervise his Negro and Indian slaves.”¹⁵ To a commander at the nearby fort in Amherstburg, Captain Hector McLean, this slaveholding Indian agent was infamous for his wealth. McLean wrote that Elliott “lives as I am informed in the greatest affluence at an expense of above a thousand a year. He possesses an extensive farm not far from the garrison stock’d with about six or seven hundred head of cattle & I am told employs fifty or sixty persons constantly about his house & farm chiefly slaves.” Another, more favorable observer traveling through the area enthused: “The farm belonging to our friend, Captain E . . . contains no less than two thousand acres. . . . His house, which is the best in the whole district, is agreeable situated, at a distance of about two hundred yards from the river; there is a full view of the river, and of the island of Bois Blanc, from the parlour window.” Elliott’s bucolic riverside farm was the setting for whippings of enslaved people who were secured to a locust tree with an iron ring and shackles.¹⁶

On the American side of the Detroit River, slavery also continued apace. The federally appointed governor of the Northwest Territory and slaveholder, Arthur St. Clair, had widely publicized his view that the provision of the Northwest Ordinance limiting slavery was ideational and meant to curtail future, rather than present, activity. He had written in 1793, and announced to Illinois residents prior, that “the declaration that there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said Territory . . . was no more than a declaration of principle . . . but could have no retroactive operation whatever.” In the Northwest Territory, French and British residents still owned slaves, and Americans had access to bondspeople owned by prior settlers. Some free residents across the Northwest Territory took advantage of this flexible situation, attempting to acquire slaves. But ambiguity had its costs. Would-be slaveholders in Detroit felt discomfort about whether their intentions would be legal. They carried the angst of residing in a gray area between the letter of congressional law and common practice on the ground. Governor St. Clair’s statements about the “principle” of the Ordinance had been intended to allay such anxieties, but in Detroit, a northerly border town with a stream of New Englanders trickling in, such worries could not be fully assuaged.¹⁷ Slavery in American Detroit was persistent but unstable, reflecting the “fragile legal constructions” that characterized northern slavery in the post-Revolutionary “gradual emancipation era.”¹⁸

Enslaved people in the town and closest farmsteads, counted at thirty-one in the 1796 Wayne County census (after many had been removed by their masters to Canada), saw little immediate improvement to their situations following the passage of the Jay Treaty. But a few years later, by 1800, unfree people were doubling down on their acts of defiance. Just as they had before the Americans took charge, enslaved men and women fought the injustice of exploitation with the limited mental and physical weapons available to them: withholding compliance, pilfering property, battling members of the master class, and stealing themselves away. Attempts at escape increased in both number and boldness. The papers of Detroit merchants who were dissatisfied with their slaves, as well as of Solomon Sibley, who managed local legal complaints, offer glimpses of the range of rebellious actions unfree people took at the turn of the nineteenth century. In 1801, a “Pawney man” belonging to the Frenchman “Mr Barth” was accused of assault against a J.B. Nadau. In March of 1802, Jaco, “a Pauni” owned by Frenchman Simon Campau, acted “contrary to the obedience due to [Campau] as his master.” Jaco had “absented himself and doth still absent himself from his said Masters Service.” Campau entered a formal complaint in the matter, seeking the territorial circuit court’s intervention. Toby, a “Panisman,” was arrested and jailed in 1807 for absconding and was returned to George Cotteral, who “claim[ed] the Said Toby as his Slave, and acknowledge[d] that he hath humbled himself to his Satisfaction.” Mary Abbott, an Englishwoman, complained in the summer of 1802 that “her slave Susan a Panie has resisted and refused to obey her lawful Command contrary to the obedience due her mistress.” Mary Abbott turned to the courts as did other slaveholders, with the result that constables equipped with a warrant were ordered to “apprehend the said Susan a Panie . . . to be further dealt with according to Law.”¹⁹ It was a difficult stretch of years for Abbott women in terms of trouble with recalcitrant bondspeople. Elizabeth Audrain Abbott, wife of Robert Abbott, found herself threatened with a whipping by her slave. A black woman named Mary, described as a “negro wench” in the court record, was jailed after “beat[ing] and abus[ing] her mistress, the same Mrs. Abbott.” Robert Abbott then endeavored to sell the black woman to Thomas Jones, who declined another offer of a “Pawny Boy” from Mr. Pattinson in order to buy this woman who had been promised as having “no fault except beating his [Abbott’s] wife.” However, when Jones discovered that the jailed Mary “was rotten with the pox,” he took Abbott to court in order to break the contract.²⁰

In American Detroit governed by the Northwest Ordinance, long-standing resident slave-owners like the Campaus and the Abbotts had in their favor a more functional judicial system to which they appealed for intervention in controlling their human property. Now masters could use territorial courts to enlist police power in the correction and apprehension of unruly or runaway slaves. But at the same time, the Ordinance limited how enslaved people could be held and transferred in Detroit. Solomon Sibley’s handwritten notes on the Jones v. Abbott case, which he argued in court, open with the lines: “1 point—By the common law a negro is no[t] a slave or the subject of property. . . . The Statutes and laws of this Country, do not recognize slavery—But on the contrary expressly negative such a state in society—Vide the ordinance of Congress passed 1787. Article 6.” Based on this reasoning, Sibley contended that Abbott was unable to “establish his right in this property,” meaning Mary, and therefore the contract was null and void.²¹ While Sibley’s sense of clarity in interpreting the Ordinance was not shared by everyone, his trial notes hint at the raincloud the Ordinance represented over the heads of slaveholders, whose only umbrella was the Jay Treaty.²²

Enslaved people in Detroit also proved aware of the import and potential of Article 6, and they were learning to effectively use the courts just as slave-owners had. The case of the Smith family, though sketchily preserved, provides a glimpse into the first documented use of legal strategy by African Americans seeking freedom in Detroit. Antoine and Anna Smith, an African American couple with children, leveraged the law to put an end to their harrowing experience of varied forms of captivity dating back decades. The Smiths were attendees at Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church, where a priest recorded fragments of their story. Father Gabriel Richard described the pair as “free negroes ransomed in the past few years from the said Indians who had made them prisoners in their youth.” Antoine and Anna had been captured by Native people, probably during the Revolutionary War. They were freed from captivity at Fort Wayne in Indiana and “taken to be husband and wife.” For reasons left out by the priest, the couple came to Detroit where they seemed to have a brighter future ahead. In 1803, Anna gave birth to a baby girl, Therése, who was baptized at Ste. Anne’s. But by 1805, the Smiths were in dire straits yet again. Anna and the children had been snatched by a local slaveholder, or perhaps sold to him in violation of the Northwest Ordinance. In response, “Anthony Smith, a black man,” hired a lawyer to contact the offender who “h[e] ld them as slaves.” A.J. Hull, attorney for the plaintiff, wrote to the Frenchman Jacques Laselle that Smith demanded the “release” of “his wife and children, from slavery.” Hull’s letter continued with the lightly veiled threat: “As you must be sensible as well as myself, that slavery is prohibited, by the ordinance which forms this territory, you cannot hold them as such. By giving his wife and children to him now, you will save yourself much trouble and expense. If you refuse I shall immediately commence my suits, which will be expensive to you, and will surely recover them in August.”²³

Lasalle’s reaction to this letter demanding the release of the Smith family does not survive. He probably relented, given the absence of further court documents in the case and the blatant machinations of other local slaveholders to appear as though they were complying with the Ordinance. The Smith family’s legal strategy won the day, but their anguish lasted months. Anna and the children were in the hands of Lasalle at least as early as June 5, 1805, when Hull wrote his letter. Hull did not expect to recover them until August. Antoine, a husband and father, must have agonized each passing hour about the suffering of his loved ones during that extended wait.²⁴ Following their ordeal, the family returned to the multiracial community of Ste. Anne’s Church, where a handful of other blacks also worshipped. In 1816 church records show that Anne Smith, “a free negress,” gave birth to another daughter named Angelique.²⁵

British captain Alexander Harrow, who had already lost a man named Sampson to an escape in the 1790s, encountered difficulties for the second time when Robert Taylor, a black man, absconded from him in June of 1802. Harrow had a warrant issued for Taylor’s arrest. But by the next month, an exasperated Harrow was offering Robert Taylor a contract of indenture, in which he attested: “I Alexander Harrow of River St Clair of Wayne & Territory North-West of the Ohio, being willing and desirous that Robert Taylor, a negro man of about Thirty years of age, and a slave servant of mine for life . . . should at a future day & within a reasonable time, obtain, possess & enjoy, full and entire freedom.” The term of indenture was set at four years, during which time Taylor was to “well and faithfully, work, labour and serve” Harrow and “at all times during said Term, behave himself, honestly, uprightly and faithfully.” If Taylor failed to meet these conditions, his status would revert back to slave for life. If he complied, he would receive at the end of four years “A suit of cloaths adapted to his Station in Life,” courtesy of his former master.²⁶ Harrow, who was losing valuable property to escape, thought it wise to offer a promise of future freedom in exchange for the loyal service of his African American bondsman. Against his preference to simply hold humans as chattel outright, Harrow had been compelled to negotiate with Robert Taylor in a new legal environment that limited slavery.

Captain Alexander Harrow slowly grasped the reality that it had become harder to keep slaves in Detroit, a town where New Englanders were gaining more influence. As enslaved people grew aware of the opening that the Northwest Ordinance created and the changing demographics on the ground, they ran more frequently and refused to return unless they could negotiate better circumstances. Harrow therefore resorted to the practice of indentured servitude, which other slaveholders in Detroit adopted as a method of holding de facto slaves at the same moment. Correspondence regarding John Reed, a black runaway from Kentucky, points to indenture as a tactic used by Detroiters, like others in the Northwest, to take advantage of the language in Article 6 of the Ordinance, which did not prohibit voluntary servitude. After being advertised as a runaway by his master, Reed was “taken up and confined” by Detroit slaveholder James May, now a U.S. marshal, “in the Common Prison of said County of Wayne.” Daniel Ransom, an agent of Reed’s owner, owed May $200, a price that included the reward money for Reed’s capture and the cost of his incarceration. The agent, Ransom, worried about whether the enslaved man could be kept captive in Detroit and therefore included a contingency in the contract for Reed’s return. Ransom would not pay May, the contract stated, “should the negro escape.”²⁷

Reed’s plot thickened. Deputy Attorney General Solomon Sibley wrote to John Reed’s former owner, Colonel Grant of Licking, Kentucky, detailing the situation and commenting that the bounty hunter, Ransom, wanted to purchase John Reed for himself. This, however, would be difficult in Detroit, as new slaves were not supposed to be bought and sold in the territory. It would likewise be tricky in Canada, where the importation of slaves had been prohibited since 1793. Sibley explained to the Kentucky colonel: “The Negro if he purchase cannot by him be held as a slave on either side. Mr Ransom’s only method will be to get the fellow to endent [sic] himself for a term of years. It will rest with you to determine whether it is not better for you to sell him for a much reduced price to what he would command in Kentucky rather than risk taking him thither thro’ the Indian Country.” Sibley’s frank assessment confirmed a further complication in this case: there was a great chance of losing Reed altogether if Colonel Grant sought to transport the bondsman southward. In order to reach Kentucky, Reed would have to be brought through Indian territory, and Reed was “an arch lad” who had “acquired a knowledge of the Indian language.”²⁸ Since Reed could not be sold in Detroit and was a flight risk due to his linguistic skills and Detroit’s location in Indian country, Sibley suggested that Reed be pressured into indenture while he languished in jail awaiting an uncertain fate.

Under the Northwest Ordinance and American authority in Detroit, enslaved people had attained a status ambiguous enough that slave-owners now had to think twice about how to transport, retain, and claim them. In addition, the formation of a newly defined international border along the Detroit River highlighted pathways for escape that made calculated risk-taking more possible for bondspeople. Enslaved men and women could run south to Ohio, they could go east and cross the river into Canada, and they could hide out in adjacent indigenous territories that lay between the town of Detroit and both of these routes. Tensions between the U.S. and British governments, as well as between various Native groups and the Americans, meant that enslaved people had now gained an advantage that indigenous tribes had long employed in the region: playing imperial powers off of one another.²⁹ Slaveholders, wary of both Indian hostilities and the unknown wilds of lake-country nature, were hesitant to track enslaved people into the swamps and Native villages surrounding Detroit. And back inside the wooden pickets of the town, a novel legal environment was leading would-be slaveholders to pursue indentured servitude instead of clear-cut slave ownership.

A record from 1799 further indicates Detroit slaveholder strategies in this altered political context. In order to avoid legal complications for selling a slave, Charles St. Bernard, a merchant of Hamtramck Township, contracted an “indenture” with Henry Berthelet, a merchant of Detroit. In actuality, the document entails the sale of a small child, the “young negro girl, Named Veronique, about five years of age,” rather than a time-limited labor agreement. According to the contract, Berthelet is: “TO HAVE & TO HOLD the said young negro girl above bargained & sold, for and during her natural life” for the “Sum of SIXTY POUNDS New York Currency.” Bernard and Berthelet take pains to explain that Veronique was “born within this County, when under the Dominion of his Brittanick Majesty, and has never been out of it since the United States have taken possession of same.” Carefully spelling out the child’s place of birth and permanent residence in British Detroit allows the men to demonstrate that she can be held under the rules of the Northwest Ordinance. Further, to hedge their bets, the merchants introduce their bill of sale by describing it as “this INDENTURE made at Detroit.” Their contract was signed, sealed, delivered, and recorded by the Wayne County court.³⁰

Too young to fend for herself or broach an escape, Veronique became the property of Berthelet. But John Reed, a grown man who had already shown that he would run, may have been offered a more forthright contract of indenture, as this was the best means for the would-be buyer/bounty hunter to hold on to him, as well as for his Kentucky owner to redeem some value from the loss of him. While being an indentured servant in Detroit could not have been Reed’s desired outcome when he first fled, it was a status that offered greater potential for the future than lifelong slavery in the American South.

Elsewhere in the Northwest Territory, indenture was also being employed as a secondary form of confinement. The practice was common in Illinois and Indiana, where a “terrain of unfreedom” developed on the shadow side of the Ordinance. Often, enslaved people were pressed into servitude contracts with only a veneer of consent. In Marietta, Ohio, in 1802, “a negro boy under the age of twenty-one” named Bob signed a contract of indenture with Dudley Woodbridge, using an X as his mark. Stephen Wilson, a man from Virginia, had previously owned Bob but attested: “I have this day received of said Woodbridge the sum of two hundred dollars for a relinquishment of my claim to the said negro boy.” Woodbridge paid Stephen for Bob, who then agreed to serve Woodbridge as his master until he reached the age of twenty-one. In Wilson’s words, a “bill of sale” was made granting Bob “his freedom, to enable him to bind himself by indenture to Dudley Woodbridge.” Bob was sold to “free” him up to sign an unpaid labor contract. Bob did manage, however, to extract something of value for himself in these negotiations. According to the agreement, Woodbridge would: “At the age of twenty-one years . . . provide and furnish the said Bob with good, comfortable and sufficient apparel, meat, drink, washing, & lodging; and will learn him the said Bob to read.” If Woodbridge kept this promise, Bob would be literate by the time he attained his actual freedom. The documents describing Bob’s sale and indenture found their way into the archives of Detroit when the Woodbridge family moved to town in 1814.³¹

While enslaved blacks like John Reed were able to slightly improve their status through indenture, several individuals held as slaves in Detroit found other ways to inch toward autonomy. They began to collect wages for their work as a trickle of American migrants moved into town in need of labor. Eager American lawyers, merchants, and doctors kept farms in addition to practicing their professions and sought skilled agricultural and domestic workers. This included compensating enslaved people who were hired out by their owners and allowed to retain some of the income, or who were permitted to hire themselves out. David Maney paid Eli[z] abeth Burnutt “for her washing” in September of 1802; she attested to the receipt of this sum by signing with her mark. Evidently a practiced washerwoman, Elizabeth was also a seamstress. The man who owned her, William Burnett, had been owed “Cash to your woman to pay for mending” two years earlier. Merchant James May recorded that William Robertson owed “half pay of Pomps wages for attending cattle [in company] with John Askin” and that Charles La Leavre was owed “By 1 days work of his Man helping to kill pigs By work for self.” A woman called Black Betty owed in May’s ledger for five pounds of beef, which she may have planned to pay off through the exchange of her labor. This was probably the same Bet sold with her two sons by Sarah Macomb after William Macomb’s death in 1796. In the Macomb family account book several individuals received pay for services: Charity for washing, Suana for washing, Sisco for masonry, and Will for chopping wood. A woman called Black Patty, who may have attained her freedom, was earning enough to accrue livestock and pay her debts in cash. In 1801 Patty conducted business with or through James May, had an “account” on file with him, and had paid “10 dollars + Cash 3 dollars” toward “a cow + calf 17 Dollars + 50 Cents.”³²

Beyond creating a market for finite indenture contracts as well as paid work, American jurisdiction in Detroit had a third unexpected benefit for the enslaved: an enlarged geographical community. Raiding during the Revolutionary War had increased the black population in town, which meant more available free labor for slaveholders. But higher numbers also meant the black community as a whole was bigger, potentially more robust and resilient. Having a greater number of African Americans in the area—most of them enslaved, a few of them free—increased the chances for social alliance, communal collaboration, and organized rebellion among blacks as well as among unfree people of indigenous ancestry. One truncated but telling example points to a growing black community in the southern Great Lakes that may have channeled its collective energies toward a radical challenge of slavery in the area. In 1803, a fatigued British captain outlined the “cares” of his French wife in a letter to John Askin, his relative by marriage. The unruly behavior of her slaves had driven his wife to distraction, groused Captain Alexander Grant. Mrs. Grant’s bondspeople were “very ungrateful and turbulent,” and her “Cursed negroe wench” along with a black man lately purchased from Matthew Elliott, were both in jail for theft. Grant complained that the jailed pair were suspected of carrying “information of a great number of vagarents hovering about here to bring off as many negros as they can And as I am told forming a Town on the other side of Sandusky. at present there is forty Black men there.”³³

Grant’s grumbling letter reveals that African Americans clustered on the south side of Lake Erie were rumored to be easing into Detroit River settlements, stealing items, sharing strategic intelligence, and encouraging enslaved people to escape. The specific community described by Captain Grant in 1803 was undoubtedly the same one encountered by Moravian missionaries who followed the Miami River to Lake Erie in 1808 and were the first to document the settlement by name. “After we had passed through a place where twenty years ago an old Wyandotte town had stood, we came to Negro town where about six or seven Negro families live. They have been among the Indians for a long time, and have taken over their way of life,” penned one of the fascinated Moravian brothers. After entering the Wyandot-African village just outside of Upper Sandusky near the mouth of the Sandusky River, the traveling missionaries were served by a black woman host, who “spoke English very well,” and gave them “cornbread and coffee,” the latter being a preferred drink among the villagers. The Moravians took care, while in the home of their host, to follow “Indian custom” and accept the victuals she offered. A Methodist minister called Benjamin Larkin passed through two years later, and remarked upon the same settlement where “some Negroes and Indians dwelled.”³⁴

These survivors of war, slavery, and migration encountered by the missionaries had come north by various routes in the late eighteenth century and resided with Wyandots, members of the Wendat (Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals) diaspora set in motion by wars with the Iroquois in the middle 1600s. Some blacks in the village had been brought in as captives but later lived as free people; others may have entered as free. Some of these individuals were mixed-race of African and Native ancestry, but seen as “Negro” by the Moravians due to their darker skin tone. Some may also have preserved African and African American spiritual and folk practices, as not very far away, in Fairfield, Upper Canada, Moravians had observed a black woman with a broom that was “somewhat like the fetishes the Negro in Guinea fashions out of roots” and was believed to bring protection to its bearer from “illnesses and misfortune.”³⁵ This village south of Lake Erie was the same community that produced the free black trader who worked between Detroit and Ohio with a Wyandot partner in the 1790s.³⁶ When the Wyandots were compelled to sign away territory to General Anthony Wayne after the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1795, most tribal members moved westward. Several black families who had acclimated to Wyandot ways stayed behind. Tension grew between the groups, as the Wyandots, pressed to remove and take stock of their now meager resources, began to distance themselves from people of African ancestry in the village.³⁷ The black, mixed-race, bicultural residents who remained rebounded from this rejection and received other African descendants into their midst, especially runaway slaves trickling in from the U.S. South. Negro Town (a name that would stick well into the early twentieth century and later be disparaged as “Nigger Town” by local white Ohioans) became a radicalized community of color out of necessity.³⁸ Mrs. Grant’s black woman and the man with her in jail likely had connections there, suggestive of a free black network based near Lake Erie and the interconnected Detroit River region as early as 1803. In the summer of 1807, James May on the American side complained to John Askin on the Canadian side that his own enslaved man, Nobbin, had escaped and that “a bad set of people about” were also trying to persuade Askin’s enslaved boy, George, to run across the river.³⁹ These “bad people” may well have hailed from Negro Town. Enslaved blacks and Indians in Detroit now had another destination should they take a gamble on seizing freedom: a black village in the remote, semi-protective zone of former Indian lands not yet settled by whites.

Despite the continuation of slavery, circumstances in Detroit had shifted in discernible ways for unfree people as well as their owners several years into the new American era. The disruption of the Revolution had reshaped the racial makeup of Detroit’s population, dispersing more African Americans throughout the region. The Northwest Ordinance narrowed pathways to slaveholding for Americans, while the Jay Treaty drew a boundary that highlighted routes for escape to foreign territory for enslaved people. In this environment, captives found greater opportunity for boldness. Escapes were more frequent, and freedom-seekers identified multiple destinations.⁴⁰ In addition to fleeing south toward Sandusky or Cincinnati across wild terrain that no white gentleman relished entering, bondspeople made for Native towns, viewed as equally formidable by slaveholders even in the aftermath of the Treaty of Greenville that had stripped indigenous groups of most tribal territory in Ohio. From one community home-base with both a black and Indian imprint, Negro Town of Ohio, clandestine attacks may have been waged against Detroit slaveholders to rile bondspeople, seize goods, and spread the message of freedom. Just as John Askin had sensed when he packed up his things and moved to Canada, winds of change were in the air along the strait.

Legislating Detroit Town

While enslaved people in Detroit pushed for liberty in radical ways, Elijah Brush’s professional star continued to rise. His father-in-law, John Askin, wrote that Brush was “an industrious man and except for improvements is by no means extravagant for a man who earns so much for his profession” and noted with paternal pride, “His practice is worth a great deal.”⁴¹ In 1803 Brush was appointed as a trustee of the board governing the township of Detroit (as had been his father-in-law before the move to Canada). Brush was responsible, along with a handful of leading men, for devising local rules, ensuring the compliance of the public, and handling complaints. The board’s first municipal ordinances addressed fire protection and the sale of foodstuffs. Bread now had to be stamped with bakers’ initials and sold for the fixed price of six pence for a three pound loaf. Instead of allowing farmers (primarily French residents) to come to town with carts of eggs, butter, beans, vegetables, and meats on Sunday and commence selling these products following mass at Ste. Anne’s, as was the local custom, the board established market days on Tuesday and Friday and designated a set location by the river that would serve as a farmers’ market.⁴² Tavern keepers were prohibited from allowing “any minors, apprentices, Servants, or Negroes to Set drinking in their houses, at any time, or to have any Strong drink, without Special order & allowances of their parents or masters.” This directive indicated the finely graded class stratification in Detroit as well as town leaders’ continued efforts to control the behavior of societal underlings. “Negroes,” a term nearly synonymous with “slaves,” were classed right along with poor laboring whites, minors, and “servants,” the latter of which could include members of any racial group as well as lifelong unfree people characterized as indentured servants in contracts.⁴³

The absence of the word “slaves” in this edict is representative of all early laws in Detroit, which avoided directly pointing to a class of people held in slavery, likely due to the influence of the Northwest Ordinance and the seriousness with which leading Detroiters, such as Solomon Sibley, took this federal mandate. Detroit would never develop a slave code like other municipalities with slaves; nor did it clearly lay out rules for indenture. Slavery and servitude were old practices instantiated by custom rather than regulated by local law. Enslaved people would therefore fall under the general rules of the community, with their masters held responsible for their infractions. It would take decades before Detroit had a law specifically aimed at enslaved people, which took the form of a Michigan territorial black code, rather than a slave code, in 1827. Following a dramatic act of organized resistance in which Detroiters aided the escape to Canada of Thornton and Lucie Blackburn, runaways from Kentucky, the territorial legislature seated in Detroit passed “An Act to Regulate Blacks and Mulattoes.” This punitive legislation required blacks in the city to provide proof of freedom, register with a clerk of court, and pay a registration fee; it also required newcomers of African descent to pay a $500 bond to a free resident within twenty days to guarantee good behavior, or else be forcibly removed. The law charged fines for anyone aiding runaway slaves and, in the interest of maintaining order in the wake of mass action to aid the Blackburns, mandated the punishment of those who kidnapped free blacks. Despite the clause that protected African Americans with proof of freedom from unlawful seizure, this law intended to limit and control the black population, making it harder for free blacks and runaway slaves to call Detroit home. But decades earlier, in 1802, before the existence of Michigan Territory as a discrete place, no such law directed at the black population existed. Blacks and Native Americans held as slaves were legislated alongside people deemed dependents with no reference to enslaved status.⁴⁴

While studiously avoiding the subject of slavery, Detroit’s board of trustees spent the bulk of its administrative energies passing and enforcing rules about fire prevention. In a town built almost entirely of wood, fire was a hovering threat and constant cause for anxiety. The board therefore required residents to keep their roofs free of soot, to own ladders tall enough to reach the tops of chimneys, and to maintain personal fire-fighting paraphernalia, including a barrel full of water and buckets. In the evenings, domestic fires had to be covered and candles snuffed. A night watchman patrolled the streets looking for wayward flickers of light and pounded on door planks to question residents about candles left visibly burning. Fire inspectors regularly checked every household for the requisite ladders, buckets, and barrels. Those who broke the fire codes and other regulations were charged by the board and required to pay fines. By 1805 town trustees had put in place scrupulous precautions against a possible conflagration, a regulatory code for the grocery market, fines for noncompliance with municipal rules, and a system of tax collection.⁴⁵

As soon as Detroit’s trustees began to make local laws, residents—including those same trustees, began to break them. John Askin was a fire code offender before his move across the river, as was John Dodemead, a relative of James Dodemead, the man in charge of the fire engine. In 1803 merchant-slaveholders George Meldrum, Henry Berthelet, Robert and James Abbott, and James May were all fined for fire code violations; they failed to keep at their houses the required kind and number of ladders and buckets. Elijah Brush “esq[uire]” was also charged for having a “roof-ladder too Short” but was conveniently “excused” from fine payment.⁴⁶

Town officials policed moral dangers, too. In 1803 inspectors filed a report against Henry Berthelet, the purchaser of little Veronique who would soon attain U.S. citizenship, as well as other “Delinquents” for using “profanity on the Sabbath day.”⁴⁷ In 1802, Deputy Attorney General Solomon Sibley brought suit against Margaret White, “Spinster,” for keeping “a common, ill governed, and disorderly house.” At White’s residence, “for lucre and gain, certain persons, as well men as women, of evil name and fame, and of dishonest conversation” engaged in “drinking, tipling, whoring, and misbehaving themselves.” The growing Town of Detroit now had a social counterpoint to Ste. Anne’s Church in the form of a rowdy saloon and brothel. We can surmise that indigenous and black women were present here, as the prostitution of enslaved women by their owners had long occurred in Detroit’s sister city of New Orleans.⁴⁸

James May, an elected town board member, was a two-time offender for breaking town codes. He violated regulations by sending beef “not Sound” to market, for which he had to pay fifteen dollars.⁴⁹ He also broke the law by proxy, since he carried responsibility for the actions of his slaves. In 1802 May was charged twenty-five cents because his “young Negro boy” was caught “carrying filth out of the S. W. gate of the town,” which amounted to littering on the public commons.⁵⁰ May was also busy accusing others of breaking the rules; in 1803 he complained that the “Negro-man” of John Michel Yack (of French and German descent) was guilty of “Galloping a horse in the streets of the town of Detroit.” Yack was fined a dollar for the transgression of his slave.⁵¹

Although James May could not have been happy about his own fees, he certainly had the means to pay them. In a tax list for Wayne County compiled in 1802, one hundred and four homes and only seven slaves were counted within the pickets of the fort and just beyond the walls to the west. Several enslaved people who lived in farms outside of town were not accounted for, including the Denison family, the bondspeople owned by William Tucker on a tributary of the Detroit River. According to the records of Ste. Anne’s Church, between 1800 and 1809, at least twenty-nine individuals were still being held as slaves within the church community. This included ten blacks, fifteen “Panis,” one “mulatto,” and three individuals with no racial designation listed.⁵² James May, who possessed one slave according to the 1802 census, also owned one of the three most valuable homes, assessed at $1,000. In a tax levied in 1805 for ownership of “mules, calashes, carioles, dogs and studhorses,” May was the highest taxpayer, followed by Joseph Campau, James Abbott, and Elijah Brush, all slaveholders or beneficiaries of indentured slave labor.⁵³ Although William Macomb’s widow, Sarah Macomb, was not listed among these men and may not have had a fancy calash or studhorse, she was still prospering in the decade following her husband’s death. In the spring of 1806, under a list of “Sundry Expenses for the Family,” Sarah Macomb recorded the purchase of “Molly the Wench,” for whom she paid “70” in “cash.” The acquisition of Molly dwarfed all of Sarah Macomb’s other expenditures recorded in the same list, including: honey, eggs, fish, work by the blacksmith, a pig, six hens, linen, and cash paid while “shopping at New York.”⁵⁴

The serious-minded attorney Solomon Sibley watched national matters as closely as local issues from his home in Detroit. When Ohio achieved statehood and Congress formed Indiana Territory in 1803, the seat of Northwest Territorial governance shifted from Ohio to Indiana. Sibley, who served as a territorial representative, worried about the fate of Detroit in the aftermath of this consolidation, fearing Detroit would fall prey to neglect now that the regional government was at a farther remove. Therefore Sibley, along with other local leaders, pushed for a separate territory that would prioritize Detroit. Two years later, Sibley saw his dream of independence realized. In January of 1805, President Thomas Jefferson approved a division of the lands then encompassed by Indiana Territory. The newly christened Michigan Territory would occupy the boundaries of what had formerly been defined as Wayne County, a land nestled among flowing rivers and glistening lakes. Even better, Detroit would become the territorial capital, and President Jefferson would appoint commissioners to govern from the town beginning July 1, 1805.⁵⁵

Elijah Brush stood in the thick of local town governance as the infant Michigan Territory took shape. Constantly busy with his law office, he also juggled new roles as fire inspector (an elected position) and lieutenant colonel in the Michigan militia (an appointed position) starting in 1805.⁵⁶ True to form, Elijah Brush dressed smartly for his militia post, having ordered in from New York “twelve yards of superfine Buff casimure and four doz[en] of the best trible gilt Coat buttons” as well as a stack of instructive military books: “Hayts Cavalry dicipline—Steven’s Artillery, Stubons Exercise for the Militia, [&] Fishers Military tactics.”⁵⁷ During Elijah’s long stints at work, Adelaide Askin Brush, little Edmund, and the newest baby Charles sometimes stayed with family across the river in Canada. Adelaide may have been visiting at the home of her father when the greatest calamity since Detroit’s founding unfolded. One morning, from the safety of Strabane, his stately home across the river, the venerable trader John Askin witnessed flames leaping across the rooftops of Detroit.⁵⁸

The Great Fire of 1805

It had begun at ten o’clock in the morning of June 11 in the year 1805: the fire that would destroy the original French fort town made charming by shingles and diminutive glass window panes.⁵⁹ John Harvey, a baker by trade, kept a stable behind his business where sparks of a mysterious origin ignited, possibly from the pipe tobacco of an employee at the bakery falling into hay. Robert Munro, a witness to the events that would transpire, was employed as the storekeeper at the Indian Factory, where government goods were sold to Native traders. The factory site was located opposite the bakery in Detroit’s compressed town center and so made for front-row viewing of the impending disaster. When Robert Munro caught sight of “flames bursting through the doors and windows” of the bakery’s outbuilding, he wildly shouted the alarm.⁶⁰ His calls, along with the panicked screams of others, were answered by the town’s single fire engine, a souped-up horse-drawn wagon manned by twelve volunteers. The bucket brigade, a line of men passing buckets overflowing with water, fell hurriedly into position. Despite the frenzied efforts of community firefighters, a robust wind carried the flames from building to building. Townspeople began to flee, lugging all they could from their homes and making their way to the commons beyond the pickets near the river. Robert Munro at the Indian Factory grabbed what he could and ran. At Ste. Anne’s Church, where mass was in session that morning, Father Richard fled as Father Dilhet, with the help of a few devoted worshippers, salvaged “vestments and sacred utensils.” Their actions to save cherished church items may be the reason why the Ste. Anne register, in which so many fragments of enslaved people’s lives were notated, has been preserved to this day. The church, along with every other structure inside the town walls with the exception of the fort (British Fort Lernoult, soon to become Fort Shelby) at the rear of the settlement, burned to the ground within a few hours.⁶¹ Three days later, Robert Munro opened a letter to William Henry Harrison, governor of Indiana Territory, with the solemn words: “Sir,—I have the painful task to inform you of the entire conflagration of the town of Detroit.” He ended lamenting: “I can hardly hold the pen to write these few lines, and my mind is equally affected with the distressing scenes I have witnessed.”⁶²

Robert Munro was among the first victims of the disaster. Close enough to the fire when it broke out to be injured, he later bore the psychological scars. Canadians like John Askin, at a safe distance along the opposite bank but with friends and relatives remaining on the Detroit side, watched the ominous dark smoke mushroom into the sky with near equal panic that morning. The first Detroiters to escape the smoldering town jumped into rowboats and pushed out onto the waterway. From the sanctuary of the river, they watched, in the words of an early Detroit historian, Clever Bald, “the flames sweeping from house to house across the narrow streets, fire-fighters stubbornly working at their hopeless task, women and children streaming out on the Common, and above, like an angry storm cloud, the thick black smoke hiding the sun.”⁶³ Munro, who had barely escaped the Indian Store with his papers and two thirds of the goods, reported to Governor Harrison that “In less than two hours the whole town was in flames, and before three o’clock not a vestige of a house (except the chimneys) visible within the limits of Detroit. The citadel and military stores were entirely consumed. . . . The situation of the inhabitants is deplorable beyond description; dependence, want, and misery is the situation of the former inhabitants of the town of Detroit.”⁶⁴ Another eyewitness, awestruck by the incident, described it as “at once sublime and painful, exceeding in awful grandeur perhaps almost any spectacle of the kind which has happened since the world began.”⁶⁵ But two important people did not see the conflagration and were late in even learning of it. William Hull and Augustus Woodward, Michigan Territory administrators appointed by President Thomas Jefferson, were en route to Detroit from the East while the great fire burned.

William Hull had agreed to serve as the governor of Michigan Territory and Augustus Brevoort Woodward as one of its two active supreme court justices. By the time the men arrived at the seat of their new territorial government, scheduled to become official the next month in July, they found nothing there but the shards of a colonial settlement. The buildings were gone with most of the contents destroyed, and the people were severely distressed. On the cusp of its grand moment as capital of Michigan, Detroit lay in a pile of debris. John Askin may have thought that his prognostication of Detroit falling into “ruin” seemed to have come to pass, though not in the financial realm where he most expected it. Disaster sparked by human hands, rather than an unfavorable business environment, proved to be the first undoing of Detroit. The original French Canadian dwellings were lost to wisps of memory, leaving the town orphaned from its eighteenth-century architectural heritage and its residents orphaned from their sheltering homes.

Out of the Ashes

Judge Augustus Woodward was the first of the incoming U.S. administrators to arrive on the scene after the fire. Judge Frederick Bates was already present, as he lived in the town, had served in the military, and, as his letters have revealed, courted French ladies.⁶⁶ Woodward appeared on June 30, having departed from Washington days before with the formal appointment from President Jefferson that he had long sought in hand. Woodward was born in New York City in 1774. He studied at Columbia College and soon made his way to Washington where he began the practice of law and served as a member of the city’s first municipal governing council. A voracious reader and fiercely analytical thinker, Woodward found interest in all manner of subjects, from the study of languages (he wrote in Latin, French, Greek, and Spanish as well as speaking fluent French) to literature and poetry, science, leadership, politics, and governance.

A staunch Jeffersonian Republican, Woodward admired Thomas Jefferson and wrote forthrightly that Jefferson was, in his view, “undoubtedly the second character in America in every thing which forms a component part of a great man. Washington alone is his superior.” Woodward’s handwritten notebooks, full of pictorial foreign language word-trees, a self-made map of Washington City, English word sounds and stenographic shorthand notes, classical quotations, and principles of chemistry, show Woodward to have had much in common with the supple-minded Jefferson, known for his interest and competence in a dizzying array of subjects. In 1790, soon after Jefferson was elected to the presidency, Woodward sought a clerkship with him. But Jefferson informed the avid young student by mail that “I am not able to serve your wishes. . . . There neither is, nor has been a single vacancy in the clerkships in my office since I came to it.”⁶⁷

It was not until six years had passed that Woodward had the chance to meet Thomas Jefferson in person. A critical observer who treated Jefferson to the closest scrutiny, Woodward wrote down “Notes on My Visit to Mr. Jefferson,” in which he found fault with the president’s comportment. Jefferson was too “lively” and attentive, which “detracted from that calm & sublime dignity, which the imagination always attributes to a great & elevated character.” Woodward continued in his critique: “Calm & composed he should have waited my approach without an advance on his part; my salutation & accessions . . . should have been readily reciprocated with a mild & engaging condescension.” Jefferson was, in other words, too willing to engage Woodward and failed to display a social distance that underscored Jefferson’s higher status.⁶⁸

Woodward’s desire for Jefferson to politely remind him of his place reveals the young lawyer’s own belief in social hierarchy and graces. But at the same time that Woodward disliked Jefferson’s outgoing manner, he accused the president of being overly self-promoting. “I rather tho[ugh] t he spoke of his own notes a little too often: he ought not to have presumed that I had read them or had ever seen them,” Woodward harped.⁶⁹ But Woodward had read Thomas Jefferson’s bestselling Notes on the State of Virginia, published in 1785. Jefferson’s Notes contained the now well-known passage in which Jefferson lambasts African Americans for being unintelligent, unattractive, and unfit for assimilation into white society. Woodward, writing his own thoughts on blacks in an essay titled “On Habits,” had expressed views remarkably similar to Jefferson’s. In the essay, Woodward wrote: “in our own country—One sees all the negros in slavery—from his cradle he has known nothing else; the impression made by this custom has habituated him to imagine some kind of natural connection between the Africans and slavery. They are such black ugly creatures with such big lips & flat noses that surely God who is a wise Being & does every thing right w[ould] never put rational Souls into them—They must be hewers of wood and drawers of water forever—At any rate, they must not be put on a par with that dignified being a white man.”⁷⁰

Augustus Woodward was certainly influenced by Jefferson’s writings in this opinion of African Americans as a subspecies created by God with an inbred irrationality. Nevertheless, he thought it arrogant for Jefferson to assume familiarity with Jefferson’s popular book. Woodward’s skittish interaction with Thomas Jefferson upon their first meeting was an indicator of his social awkwardness more generally. A tall, reedy man with a prominent, irregular nose and small, piercing eyes, Woodward believed deeply in his own self-evident intelligence and was quick to defend against slights. That he could sharply judge a man whom he admired and whose ideas he incorporated suggested that Woodward readily turned an exacting eye toward those who did not measure up to his standards. Still, Woodward’s intellectual gifts and passion for knowledge caught and held Thomas Jefferson’s interest. Jefferson became an associate to the younger attorney, lending him an encyclopedia and seeking Woodward’s aid in identifying sources on topics of interest to them both. On one occasion, Woodward promised to send Jefferson a work that he would “shortly procure from alexandria” [sic] containing “a great deal of information on the domestic jurisprudence of France.”⁷¹ This relationship led to Woodward’s appointment as one of Michigan’s first two supreme court justices, for which he would take an oath of fidelity to “support the constitution of the United States.”⁷²

As the first appointee to the court, Woodward became chief justice of the Supreme Court in Michigan Territory. He brought his prejudiced views on race with him to the work as surely as he carried along his educational training and legal experience. The driving intellectual force in a territory that was only required by local law to have one judge present for cases, Woodward would become the only justice to write opinions for the court during his eighteen years on the bench. Several of these cases involved disputes over slavery, a practice limited by the Northwest Ordinance but not explicitly addressed in Michigan Territory laws (that Woodward himself would first pen in 1805) or in Detroit Town edicts established by the board of trustees. Woodward’s decisions on slavery cases would soon show his investment in establishing a legal culture in Detroit that reflected the principle of the rule of law, protected U.S. sovereignty over its territory, and maintained peace at the border.⁷³

Augustus Woodward arrived in Detroit one day before Governor William Hull, with a personality guaranteed to irk his superior. Woodward was self-posturing, self-important, and spoke in multisyllabic words so as to display his fine education.⁷⁴ He was also prominent and fortunate enough to immediately find shelter with James May, whose expensive home was located beyond the borders of the fallen town. From there, Woodward, whose “office and his friendship with President Jefferson gave him prestige in the Territory, and his own imperious nature demanded respect,” began to steer the distressed inhabitants.⁷⁵ Together with Judge Bates, Judge Woodward convinced Detroit residents to await the arrival of the governor before rebuilding their homes. With no permanent shelter, the townspeople created a refugee camp on the common land beside the river, squatted in the homes of nearby farmers, and depended on the charity of local merchants, like Jacques Girardin, a slaveholder, who provided the people with loaves of fresh bread.⁷⁶

One day after Woodward’s appearance and two weeks after the massive fire, Governor William Hull finally reached Detroit. He arrived with his wife Sarah Hull, a son, two daughters, a personal secretary, and the secretary of Michigan Territory, Stanley Griswold. “Shocked and appalled to find his intended capital in ruins, and the inhabitants encamped round about,” Hull went about the difficult business of managing a proto-state.⁷⁷ Unlike Augustus Woodward, Hull was not able to secure the best of temporary accommodations. Hull wrote to James Madison, secretary of state: “On my arrival (July 1st) every house was crowded, and it was more than a week before I could obtain the least accommodation. I am now in a small farmer’s house about a mile above the ruins, and must satisfy myself to remain in this situation during the next winter, at least.”⁷⁸

Although an unfortunate man in the summer of 1805 and on key occasions thereafter, William Hull had been born into privileged circumstances in 1753. He hailed from Connecticut, trained at Yale College, and served honorably in the Revolutionary War under General George Washington as well as General Anthony Wayne. Hull had been appointed by Jefferson as governor of Michigan, which also made him military commander of the territory. But any grand hope that he may have harbored for his new western post was dashed from the beginning. Hull was described by his descendants as “a man of considerable ability . . . handicapped in his new job by his total lack of acquaintance with frontier life and problems.”⁷⁹ As he struggled to recover Detroit from overwhelming disaster, a task that stretched on for years, William Hull would learn too late about the pressure that the Indian presence would foment and the cohesion of the large French population, whose language he did not even speak.

But in the days immediately following the fire, Hull forged ahead with drawing the beleaguered populace together. He called a meeting beneath the pear trees of slaveholder Sarah Macomb’s fruit orchard and gave a rousing speech.⁸⁰ Hull vowed that a committee would be formed to request aid from the U.S. government, assured the people that they would be made financially whole, and expressed his desire to rebuild the town according to a “Judicious and enlarged plan.”⁸¹ Governor Hull saw opportunity in the ruins of Detroit. Some local leaders agreed with his vision of an expanded settlement, such as Solomon Sibley, who had always judged Detroit to be too tight and too French. Stumbling out from the ashes of catastrophe, certain Detroiters began to see strategies for growth that today might be termed “disaster capitalism.”⁸²

Elijah Brush also approved of the governor’s notion of building a bigger and better Detroit. One year after the fire in 1806, Elijah Brush, James May, and John Anderson wrote a letter to President Jefferson representing a view that they described as having been sanctioned “by all the inhabitants here who are in the least Degree interested, or affected thereby.” Governor Hull was, in the letter writers’ estimation, running “a System of Territorial Government as much to our perfect satisfaction.” But the men nevertheless had pressing concerns and urgent requests. They appealed to the U.S. government to recognize all land claims obtained and held during the French and British periods; they wished to see “the Indian Title in this Territory . . . extinguished.” They wanted “to open the door to Emigration” and thus see more white settlers enter the country, and they sought “some support and Releif [sic] for the unfortunate sufferers by the late conflagration at Detroit.” Finally, they hoped to see “the Plan of the New Town of Detroit” enacted—a town that would marginalize indigenous people and reward settlers of European descent, who by hook or by crook had gained title to those lands in the colonial period. If these measures were not taken, especially regarding land, “our Ruin is completely sealed,” the authors proclaimed in defeatist language about Detroit that was already beginning to sound like an echo in the early nineteenth century.⁸³ Early settlers may have found the wood-shingled village charming and may have tolerated indigenous neighbors to further the fur trade, but the new Americans had another vision in mind. The catastrophe of fire on the heels of the establishment of Michigan Territory created an opportunity for drastic change. The rustic French fort town that hugged the banks of the narrow river could now be remade into an “authentic” American city.

Judge Augustus Woodward was tasked by Hull with designing a spatial layout for the New Town Plan. He seized upon the assignment with gusto, imagining the future Detroit as a grid of long, diagonal streets punctuated by graceful spokes at regular intervals. Much of the design was inspired by the work of a Frenchman, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, who had planned the majestic Washington City for President George Washington.⁸⁴ Woodward had kept a hand-drawn map of Washington in his pocket notebook while working as a lawyer there. Perhaps he pulled out that map, worn at the creases of the folds, to examine its specifics before sketching a design for Detroit. He also may have dusted off his reading notes from Columbia College, which included the titles On the Best Plan for Building a City, Improvements on the Plan of the City of New York, Description of the City of Philadelphia, and Description of the City of New York.⁸⁵ Surely this moment was one the intense man who compulsively sketched in his notebooks had been waiting for all his professional life. In addition to calling upon his broad base of multidisciplinary knowledge as well as his love of the liberal and applied arts, Woodward relished playing a dominant role in the refashioning of Detroit. His ardent belief in nationalism and patriotism, and the need to build up both in America, suggest he would have welcomed the challenge to remake Detroit into the pride of an American West.⁸⁶ Although he spoke fluent French and admired French politics of the Revolutionary era, Woodward cared little for English ways.⁸⁷ He had created a table in his plentiful notes in which he compared American and British characteristics, the latter group faring poorly in the tally. While American “Patriots” could be counted on for “Modesty, Intelligence, Morality, Eloquence, Decency, Family Ties, and Plainness,” the British displayed “Hauteur, Science, Gluttony, Ratiocination, Prostitution, Pride of Birth, and Splendor,” in Woodward’s humble opinion.⁸⁸ Detroit’s New Town design rested in the hands of a man who wished to imprint an American stamp with an invisible touch of French influence.

Enslaved Detroiters in Disaster’s Wake

Governor William Hull’s New Town notion depended upon the wreckage of old Detroit. But he was not the first to realize that disaster presented economic openings. As Detroit’s priceless eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century buildings lay in smoldering heaps of ash, merchant James May picked his way from lot to lot, where he “gathered the stones of which the chimneys in the houses were built . . . and built a stone house with them.” May’s palatial stone home, located on May’s Creek, a waterway that once spilled into the Detroit River, was complemented by a gristmill, tannery, and barn. This became the new hub from which May managed “a big business” with his partner, Valentine. May and Valentine rustled cattle from Ohio and Indiana back to Detroit, supplied the military post at Detroit as well as others, and provided “salt and fresh pork and beans” to households along the strait. Later, the large stone building that May called home became a courthouse and a hotel.⁸⁹ But the early account of May’s stone salvage project raises pointed questions. Who, exactly, waded through the ash and rubble looking for choice chimney stones? Who carried those stones to the undisturbed creek bank miles outside of town? Who built the stone manor house? Who ground the corn in the mill? Who raised the cattle? Who tanned the hides? May’s slaves and hired laborers surely performed these tasks, though they garner no mention in the historical record.

Not one existing narrative of the “great fire” of Detroit notes the presence of unfree people during or immediately following the incident. Despite this void, it stands to reason that enslaved people—both black and Native—would have been severely affected by the calamity. Many would have been homeless alongside their owners yet directed to the worst of temporary lodgings. Bondspeople faced hunger and bodily need just like other Detroiters but likely received lesser portions of donated food and none of the funds delivered by the relief ships dispatched from Michilimackinac and Montreal and distributed by wealthy residents.⁹⁰ Lots and roads had to be cleared, pickets reconstructed, and new homes and gardens established. Certainly slaves would have been tasked with this work as well as their customary labors. But at the same time that unfree people would have been especially disadvantaged in this moment of crisis—more vulnerable to the vagaries of chance and the burden of excess work in a town struggling to rebuild in the aftermath of destruction—they, like James May and William Hull, could find and exploit hidden opportunities. For enslaved people, disaster could be double edged—painful, but also productive. The Revolutionary War had shown that chaos and disruption could be a boon in slave communities, creating new routes to freedom. In enslaved circles where lifelong servitude was the condition of existence, events defined as crises could spur constructive change.

The Denison Case

Peter and Hannah Denison, a black couple enslaved on the Huron River twenty miles north of Detroit, would have heard about the fire as soon as news could travel. They surely worried about what the loss of the area’s central settlement would mean. But even more pressing in the lives of the Denison family than total town destruction downriver was an event that transpired just a few months before the fire. The Denisons’ owner, William Tucker, had died in the spring of 1805, and his passing put the Denisons in extreme danger. The death of an owner, as the bondspeople of William Macomb had experienced, often meant the disbursement of slaves. William Tucker left his wife, Catherine Tucker, the bulk of his property, which consisted of “six hundred acres whereof 60 acres are supposed to be leased and under fence . . . With a dwelling house, barn, stable, out houses, and orchard thereon.” William also wished Catherine to have: “my Black man and Black woman—Peter and Hannah his wife” who would receive “there [sic] freedom after the decease of Catherine Tucker my wife provided they shall behave themselves as becometh to her . . . during her life.” Tucker revealed in his will that he “always meant to give their freedom” to Hannah and Peter. Perhaps William Tucker had even told the couple as much and led them to believe he would free them upon his own death. If so, the pair would have been sorely disappointed upon hearing the specifics of Tucker’s will. Peter and Hannah would not obtain liberty yet. For that, they would have to await Catherine Tucker’s demise. But their main, heartrending concern as Tucker’s estate was settled would have been for their children: Elizabeth, Scipio, James, and Peter Jr., also left to Tucker’s wife in the will. Unlike Peter and Hannah, the children would not be freed upon Catherine Tucker’s death. Rather, “one sixth share of the negro children” would be inherited by six of the seven Tucker children—all of them boys. (Tucker’s only daughter, Sarah, was to receive two cows after her mother’s death.) How could four African American children be subdivided into six equal parts? Unless the Tucker sons (William, Edward, John, Jacob, Charles, and Henry) planned to work these slaves on a time-sharing plan, there was just one method: sale and division of the proceeds.⁹¹

William Tucker’s last testament was chillingly clear. He had bequeathed: “unto Catherine Tucker my Trusty and well beloved wife the farm I now live on together with all building stock (I mean, oxen cows sheep young cattle hogs farming utensils household furniture my Negro man and woman Peter & Hannah & their daughter and three sons). The sole use and benefit therof [sic] for & during the whole term of her natural life.”⁹² As soon as Catherine Tucker died or had the inclination, the Denison children could be sold. Their fate rested entirely in the hands of Catherine Tucker and her male heirs. Peter and Hannah Denison would have felt deep unease and even rage at this revelation. Their family was still together following the death of a man who had claimed mastery over them. But for how long?

It is impossible to know exactly how events began to turn next, who said what to whom and when. The records of Detroit are silent on which person in the transaction initiated the contract of indenture. Perhaps Catherine Tucker sought fast cash to balance the finances of her estate, or perhaps she feared that a resentful Peter and Hannah would run. Maybe Elijah Brush saw the need for skilled labor following the fire and approached Catherine Tucker about acquiring her black man and woman. Whatever the impetus, in 1806, Catherine Tucker transferred Peter and Hannah for an undisclosed signing fee. She “indented” the couple “to Elijah Brush for one year, at the expiration of which they were to have and enjoy their freedom.”⁹³ Elijah Brush had probably paid Catherine Tucker hundreds of dollars to make this deal for the Denisons’ removal. The couple’s children would remain with Catherine Tucker, however. This loss of their family must have dominated the thoughts of Hannah and Peter as they rowed the river to the remains of the old French port town where they had been purchased in 1780 and 1784 and separated, then, or prior, from their own parents.⁹⁴

The home occupied by Elijah and Adelaide Brush, as pictured in a drawing from the middle 1800s, took up the better portion of a city block. Sprawled across lush park-like grounds surrounded by pickets, the large two-story farmhouse had multiple front-facing windows framed by wood shutters and a long, covered front porch secured at the corners by columns. Crisscrossed by walking paths, the land supported shade trees, fruit trees, and thriving gardens.⁹⁵ The house would have had stone chimneys. The doors may have been painted an emerald green, a color at that time viewed as “evidence of the taste and wealth of the householder.”⁹⁶ The Brush farm, as it came to be known after John Askin’s move to Canada, encompassed more than a mile of land with 386 feet of frontage along the Detroit River just outside the fort.⁹⁷ When the Denisons walked onto that land and into the home where they would work, they could not have helped but compare it to the more modest farmhouse of William Tucker. The Denisons also would have been quick to perceive the high social status of their new masters: Adelaide, the elegant daughter of a prominent trader, and Elijah, a big man in local affairs. At the time of the Denisons’ arrival, Elijah Brush’s stature, and hence his influence, were steadily expanding. He had been appointed co-mayor of the town in 1806 along with Solomon Sibley, and he was serving as treasurer of Michigan Territory as well as lieutenant colonel of the Legionary Corps.⁹⁸

Within the wooden walls of the home constructed on land purchased by Adelaide’s maternal ancestors in the period of the French and Indian War, the Brushes and the Denisons must have sized one another up.⁹⁹ Hannah would have been told to keep the kitchen, clean the house, sew and wash linens and clothing, and serve Mrs. Brush as other enslaved women had done before her, while Peter would have been ordered to take on many of the regular duties of male slaves in Detroit. This included heavy agricultural work, construction and repairs about the place, delivery of parcels and letters, and the application of any specialized craftsman skills. Because Elijah Brush did not engage directly in the fur trade but instead represented clients in the industry, Peter was not dispatched to sea, made to clean and pack furs, or directed to transport malodorous skins across great distances. Instead, he was likely assigned to help clear the rubble in Detroit. All through the year that the Denisons lived with the Brushes, town residents were still homeless due to the fire. During the winter of 1806 and into that spring and summer, Detroit resembled a tent city, with temporary lodgings half open to the elements teetering among refuse piles.

As days turned into weeks and weeks into months, the Brushes may have come to appreciate the particular attributes of the Denisons. We can wonder what the exacting Adelaide first noticed about the capable Hannah. Perhaps Hannah spoke often of her children in the French language, pulling on Adelaide’s heartstrings. Or perhaps Hannah, a woman handy with the needle, even claimed the superior skills of a dressmaker and could craft the fashionable clothing that Adelaide so adored. And Elijah may have recognized in Peter a self-possessed nature that indicated an unusual force of inner strength. Elijah may even have regretted the other man’s forced condition of servitude, feeling a flash of sympathy for the difference that class and color made. His father-in-law, John Askin, had after all once described Elijah Brush as a “warm hearted fellow.”¹⁰⁰ So during the long winter months, when Detroiters relied on fires for heat, stories for comfort, and sleds for transport across icy waters, the Brushes and the Denisons may have gotten to know one another, slowly laying a fragile foundation for common cause. Even given the unequal power relations in place, something transpired between these pairs—perhaps a sense of mutual dependence, recognition, or even respect. By the time the calendar turned to the fall of 1807, the Denisons were suing for their children’s freedom, and they had secured as their attorney Elijah Brush, Esquire.

Or maybe this story is inside out as I have told it, with emphases on the wrong elements. Maybe actions less romantic, but more heroic, actually occurred in Detroit that year. Perhaps Peter Denison had an unusual asset that he was able to leverage to change his family’s circumstances. He had relatives on the Macomb farm, which was parallel to Brush’s place on the other side of town. He was not unknown to Elijah Brush. The two men had probably met and even conversed in the past. Elijah sensed what Peter was made of. So upon the death of William Tucker in 1805, Brush and Denison negotiated an agreement. In exchange for something special from Peter, Elijah Brush would ask Catherine Tucker to release the Denisons under the auspices of a one-year indenture contract that would soon see the whole family freed. But then, a hitch. Catherine Tucker refused to let the children go. So while Peter and Hannah Denison lived in Detroit and worked for the Brushes, they strategized with the Brushes to challenge their former mistress’s right to continue holding the children as slaves. Like other enslaved people who engaged the services of attorneys, Peter Denison likely paid Brush’s fees by trading even more of his own labor. The case brought forward by Elijah Brush on behalf of the Denisons would test the court system of Michigan Territory as the first freedom suit to be heard there. Brush, in his own words, “had always considered the Subject of Slavery as very doubtful in the Country, and as highly necessary to be Setled by Some judicial decision.” He wanted to be the one to argue the matter, “but had no clear idea what the ultimate decision was likely to be” in the suit described many years later by a scholar of African American history as “Michigan’s Own Dred Scott Case.” Denison v. Tucker, decided in the fall of 1807 by a single judge, constituted the rationale that regulated slavery until Michigan statehood in 1837.¹⁰¹

Established in July of 1805 upon the birth of Michigan Territory, the Michigan Supreme Court was a “loosely organized, often whimsical bench.” As no physical courthouse existed, sessions were held in any available structure, including the Indian council house, offices, taverns, “and sometimes on a Woodpile.”¹⁰² The rough-hewn quality of this arrangement suited Chief Justice Augustus Woodward, whose focus on the life of the mind led him to bathe seldom and dress with scant attention to polish or presentation.¹⁰³ Perhaps in part because he was known as “quarrelsome” and “slovenly,” Woodward never married, concentrating his energies instead on the tasks and problems set before him as a manic, conceited, and some have said “brilliant” visionary of the territory.¹⁰⁴ One of the mottos scrawled into the pages of his notebooks read: “Tis better to excel in knowledge than in power.”¹⁰⁵ While Woodward’s pursuit of government posts over the course of his career shows that he was not immune to the allure of status, for him, research, reading, and knowledge in the quest for “patriotism” and “virtue” were paramount endeavors and essential ends.¹⁰⁶ So when Elijah Brush entered a motion on behalf of Peter and Hannah Denison, Woodward—a man who had written just over a decade earlier that blacks “must be hewers of wood and drawers of water forever,” consented to hear the case. The Michigan territorial judiciary had borrowed from Ohio law to establish the supreme court with “exclusive jurisdiction” over cases involving land title, matters exceeding $200, crimes allowing capital punishment, divorce, and appeals from the district courts. The Denison children would have been valued at far more than $200 and closer to $2,000. This case therefore fell squarely into the supreme court’s purview. Dutifully, Woodward issued a writ of habeas corpus, a right to inhabitants guaranteed by the Northwest Ordinance along with trial by jury. With the use of the writ, Woodward summoned Catherine Tucker into court to present the Denison children and testify as to her claim on them.¹⁰⁷

Habeas corpus had been applied over the centuries of Anglophone legal culture to prevent wrongful imprisonment and allow captive people to appear before a judge who would determine the reasons for their detention. No person, the practice presumed, should be held without just cause. In the 1700s, the writ became a tool for slaveholders to demand the return of fugitive slaves. The application of the writ in protection of enslaved people was more unusual, and in requesting it, Elijah Brush pursued an edgy legal strategy fit for his location on the borderland-frontier. Catherine Tucker was thus compelled by Judge Woodward to bring him the “bodies” of the Denison children.¹⁰⁸ Unlike most freedom suits, which became more common in the nineteenth century, the Denison case would not turn on whether the Denisons could prove a “free maternal ancestor.”¹⁰⁹ Instead, the future of these children would rest on the fine-grained interpretation of territorial and international law.

In the case of Denison v. Tucker, Catherine Tucker’s statement on September 24, 1807, began as follows: “In obedience to the commands of the annexed writ of Habeas Corpus ad subjiciendum I have brought before the Supreme court of the territory of Michigan, the bodies, of Elizabeth Denison, James Denison, Sip Denison and Peter Denison Junr . . . together with the cause of their detention by me.” Tucker, represented by attorney Harris Hickman, claimed that she held the children “in Servitude, under the Authority of the Ordinances and Laws of Upper Canada, which existed prior to, and at the time of, the surrender of the Post and Settlement of Detroit.” Tucker was a British subject who had remained on the American side of the river. She argued that she was therefore due the protection of property guaranteed by the Jay Treaty, as the children were born to Peter and Hannah, slaves of her husband purchased for “a valuable consideration.” Because the children “were all born, within the precincts & Jurisdiction of the Post of Detroit, while it was a part of (and subject to the Laws of) the province of Upper Canada,” Tucker believed “she was entitled to hold them.” She signed this statement with her mark rather than her name, an indication that Catherine Tucker’s level of formal education was no higher than that of her bondspeople.¹¹⁰

A beneficiary of slave labor who regularly represented his father-in-law and other members of the slaveholding class, Elijah Brush fought hard for the Denisons, arguing their case “at full length” a day after Catherine Tucker’s attorney presented hers.¹¹¹ The text of Brush’s argument does not survive in the Michigan Supreme Court records, but we can intuit the outlines of his position. Peter and Hannah were now free following the year-long term of their indenture contract with the Brushes. Their children should be free as well according to the dictates of the Northwest Ordinance. Brush’s allegiance in this case was not to a principle of emancipation but, rather, to individuals with whom he had ties. Brush was loyal to those he claimed as part of his circle, and the Denisons could be counted as such for reasons both altruistic and self-serving. But neither Brush’s commitment nor his connections could win the day in court on such a consequential matter as property ownership. This case, as Judge Woodward saw it, went straight to “the question of Slavery” in the territory. And as he wrote in his final decision issued on September 26, 1807: “The question is novel, it is important, it is difficult.”¹¹²

Augustus Woodward devoted thirteen pages, covered in a tight cursive scrawl with numerous lines of crossed out text and length-wise additions in the margins, to thinking through the complexities of the Denison v. Tucker case.¹¹³ Maybe he once again dusted off his books from Columbia, referencing his copy of On the Abolition of Slavery, Plan of a System of Jurisprudence for the United States, or Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, as he struggled through his deliberation.¹¹⁴ He solicited information from James Wood, a colleague in Canada, and perhaps from legal associates back East or elsewhere in the western territories. Wood explained in a letter to Justice Woodward that: “Prior to the Conquest of Upper Canada by Great Britain, an Ordinance was passed by Mr. Raudot, Intendant of Canada, dated the 15th of April 1709, by which it was ordained that, under the good pleasure of his Majesty (the King of France) all Panis & Negroes which had been or which should thereafter be purchased, should belong in full property to those who had or who should purchase them in quality of Slaves.” Wood also disclosed that Elijah Brush was well informed of this precedent, suggesting, “if you will call on Mr. Brush he will give you a Volume containing the Laws of Upper Canada which I left with him this Spring & in which the Statute you allude to is contained.” Wood’s letter, dated August 18, 1807, six weeks before the Denison case came to court, is indicative of forethought. Elijah Brush was preparing his case months in advance, and Judge Woodward was expecting the charge against Catherine Tucker. Both men may have been influenced in their actions by a statute passed in Missouri, Louisiana Territory, just months prior in June of 1807, which permitted individuals being held as slaves to sue for freedom on the basis of wrongful captivity.¹¹⁵

Augustus Woodward sought information from a Canadian regarding a nearly hundred-year-old French edict and may have looked westward for instructive territorial law. Deciding this slavery case in Detroit required as much. Because Detroit was positioned on a border and at the intersection of territorial, national, and international laws, Woodward had to contend with the legal history of two empires and one aspiring imperial nation, including layers of law dating back to the French colonial period. He had to grapple, as well, with the moral mire of slavery, the citizenship status of Catherine Tucker, and the birthdates and places of the Denisons. Woodward’s lengthy written decision began with a history of slavery in Europe (England, Spain, and France) as well as the United States, reviewed the Northwest Ordinance and Jay Treaty, defined the meaning of property, discussed “principles of the law of nations on the Subject of Slavery,” quoted the French ordinance on slavery of 1709 and the Canadian act of 1793 preventing the importation of slaves. While weighing all of these matters, Woodward professed that he held absolute the Constitution and authority of the United States. “The American government has promptly, Steadily and uniformly manifested its disposition to introduce its own forms of government, and to apply its own laws,” Woodward proclaimed. His chief aim was to affirm and strengthen America’s position as an independent nation. He therefore determined that his territorial court must resolutely uphold the international treaties of the federal government. Woodward acknowledged that the Northwest Ordinance mandated: “In this territory Slavery is absolutely and peremptorily forbidden.” Nevertheless, he also asserted: “the federal constitution required that provisions in a duly ratified treaty prevailed over any contrary local laws.”¹¹⁶ For him, the U.S. Constitution and treaties ratified by Congress trumped the quasi-constitutional nature of the Northwest Ordinance, which he saw as comparatively “local.” Woodward determined that enslaved people born before the effective American era that commenced in 1796, even “after the application of American laws,” could be held in a “State of qualified slavery.” He accepted that Catherine Tucker was a British citizen, entitled to protections of personal property as spelled out in the Jay Treaty cemented between Great Britain and the United States. He therefore decided that Catherine Tucker was entitled to hold the Denison children as her property.

Woodward rendered a complicated ruling that drew on the Jay Treaty, the Northwest Ordinance, gradual emancipation schemes in the Northeast, and British Canadian slave law. He issued a partial, graduated emancipation decision in which some slaves and slave descendants would never be free, others would be free after twenty-five years, and some—those born after the American assumption of control in the Northwest Territory—would be born free. The ruling stipulated:

The Laws of France and Upper Canada ceased to have any effect in this Territory almost immediately after July 11, 1796, but under Jay’s Treaty settlers continue to enjoy their property of every kind. The term property as used in Jay’s Treaty includes slaves, as slaves were recognized as property by the countries concerned. Slaves living on May 31, 1793, and in the possession of settlers in this Territory on July 11, 1796, continue such for life; children of such slaves born between these dates continue in servitude for twenty-five years; children of such children, and all born after July 11, 1796, are free from birth.¹¹⁷

Because the eldest Denison children had been born between 1793 and 1796, they were consigned to slavery for life; their younger brother, Peter, would be relegated to slavery for another twenty-five years.¹¹⁸ The devastation in the aftermath of that court session must have been profound. Elijah Brush had lost the case, and Peter and Hannah Denison had lost their sons and daughter to a lesser demon politely deemed “qualified slavery.”

Word traveled swiftly along the banks of the river. Catherine Tucker’s success in court spurred other slaveholders on. It was only three weeks after this decision that the Detroit slaveholder George Cotteral used the writ of habeas corpus to have the runaway Native man Toby arrested and returned to him. One week after Toby was apprehended, on October 19 of 1807, Judge Woodward had before him another slavery case. Canadian merchant Richard Pattinson petitioned the court to forcibly return his runaway slaves who were living in Detroit. Jenny, a mixed-race woman of African descent, and Joseph Quinn, a Native man, had run away from Pattinson’s home in Sandwich, Upper Canada, a year earlier, in the fall of 1806. The two had made it to safety across the river and managed to evade recapture for months. Pattinson described Jenny as a “certain Mulatto girl . . . about the age of twenty years about five feet Six inches high straight and well made.” One wonders what the relationship was between Pattinson and Jenny, a young woman whose figure he admired and who, in his words, “refuse[d] to return to his services.” Joseph Quinn, the young man Jenny absconded with, was close to her age, at eighteen. He may have been a friend, lover, or relative of Jenny’s, such that the two vowed to make their break together. Pattinson asked the Michigan court to arrest both young people and return them to his possession.¹¹⁹

Pattinson likely expected a positive outcome given the precedent of the Denison case. But that situation was entirely different in Judge Augustus Woodward’s view, which was filtered through a lens of upholding American sovereignty. In the Pattinson case, Woodward emphasized that while the Jay Treaty compelled the recognition of British property rights in Michigan, no such treaty existed between the United States and Canada regarding Canadian slaves. He decided the court had no obligation to return persons held as property who were fugitives from a “foreign jurisdiction.”¹²⁰ Woodward’s decision in this case set important precedent for slavery law in the territory and the strength of U.S. jurisdiction at the border. He later received notice from the postmaster of New York City that copies of his decision on the Pattinson case were circulating in New York, where it was printed in The American Citizen and Republican Watchtower newspapers and sent to the Speaker of the House.¹²¹

On the same day that the Pattinson case reached the court, a slaveholder in similar circumstances filed a petition. Matthew Elliott, who “had remained at Detroit until about the time of surrendering said Post to the American Government, when he removed to Amherstburg,” had lost several of his slaves. He claimed that “Hannah, Peter, Abraham, Scipio, Candus, and James who were born the slaves of said Matthew Elliott of female slaves belonging” to him, had run away to Detroit “last winter and spring.” In addition, Elliott stated that Pompey and Jane, whom he bought from John Stockwell, who bought them from George Meldrum, had also “deserted” at the same time.¹²² Elliot brought suit for the arrest and return of eight people. Given the replication of several names from the Denison family and the vague time window in which these slaves were said to have escaped, Elliott may have been chasing financial gain by claiming people he did not actually own and taking advantage of what he saw as an opening signaled by the Denison decision. Judge Woodward denied Elliott’s request, citing the Pattinson ruling that he had issued that same day.¹²³ Woodward saw no legal obligation to find, arrest, and return the slaves of British Canadian subjects. Elijah Brush, who argued and lost all of these cases, first on behalf of the Denisons’ freedom and then on behalf of Pattinson’s and Elliott’s right to recover their slaves, confessed he had never been “Sanguine” in his “expectation of Success” in any of the suits.¹²⁴ The relationship between slavery and the law in Detroit had been too hazy for Brush to predict an outcome. And Woodward’s supreme court decisions may have added still more confusion, as he protected the right to hold slaves for the class recognized as old British settlers, but rejected the right of British-Canadians to recover their slaves with the aid of the court.

Despite his previously expressed views of black inferiority, Augustus Woodward criticized slavery severely in these decisions. In Pattinson’s case, he empathized with the runaways as “human beings escaping from chains and tyranny” who “Could find no place in the whole earth to rest.”¹²⁵ In the Denison case, he approved of the Northwest Ordinance’s ban on slavery, writing: “Nothing can reflect higher honor on the american government than this interdiction. The Slave trade is unquestionably the greatest of the enormities which have been perpetuated by the human race. The existence at this day of an absolute & unqualified slavery of the human Species in the United States of America is universally and justly considered their greatest and deepest reproach.” These ardent feelings, which seem to represent a change for Woodward over time, had no practical bearing on his decisions for the Michigan court. In the end, he addressed these cases legally rather than morally, or rather, with a view of maintaining American sovereignty as the highest form of his moral duty.

The Denisons surely had little regard for the subtleties of Judge Woodward’s musings on the ugliness of the slave trade and assuredness of America’s failing. For them, the judge’s final decision that stole the liberty of four of their members was what mattered most. The next generation of their family would remain enslaved, most for their entire lifetimes. The Denisons would not abide this. By late October, the Denisons knew Tucker would have trouble recovering the children from Canada, just as Pattinson and Elliott had failed to recapture fugitives who had crossed the international border into Michigan Territory. This was all the incentive the Denison family needed. In the fall of 1807, they fled across the river to Sandwich, Upper Canada, keeping their family unit intact against all odds.¹²⁶

As the Denisons ran from Detroit in search of liberty and security in their personhood, other black and Native captives ran to Detroit from Canada. The river that had once connected two sides of a single settler community but now divided two adversarial nations was being used as a bridge yet again—this time for fugitives escaping the grip of slavery. Detroit saw a surge of freedom suits and runaway slave cases between 1807 and 1809, as enslaved people, and those who claimed them, watched to see how the legal winds would blow. Denison v. Tucker was the first slavery case decided in Michigan Territory, but it would not be the last fight for freedom at the riverside. Before long, Peter Denison would return to his birthplace of Detroit, armed and politically dangerous.