5

The Rise of the Renegades (1807–1815)

           The whole territory is a double frontier.

           The British are on one side. The savages on the other.

—Memorial of the Citizens of Detroit, 1811

Maybe the story was inside out. Perhaps Peter Denison, the black man formerly enslaved by William and Catherine Tucker, was never really a servant indentured to Attorney General Elijah Brush. The legal record of the Michigan Supreme Court tells us otherwise, explicitly stating that Catherine Tucker indentured both Peter and his wife, Hannah Denison, to Elijah Brush following the death of William Tucker in 1806. But the odd events that soon ensued on the heels of that contract indicate a more intricate and unusual course of events that unfolded in the borderland vortex of turn-of-the-century Detroit.

The onset of the 1800s was difficult for Detroiters. A raging fire had destroyed the old town within the walls and scattered residents across the countryside in search of shelter. Political leaders for the newly designated Michigan Territory, mostly hailing from more refined eastern cities and townships, struggled to find their footing in a frontier environment peopled by inhabitants who spanned a cultural range, including, most especially, indigenous North Americans and French Canadians. The first session of the Michigan Territorial government, led by Governor William Hull, was held two months in the wake of the fire in the corner tavern of Richard Smyth, who, in addition to selling spirits, crafted hats.¹ Enslaved people, often in groups, were making bold bids for freedom by crossing the international borderline that was the Detroit River, a movement that led to a series of controversial cases in Chief Justice Augustus Woodward’s outland court. French-speaking habitants harbored suspicions of the radical plan for rebuilding the town put forward by American leaders. Because of the need of constant translation between French residents and the governor, “the intercourse of the heart,” Judge Woodward wrote, “seldom pass[ed] through.” Neither the British nor the French actually liked easterners, Woodward confessed. The British referred snidely to Americans as “Yankees,” while the French maligned them as “Bastonnois,” “Sacre Bastonnois,” or “sacre cochon de Bastonnois” (Bostonians, blasted Bostonians, or filthy swine of Boston).² Eastern newcomers, for their part, often viewed the old western settlers as uncouth and “half savage.”³ The landed elite, many of them from longtime merchant and slaveholding families, pushed for a federal government that they distrusted to recognize existing land claims and mark a fixed boundary between white and Indian territory that would swell the former and shrink the latter. And even as Detroit dragged itself out of the ashes of manmade disaster and negotiated internal social as well as political strife, new threats gathered on the horizon that presaged the possibility of yet another imperial war.

Incoming governor William Hull may have once thought that he was equipped to untangle such a tight knot of conflicts and pressures. Hull was a man possessive of an imposing physique, as well as an impressive military and judicial background. His full girth, patrician nose, and slightly downward turned eyes might even have intimidated those who worked with and beneath him. His history of outstanding service in the Revolutionary War helped him win the appointment as governor of Michigan Territory. Hull had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel in that conflict and was roundly recognized for his brave and brutal handling of the bayonet, even receiving a personal commendation from General George Washington. After retirement from the military in 1786, Hull served as a common pleas court judge in Newton, Massachusetts, and as a member of the Massachusetts state senate. Being a Democrat and staunch supporter of Thomas Jefferson also buoyed Hull’s rise, as it was President Jefferson who tapped Hull for the gubernatorial post that included responsibility for Indian Affairs in the region. For a salary of $2,000 per year, William Hull made plans to move “to a rough frontier society made up of French-speaking settlers intermixed with a sprinkling of Americans who were primarily westerners of an independent spirit.” After taking the oath of office in Albany, New York, in the spring of 1805, Hull set off for Detroit with his family by way of a water route. Travel across Lake Erie was unpredictable, with the speed of the crossing entirely dependent on the winds. Nearly two long months after their departure, the Hulls had arrived to find Detroit “vanished.”⁴

Sarah Hull, William Hull’s wife of twenty-four years, entered a waking nightmare when she arrived with a son, Abraham, and two daughters, Nancy and Maria, by way of the Detroit River. Four years later, she would describe the arduous trek from the Northeast as “a long and perilous journey through the wilderness of six hundred miles.” Responsible for the management of her upper middle-class household in a period that elevated white women’s roles as Victorian wives and mothers of the Republic, she was expected to create a proper and uplifting home while her husband attended to politics. But there was no home to make in Detroit. The settlement was an ash bin. Sarah Hull and her children were virtually homeless, living with a farm family a mile out of town in crowded conditions worse than those suffered by her husband’s headstrong chief justice.

Sarah had not been groomed to live in a refugee zone on the western edge of American expansion. The daughter of a judge in Newton, Massachusetts, she would have been expected by fellow ladies of the genteel class to instill virtue in her children, host teas and charm guests, and lubricate the social wheels of her husband’s bright political future. Frontier Detroit promised nothing resembling this picture. The people there were isolated, insular, ethnically oriented toward French and Indian ways, and accustomed to making do in the most extreme of circumstances. In 1805, the population amounted to just 274 souls within the walled village, and most of those residents had been displaced to makeshift lodgings. Outside the central footprint of the riverine fort, farmers, “almost exclusively French,” dug in along the various waterways. Sarah Hull could not have missed the precarious nature of Detroit Town: “a long, narrow column of settlers . . . flanked by the British on one side and by the woods and the Indians on the other.” But she had shown fortitude in accompanying her husband to military encampments during the Revolutionary War. She had been present at the Battle of Saratoga and helped to tend the wounded. This was exactly the kind of grit that she would need to muster, and more, in adjusting to her new environs of Detroit.⁵

While Sarah Hull struggled to keep her family fed, clean, and morally upright in their temporary, substandard quarters, she observed her husband weighing out the innumerable threats to the territory he now governed. Indians, their large and persistent populations and outstanding claims to Detroit area lands, plagued William Hull. His most active supporters, merchants of an American cast, wanted Native people pushed back and contained. Even more foreboding than the Indian encampments outside Detroit were the hundreds of clans, tribes, societies, and confederations of indigenous people spanning the Great Lakes region from New York to Minnesota and into British Canada. These original inhabitants of the inland seas, chain-linked rivers, fertile coasts, and forested hunting grounds had shown themselves to be fierce protectors of their lands and life ways. Indians had attacked this very settlement and held it hostage in the 1760s. Then they had fought with their former foes—the British military—against the Americans not twenty years later. During the Revolutionary War, Indian warriors had gathered at Detroit in order to collude with British officials and plan attacks on patriot settlements. They were everywhere, the indigenous people of the Great Lakes. These Indians had their own minds. They had a generation of young men itching to retake what had been lost in the Treaty of Paris in which they had had no representation. They also had the friendship of the British who lay in wait, ready to use them as a first line of offense against their former American colonies that had dared to break away. While William Hull pondered the Indian threat that never quite receded, he anxiously watched as tensions between the United States and Great Britain simmered to boiling.

The main issue was impressment. Great Britain boasted the greatest navy in the world and depended upon its ferocious fleet for global financial primacy as well as homeland security. The British navy enabled the small island nation to dominate much of the globe in international trade. But as Britain fought a protracted war with France during the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars that followed, the country’s navy was severely overstretched. The British navy desperately needed more sailors even as British subjects and Irish resisters were defecting to American ships in the hope of better wages, greater independence, and shorter terms at sea. Determined to preserve its military might on the oceans and to put the upstart United States in its place, Great Britain got its back up. The navy ramped up a program of impressment led by burly “press gangs” that searched port town pubs and social spaces, and even private homes, for British defectors. These men were taken aboard British ships and compelled to work for the navy in conditions that approached indentured servitude, with low pay, long terms lasting until the ends of wars, and little if any shore leave. After 1803, the British navy became even more aggressive in its impressment practice, challenging American merchant ships, searching the decks for defectors, and forcing into military service men who claimed American identities by way of affiliation, naturalization, and birthright.⁶

This was the cast of William Hull’s mind when an incident foreshadowing the War of 1812 unfolded in the summer of 1807. On June 22 of that season, an American warship floated near the Virginia shoreline with no military mission and only light weaponry. The frigate U.S.S. Chesapeake captained by Commodore James Barron was simply scheduled for a routine commercial trip to the Mediterranean. The deck was loaded with cargo, the ship’s cannon stowed away. So neither the captain nor the crew saw the blow coming when the British warship Leopard attacked by cannon at close range. The Leopard struck the Chesapeake thrice as the American captain tried but failed to launch an effective defense. Commander Barron had no choice but to surrender while a party of British naval officers forcibly boarded the ship, physically inspected the bloody crew, and kidnapped four men accused of desertion from British service. Only one of these prisoners, Jenkin Ratford, had actually been born in Britain. Three Americans were killed in the Leopard assault; eighteen were wounded. The Chesapeake was a bundle of shattered boards when finally released to limp back to port. The British defector, Ratford, was punished for his crime with a hanging on board the ship that he had fled months prior. The captured Americans from the Chesapeake crew soon joined the six thousand American men who had already been impressed by the British.⁷

News of the Chesapeake affair leapt across eastern seaboard states as well as western territories. The offended American populace fumed with outrage. President Jefferson declared a risky trade embargo, crippling commercial exchange and the country’s overall economy. The American Republic and British Crown were squaring off against one another as events slowly spiraled toward war. The British lords of the sea were on the offensive, and Governor William Hull was steward of an untamed land bordered by massive waters. Michigan Territory was a virtual peninsula with three quarters of freshwater coastline accessible to an aggressive British Provincial Marine. Moreover, the land over which Hull had formal American authority, but not by Native American consent, shared a border with British Canada that was uncomfortably close. A few stone throws across the Detroit River sat in wait Fort Malden, the encampment built by the British military after these same men had begrudgingly vacated Detroit just over a decade prior. And only one month before the Chesapeake incident, Hull had received an alarming letter from an officer stationed at Fort Mackinac, on the island above the Straits of Mackinac. The captain warned that neighboring tribes were communicating by wampum belt and likely planning to attack. So Governor Hull felt the breath of danger when he cast his thoughts to the corners and borders of Michigan Territory in the summer of 1807. The Indians could assault Detroit. The British could besiege Detroit. And the two could join their nefarious forces to fall upon America together, just as they had in the Revolutionary War. Biographers of William Hull have tried to convey and contextualize his fear of an Indian attack fired up by British instigation. For it was this fear (in hindsight, strategically misdirected) that led Hull to act in unpredictable ways that shocked his white contemporaries.⁸

The Renegade Militia

William Hull determined that he needed a strong defense, the best defense that could be obtained in a hinterland settlement with a dangerously low population of free white men. His attempt to organize the local French farmers into a formidable militia, as required by law for every new territory organized through the Northwest Ordinance, had dissolved into conflict when locals complained that the uniforms Hull required were far too expensive. Through a newly devised Michigan law modeled after a New York code, Hull and the judges had bestowed upon Hull the right to dictate militiamen’s dress. A proper New Englishman with a penchant for formalities, Hull decided that each member of his militia should don: “a long blue coat . . . white plain buttons, white underclothes in summer, white vests and blue pantaloons in winter, half boots or gaiters, round black hats, black feathers tipped with red, black cartridge and bayonet belts.”⁹ Hull was more than slightly out of touch with his new frontier environment, judging by his dress code. Elijah Brush, the flashy attorney turned militia leader, was perhaps the only soldier more than happy to comply. Brush had ordered a uniform ready to wear from New York the moment he received his commission. But the majority of Detroit residents who were compelled to defend the settlement could not afford to purchase the fabric that Hull required for uniforms (which he had ordered wholesale and personally sold), let alone spare the time from farmhouse labors that would be required for their wives and daughters to stitch the peacockish outfits. The down-to-earth French residents of Detroit were disaffected. The eager beaver Americans were small in number. Who could Hull turn to, then, as threats outside the town walls mounted? Who, in Detroit, had nothing but their lives to lose?

Governor Hull had no choice that did not involve invention. He was in dire need of new and untried ideas. He might have sought out, in this circumstance, someone like Elijah Brush, an influential American with local ties, a formal role as lieutenant colonel of the territorial militia, and experience in the settlement dating back several years. I know a man, Elijah Brush might have whispered to William Hull, following a meeting of militia leaders in Richard Smyth’s candlelit tavern. For surely Elijah Brush did know Peter Denison, the enslaved black laborer of William Tucker famous enough that various Detroiters had tried to buy him. Peter Denison was broadly skilled in physical work and river navigation; he had an unusual strength of mind that inspired respect in others. A man of talents masked in the historical record that paid little attention to slaves, but apparent to all who encountered him in his time, Peter Denison was soon envisioned by Governor William Hull as a chief defender of Detroit. The challenge was getting access to the man when he belonged to Catherine Tucker, a piece of human property bequeathed by her husband.

Elijah Brush must have approached Denison first. Then came the contract of indenture with Catherine Tucker, and the move of Peter and Hannah Denison into the elegant riverside home of Elijah and Adelaide Brush. Peter, in consultation with Hannah, must have extracted a promise for his dangerous work on behalf of the town: freedom for himself and his wife, and probably for their children as well. For in August of 1807, months before the Denison v. Tucker freedom suit was brought before Judge Woodward, Peter Denison was leading a company of men of color whose task it was to defend Detroit.¹⁰ Members of the prominent Askin family were among the first to nervously notate the strange sight of black men drilling with arms right across the waterway. James Askin wrote to his brother Charles from Strabane, the family abode on the Canadian coast of the Detroit River: “at Detroit they are making great preparations. The Town of Detroit is Picketed in from the Water Side until it joins Fort Lernoult. A Company of Negroes mounting Guard, The Cavalry Patroling every night, Batries Erecting along the Settlement, and the Militia called out frequently.” James’s father, John Askin, was displeased at this unwelcome turn of events, writing to a business colleague in Montreal: “our run Away Negroes have had Arms given them & Mount Guard.”¹¹

The Askins may not have been taken by utter surprise at this unusual turn of events. They could have been warned of developments by their in-law, Elijah Brush. But British military officials at Fort Malden in Amherstburg necessarily learned of the news through formal channels of command. On August 17, 1807, Lieutenant Colonel Jaspar Grant informed Secretary James Green of Quebec that he had heard from Colonel Isaac Brock of trouble brewing in Detroit. Grant’s description was even more detailed than the following excerpt reveals, as his intention was to expose Detroit’s advantages and weaknesses should a military conflict unfold. Grant wrote to Green in a lengthy letter:

           As the affair of the Leopard and Chesapeake has occasioned much ferment at Detroit, and has also induced the Governor the Territory of Michigan, who resides there, to take steps by no means indicative of friendly intentions, I conceive it my duty to acquaint you . . . [of] what is going forward there. . . . The Militia of Detroit have been constantly assembled for the purpose of Drill, they amount to about 400, are much better disciplined than could well be supposed, are very well appointed, and two Companies are kept in constant pay. There is, besides, a company formed of Renegade Negroes, who deserted from Captain Elliott and several Gentlemen at this side. This company consists of . . . 36 in number, and are kept for such desperate services as may be required at this side.

These armed black men defending Detroit were joined, as Grant described the scene, by a force of “inhabitants . . . called in from the distance of 30 miles.”¹² Governor Hull had been inventive indeed, forming a special militia of nearly forty former slaves; and so, it seems, had Peter Denison, their designated leader.

Appointed as the head of a defensive force made up of enslaved men of color, Peter Denison had fished for his men across the river among the farms of Upper Canada’s largest slaveholders. Denison’s recruitment strategy of enticing enslaved men to Michigan was the unspoken cause behind Matthew Elliott’s lawsuit in October of 1807, in which Elliott attempted to recover several fugitives who were living in Detroit. Elliott had listed the Denisons as part of his absent human property although the family had not formally belonged to him. His action may have been as emotional as it was economic, a vindictive attempt to punish Denison for leading away Elliott’s bondsmen. Inside and outside the courtroom, Elliott met resistance. His overseer, James Heward, had been tasked with finding the runaways, but met sharp recriminations from white working-class Detroiters when he arrived in town to give testimony. The overseer stopped in at Smyth’s tavern “to get a drink of grog,” and found himself being verbally accosted by a carpenter named William Daily and a navigator named Peter Curry. As half-pints of brandy made the rounds, Daily called Heward a “British rascal” and “threatened to pull off his wig.” The tavern filled with more working men from Detroit. Heward’s situation grew dicey. In a defensive move that begged greater forethought, Heward called the men “a damned rascally set of beggars,” which they rejoined by calling him “a damned British rascal.” By the time the dust settled, Heward had been tarred and feathered on the face and head, his wig tacked up by a nail on a post at a public street corner. In an irony that again revealed the intense social dynamics of Detroit, a thirteen-year-old enslaved boy belonging to the father of Heward’s host sounded the alarm that “they were killing Mr. Heward.”¹³ Heward was not in lethal danger, as it turned out, but his dignity took a blow, and “he had tar on his face” and “his hat full of feathers” by evening time. James Dodemead, a witness to the whole affair who testified before Judge Woodward, said he could think of no motive for the tavern patrons’ aggression except for the “offense given by Mr. Heward . . . [in] coming over to give testimony respecting Mr. Elliott’s slaves.” The only item the attackers took from Heward was his wig, the witness reported—the chief symbol of the victim’s social class and national identity.¹⁴

In addition to throttling Heward outright, the men at the tavern threatened the absent Matthew Elliott with a tarring and feathering and boasted that “if the Court decided the Slaves of Mr. Elliott Should be restored, the Court should be tarred and feathered” too. Attorney General Elijah Brush, who was deposed in this case, said he was told by an irascible Mr. Smyth that Elliott was also targeted for “formerly taking an active part with the Indians against the United States” and that the threat of tarring and feathering extended to “the judge.” Harris Hickman, counsel for Matthew Elliott, swore that “Richard Smyth, tavern keeper in Detroit . . . made use of a great deal of violent and abusive language . . . relating to the Case of Mr. Elliott’s Slaves” and “Swore very bitterly that they Should not be restored to their master, and that he would Kill any person who Should come to his house to take them, or Should attempt to arrest them, and to carry them across the river.” Smyth made this promise on “several other Occasions since,” Hickman testified, “with violent language and threats of the Same Kind.”¹⁵

The men in the tavern disdained the forcible seizure of slaves. Richard Smyth, a justice of the peace as well as a hatter and barkeep, was sequestering some of the runaways in his own house. As shown by the ire of these workers, an antislavery spark was flaring in the city along the strait. But objecting to the return of fugitive slaves to the Brits was not just rooted in a rejection of the notion or practice of bondage; it was how these men could sense as well as demonstrate their burgeoning identity as American Detroiters. It offended these residents to see rich slaveholders cross the river and try to enlist the Michigan courts to arrest black bondspeople. The British elite, once occupiers of this soil, were now intruding on these tavern-goers’ turf. Defending fugitive slaves in their midst was an act of nationalism, which is why Judge Woodward admonished them in patriotic terms. In court, Woodward chided: “he did not believe any American citizen would So much disgrace their Country” as these men had in insulting Heward and Elliott, “at a time when the United States had so many good Causes of Complaint against the British government.” Matthew Elliott, Woodward said, “had a right to be a Suitor in the Courts.”¹⁶

The conflict between the tavern-goers and the slaveholders, between the tradesmen and the justice, was spurred by border tensions. These tensions led Smyth and his mates to see black people held captive by the British as fellows and potential allies. The presence of black runaways stoked political and class consciousness among the white workers, giving them clear ideological adversaries: British slaveholders who sided with Indians, and a pompous eastern judge who might be tempted to side with slaveholders. Slavery became a screen against which these men could project a proud national identity. Daily, the carpenter, Curry, the navigator, Smyth, the hatter, and the several men who joined them, including William Watson, Austin Langdon, Abraham Geel, and others, tested their ideal Americanness against the foreignness of British slave-owners, and even against the definition upheld by Augustus Woodward in which “Americans” should be cautious of causing “offence.” Upon witnessing the tarring and feathering of Heward, one among them had cheered his fellows on by shouting: “hurraw my boys.” They likely roared at the news that Governor Hull was arming fugitives, including some of Elliott’s own bondsmen. But Augustus Woodward saw escaped slaves as “disorderly characters who had Come from the British dominions” and decried Hull as having “resorted” to “low intrigues.” To the chief justice, black slaves, unruly workers, and jumpy territorial governors were the real threat to America.¹⁷

While Smyth and the men at his tavern jolted the establishment, enslaved men of color were crossing the strait to fight in defense of Detroit. Peter Denison resided on the Michigan side of the border, but his men lived on the Canadian side and had pledged their “desperate services” in order to seize freedom in the United States. When they traversed the river and armed themselves beneath a rival national flag, these men were joining a tradition set by enterprising men of color in colonial wars past. During the French and Indian War as well as the American Revolution, black men had fought, mostly for the British, in exchange for promises of freedom. Even that very summer of 1807, as hackles rose in the aftermath of the Chesapeake incident, enslaved black American men had escaped their owners to board British naval ships.¹⁸ But the Detroit militia of formerly enslaved men deviated from this more typical arrangement. Led by officers of African descent, these men had crossed an international border to fight for the other side.

In the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the Civil War fifty years into the future that would divide America from itself, black men were rarely shown the respect of being named officers of their military units. But William Hull, according to a scornful Judge Augustus Woodward, had audaciously formalized black men’s martial leadership. Woodward wrote in a complaint to the secretary of war, William Eustis, “Mister Hull had issued three commissions to captain Denison, lieutenant Burgess, and ensign Bosset, black men, not under any law of the United States or this territory.” In Woodward’s view, Hull had been “insolent in the extreme” when challenged about this course of action and had taken as his authority “some ex parte correspondence with mister dearborne, then secretary of war.”¹⁹ Hull made a show of defending his deeds in a letter to Colonel Grant at Fort Malden meant to calm escalating fears that these armed former slaves might attack. “The permission which I have given to a small number of Negroes, occasionally to exercise in Arms,” Hull wrote, “I am informed has excited some sensibility among the Inhabitants on the British Shore. Be assured Sir, it is without any foundation, for they only have the use of their Arms, while exercising, and at all other times they are deposited in a situation out of their control.”²⁰ Hull’s reassurance that the formerly enslaved Canadian men did not always have access to their rifles and bayonets would have been cold comfort to the British military leader, as well as to the slaveholders in his province, whose human property was not just absent but also armed.

Governor Hull cut a new groove into the pattern of using black fighting men in colonial and early America. Under his auspices, the “first black militia” was formed in the United States.²¹ The military titles that Hull bestowed upon leaders in this unit—captain, lieutenant, and ensign—indicate that he viewed the group as akin to a company in the Michigan militia.²² And very likely, Elijah Brush, or Peter Denison himself, had driven Hull to formulate this arrangement. The fear of an Indian attack was so great at Detroit that Hull hired desperate men for desperate measures. How these rebels must have relished scoffing at their former masters, drilling with weapons in plain sight right across the waterway. Primary accounts describe this unusual militia company variously as a group of men made up of “Negroes” and “slaves.” Although the record does not state as much, some of these men may have been Native or mixed-race Afro-Native people enslaved by the British. Their object would have been freedom, rather than allegiance to any single slaving nation, be that nation European, American, or indigenous.

Governor Hull had authorized an unprecedented military organization. Judge Woodward stridently objected, viewing Hull as having gone a bridge too far when he armed the slaves of the neighboring nation. Woodward directed his concerns to Secretary of State James Madison in July of 1807, writing: “There is however one point on which the inhabitants of the different sides of the river are at variance. This is the desertion of the slaves. I expect complaints will be made to you on this head by the British minister. I do not approve the temper, principles and conduct of the inhabitants of this side, on the subject. I thought something ought to be done to check it.”²³ In a set of resolutions addressed to a Michigan territorial special committee in 1808, Judge Woodward continued to criticize Governor Hull on this issue, stating that Hull had been responsible for the “embodying of slaves belonging to the subjects of his Britannic Majesty residing in the province of Upper Canada into a militia company, and the issuing of commissions, or other authority, to such persons, or other slaves, or black persons, to be officers in such militia company.” Woodward viewed Hull’s actions as stoking the flames of discord between the United States and Great Britain and, most importantly to him, of violating American civil law. In order to have gone forward with a plan to arm escaped slaves, Hull should have sought higher legal approval. “In our government,” Woodward asserted, in a separate letter of complaint to the secretary of war, “we had no masters but the law.”²⁴ Although Woodward’s comment was not consciously ironic, it highlights a difference in status that fueled the dispute; the enslaved men in Hull’s militia could not have made so bold a claim to having just one master in the abstract form of law. Their masters were men and an immoral slave system wielded by men that sometimes bested the law. The special committee responded to Woodward’s complaint that Hull had acted out of bounds by quoting the territorial dictate regarding the governor’s military powers. “‘The governor, for the time being, shall be commander-in-chief of the militia, appoint and commission all officers in the same below the rank of general officers,’” the committee reminded Woodward, then stated further that they had paid “particular attention” to Woodward’s charge that Hull had “formed negroes, who were slaves, into a military company.” The committee found it to be “true that the governor has given permission to the black male inhabitants to exercise as a military company; that he has appointed a black man by the name of Peter Denison to command them; and has given him a written license for the purpose; though not in the form of a military commission. . . . This company has frequently appeared under arms, and has made considerable progress in military discipline. That they have ever conducted in an orderly manner, manifested on all occasions an attachment to our government and a determination to aid in the defense of the country whenever their services should be required.”²⁵

Not surprisingly, the territorial special committee (made up of the judges and Hull himself) sided with Hull, but, remarkably, the committee heaped praise on the discipline and patriotism of black men. The committee’s response went on to assert that Woodward’s emphasis on these men’s status as slaves was an irrelevant point: “With respect to any of them being slaves, the committee only observes that they were black persons, who resided in the Territory, and were not claimed as slaves by any person or persons in the original States.” The committee members had decided against Judge Woodward, but by using the same logic as Woodward’s own legal decisions in the Pattinson and Elliott cases: if these black militiamen were runaway slaves of British owners, it was not Michigan Territory’s affair. Michigan was only beholden to slaveholders from their own nation: the United States. “Under this view of the subject,” the committee report concluded on this matter, “the committee is of the opinion that the conduct of the executive in availing the country of the services of their black people, was not only proper but highly commendable; especially as it was at a period when the safety and protection of the Territory appeared to require all the force which could be possibly collected.” Black men formerly from Canada would now be considered “their,” meaning Michigan Territory’s, “black people,” members of “the country.” Woodward was not convinced. He rebutted this finding in a letter to the federal government, noting again his doubts about the “propriety of organizing a military company composed of slaves who had run away from gentleman residing opposite” and of “negroes commanding the company as officers being alike unauthorized by the town and the gen. [general] gov. [government] .”²⁶

Augustus Woodward’s pointed criticism of the formation of a black militia in Detroit exposed the issues of racial bias, slave status, international relations, and military readiness in a way that forced a clear and revealing response from territorial representatives. These men, like Governor Hull, viewed the defense of the border as utmost in importance and would not protect human property rights of British slaveholders on Michigan soil. Black men in Michigan Territory were presumed free unless an American owner from the slave states made a claim. Despite this deference to U.S. slaveholders regarding fugitive slaves that meant the continued, legalized threat to black people in the Northwest, the committee’s response was an avowed rejection of slavery as an assumptive state for all black men. These legislators affirmed Michigan’s fledgling political identity as a free American territory and lauded black men as responsible and even patriotic. No other city, state, or territory within the nation had yet made such a bold defense of black men’s collective honor. It happened first in Detroit.

But also central to this story is why it happened in Detroit, an environment characterized by frontier conflict and borderland contingencies. The violent threat of Indians was assumed to be so great that black men not legally freed should be armed to fight against them. While their recognition of the talents of African American men might be viewed as progressive, if self-serving, William Hull and the territorial committee at the same time reinforced an oppositional ideology of “Americans” versus “Indians.” Indigenous people were perceived as bogeymen in the wilderness, a terrifying, outsized threat requiring radical containment. At least these militiamen of color were not prone to taking scalps, territorial leaders may have thought, in a slanted view of reality that failed to recognize Euro-American brutalities against Native people. Here, in this circumscribed imaginative space of the colonial psyche, black men had an advantage. They could be viewed as co-combatants rather than age-old enemies. A conceptual line was now being drawn between Native Americans and African Americans that favored blacks in the pre–War of 1812 years. Black men had one thing the Michigan Territory needed more than almost anything else: the willingness and strength to defend Detroit and America’s borders. But the effective difference between being “black” versus being “red” was far from clear cut in every interaction or circumstance. Members of each group were still enslaved in Detroit, sometimes within the same households. And the racialized categories (“negro,” “black,” “mulatto,” and “panis”) used to serve as shorthand for their naturalized subjugation were sometimes viewed as overlapping or interchangeable by officials. In 1808 John Askin recorded his contract of indenture with Charlotte Moses, “a mulatto or pawnee Girl of Detroit,” who signed her X mark to “truly observe and obey” him as “her Said Master.”²⁷ Another example of multiple or confused racial identifiers appears in a criminal case that wound through the Michigan courts in the summer of 1814. Monique, a woman charged with stealing a valuable bedspread from the shop of Andrew Elliott, was found guilty by a grand jury in the territorial supreme court. The district court record in Detroit, where Monique resided, describes her as “a certain Black woman,” while the supreme court record describes her as “a Pawny Woman.” Notably, both the district and supreme court sessions were held in Detroit where Monique was personally known. Perhaps Monique was mixed-race; perhaps her sliding racial identification signaled her enslaved status more than any concrete racial designation. Precisely recording her racial identification was clearly not essential to the case or a matter of importance to the court. Similarly, individuals of Native ancestry or of mixed-race Afro-Indian descent were very likely to have been present in the so-called Negro Militia.²⁸

Judge Woodward thought the risk of Indian attack was being exaggerated and said as much in his critique of Governor Hull. Colonel Grant on the British side of the river also expressed disbelief at William Hull’s fired-up rhetoric: “They have picketed in the whole town of Detroit,” Grant wrote. “Every military preparation is going forward there, and every violent declaration against this side . . . the Governor of Detroit declares, if an Indian fires a hostile shot in Detroit or in the Territory, he will treat the Canadians with the utmost severity. The apprehensions circulated at Detroit appear to me to proceed more from Policy to freighten the Inhabitants into labour without food or reward, than from any real sense of danger from Indians.” Grant went on to disclose to his superior that any alliance between the British at Fort Malden and western tribes was unpredictable. “The Aid I should expect there from Indians and Militia is of a very precarious kind,” he wrote. “Indians can never be brought to act within pickets.”²⁹

Grant’s canny analysis painted a picture in which Hull was using the fear of Indians to compel undercompensated military labors, and in which Native people hardly stood at the ready to passively take orders from the British regarding designs on Detroit. As progressive as William Hull’s actions seem with regard to black militiamen, they were also strategic in a way that furthered the consolidation of American authority within the town and beyond. Hull could use the deep desire for freedom among men of color to entice them to work for little or no pay, even as he used the specter of a Native assault to pull French farmers into town from thirty miles distant. William Hull’s stated terror of Indians may have included an element of cold calculation, but he was right on one score—Native people had not yet been contained and could not be controlled. Just as American and British relations were a seething cauldron of suspicions, American and indigenous relations were far from settled in the Northwest.

The black militia authorized by Governor Hull remained active in Detroit for years, prepared, according to the territorial committee, to defend “the country.” But which country would those men favor as they considered their political allegiances? Did they subscribe to any national identity at all when both countries that warily met at the Detroit River border held blacks and Native people as slaves? Peter Denison, the sole member of the black militia whose story we can access through the documentary record, demonstrated loyalty to his family rather than to Michigan or the United States. He had agreed to lead William Hull’s unconventional military unit in exchange for freedom. But in the summer of 1807 while his men drilled in plain sight at the fort in Detroit, Peter Denison’s children were still being held as slaves by Catherine Tucker. Peter and his wife Hannah took the case to court that autumn with the aid of Peter’s fellow militia leader, Elijah Brush. Judge Woodward, who had never approved of the black militia, issued the writ of habeas corpus as Brush requested but refused to free the children of the militia’s well-known leader. Peter Denison must have felt that his trust had been betrayed—by the town of Detroit, the territory of Michigan, and perhaps Governor Hull himself. But he did not settle for this theft of his family’s natural rights, any more than the Native peoples who continued to live around Detroit settled for the theft of their land base. Peter knew the rough terrain of the border; he had already crisscrossed the river in order to gather his men. In the fall of 1807, he abandoned Detroit’s black militia, and likely his formal protection of freedom issued by the governor, to flee with his family to Canada.

The Denisons had held, and lost, a legitimate route to freedom. Now they were on the run as fugitive slaves. But Peter Denison had won a partner in Elijah Brush, not resulting from Brush’s sympathy or guilt, or even an antislavery stance adopted by the attorney. These men had spent months as comrades in arms, serving in segregated units of the Michigan militia. Peter Denison and his wife had lived with Elijah and Adelaide Brush, in the intimate quarters of the couple’s urban farm. Although Elijah could not have felt the anger, fear, and humiliation experienced by Peter Denison, whose children were counted as chattel, he could have shared Peter’s sense of moral outrage. Hadn’t Peter been willing to risk his life for Detroit, the capital of Michigan Territory? And yet the court of that territory refused to protect his children as full-fledged persons. When Peter Denison rowed the river with Hannah, his daughter Lisette, and his sons James, Sip, and Peter Junior, he was not without friends. A note in the Michigan Supreme Court record indicates, in just one line, that Denison family members “took refuge with Mr. Askin.” Elijah Brush came through for the daring Denison family, convincing his father-in-law, once among British Detroit’s largest slaveholders, to extend a hand.³⁰

Red-Lining Detroit Lands

Immediately following the series of territorial supreme court suits that tested the limits of slavery in Michigan, Governor Hull set his mind to the problem of Indians and land. Local white property holders had been complaining about Native Americans living too close to town and had expressed worry about a lack of formal federal recognition of their preexisting land claims. The loss of more than three hundred buildings to fire and the unsettled issue of how to reapportion lots within the town pickets raised the stakes of land competition all the more.³¹ And the shadow of possible war with the British placed a continuous pressure on the military readiness of Detroit, which, in the view of U.S. officials, entailed managing where Indians were on the landscape and what actions they engaged in.

In his dual capacity as governor and superintendent of Indian affairs for Michigan Territory (a conflict of interest when considered from the indigenous standpoint), William Hull started on the difficult task of reorganizing Detroit area lands by wresting more ground from Native people on the direct order of President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson had been desirous of extending America’s hold at Detroit beyond the immediate fort town. He informed the senate that “the posts of Detroit and Mackinac” had been designed as “mere depots for commerce with the Indians” by “the government which established and held them.” Jefferson, in contrast, wanted to extend the land base around these forts for military purposes. Hence, he “thought it would be important to obtain from the Indians, such a cession in the neighborhood of these posts as might maintain a militia proportioned to this object.” Already a veteran of the Louisiana Purchase with a keen understanding of the power of holding contiguous terrain for settlement and economic advancement, Jefferson had in mind acquiring lands in Michigan “so as to consolidate the new with the present settled country.”³²

In December of 1807, Jefferson’s secretary of war, Henry Dearborn, conveyed the order to William Hull to “hold a treaty with the chiefs of such Indian tribes or nations as are actually interested in the lands hereafter described.” While Dearborn pointed out that it would be “difficult” for Hull “to ascertain, with any tolerable degree of certainty, the quantity of acres,” Hull should expect to net in the ballpark of six hundred thousand acres, for which he was “not, on any condition, to exceed two cents per acre” and should endeavor to find it unnecessary to “exceed one cent per acre.”³³ Hull was convinced of the soundness of this aim and began to plan the treaty council. “I probably shall not hold the treaty until about the first of June,” he wrote to Dearborn, “They are now on their hunting grounds, will soon be employed in making their Sugar, and in the month of May, will be engaged in their planting—In the meantime, I shall be making the preparatory arrangements.” Hull’s reply conveyed his own implicit awareness of Native people’s wide-ranging use of their lands—for maple sugaring, hunting, and farming—necessities of cultural meaning and subsistence. Still, he expressed in his letter to Dearborn, in the interest of progress and economics, this land should be finagled for the United States at less than the cost Dearborn had set. “If the treaty can be effected,” Hull penned, “and the lands can soon be opened for sale, it will be of vast advantage to this Country, and likewise to the United States—The more I see of the Country, the more valuable I consider it.” Hull added in a postscript to his missive that he thought it advisable to extend the boundary “so as to include the islands” in the land cession.³⁴

Governor Hull called a meeting of Ottawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi leaders in the Wyandot village of Brownstown, south of Detroit, later that year. On November 7, representatives of the various tribes gathered and agreed to cede what is now all of southeastern Michigan and a sliver of northwestern Ohio. The payment for these lands was set at $10,000 in “money, goods, and implements of husbandry.” Native people were to retain fishing and hunting rights and to receive “two blacksmiths,” provided to the tribes as evidence of the U.S. government’s “liberality.” Several small portions of land, ranging from one to six miles square, were to be “reserved to the said Indian nations” for their villages and agricultural pursuits. William Hull reported to Thomas Jefferson in December of 1807 that all had gone smoothly, and that he had “heard of no complaint from a single individual of the Indians” regarding the treaty. He attested, too, with his jacketed chest puffed slightly out, that he “believe[d] a treaty was never made on fairer principles.”³⁵

Governor Hull accomplished his objectives in this carefully orchestrated treaty council, and his description of the outcome may have faithfully reflected how he felt about the negotiations. But these treaty proceedings were not as pleasant as Hull’s description implies. While the treaty itself details only land, monies, objects, and expertise to be exchanged, Hull’s speech to the gathered Native leaders in advance of the treaty signing focused on an entirely different subject: warfare. When addressing representatives of the Ottawa, Ojibwe, Wyandot, and Potawatomi nations who held land and interests in Detroit, Hull highlighted themes of weapons, conflict, death, and danger. He addressed the gathered leaders as “My Children,” and directed them to listen “with attention” for “the good of [their] women and children.” Hull then offered his talk as a representation of the views of “Your father, the President of the United States” who “desires to recall to your minds the paternal policy pursued towards you by the United States.” Referencing the mounting tensions between the United States and Great Britain, Hull explained that “a misunderstanding having arisen between the United States and the English, war may possibly ensue.” In the event that war did break out, it was the president’s wish that “the Indians should be quiet spectators.” Hull’s purpose in this speech, in addition to attaining land, was to keep Native people from fighting with the British against the Americans. He assured his listeners that if they did not express “intentions hostile to the United States,” they would be left unmolested by the United States, and indeed, protected by the nation. But if they did harbor ill intentions, the United States would “lift the hatchet” and “never lay it down till that tribe is exterminated, or driven beyond the Mississippi.” He warned them that if the Indians dared to challenge the U.S. militarily, they “will kill some of us; we shall destroy all of them.” He then summarized these pertinent points by emphasizing “the interest your Great Father takes in your welfare; how anxious he is to promote your happiness; how desirous he is to prevent you from taking any measures, which will involve you in ruin.” Hull concluded with the disclosure that this degree of candor was actually an act of kindness, “warning you of the fate of any tribe, who shall have the hardihood to raise the hatchet against us.” He then advised the leaders to render “a plain and decided answer” on their political allegiances.

The content of Hull’s speech, as submitted by him to Thomas Jefferson, did not dwell on the Detroit area land cession. It did not have to, when the threat of extermination and removal was implicitly leveraged as context for the treaty negotiations. How broadly would the U.S. president interpret “hostile intentions” on the part of the gathered nations? Would agreement to the requested land sale insulate the tribes from deadly accusations of hostility? Certainly the gathered Native leaders must have thought so; they proved themselves unwilling to take the chance for the sake of their families. One Ojibwe leader who signed the treaty, and whose name is recorded as Pooquiboad in the proceedings, stated: “Our solemn determination is, never to raise the hatchet against the United States. We too well know the fatal consequences of it.”³⁶ From the middle 1600s onward, indigenous people of the Great Lakes had fought valiantly and strategically for their homelands, autonomy, and relative positioning in a seemingly never-ending series of imperial wars. They knew the cost of losing in such battles, and many in the Ohio Valley had recently lost nearly all in the American revolutionary conflict and postwar campaigns of General Anthony Wayne. So William Hull was successful in achieving the Indian land cession desired by the president as well as propertied residents in Detroit. The negotiation that he viewed as utterly fair had been peppered with language steeped in threat.

The 1807 Treaty of Detroit is rarely mentioned in histories of Detroit, of Michigan, or of the Midwest, but it was critical to American officials’ plan for defending against British and Native aggression on the northern U.S. border and to Michigan territorial leaders’ hopes for fostering white settlement in the march toward statehood. This drawing of a broad boundary around the capital of Detroit and its environs set in place the pattern for the eventual relinquishment of most of what we now know as the state of Michigan by the early 1840s.³⁷ The reduction of Native territorial sovereignty immediately around Detroit also had dire consequences for enslaved people who used indigenous spaces as routes of escape with the knowledge that slaveholders were unlikely to follow them there. The shrinkage of Native landholdings strengthened U.S. military positioning, flung the door wider for American settlement, and smoothed processes of surveillance and recapture for American slaveholders. A win for Governor Hull and U.S. settlers was a loss for Native people as well as for the enslaved.³⁸

William Hull found that in Detroit success and setbacks followed one another like the tumbling waves of the lakes. While Native leaders had consented to sell hundreds of thousands of acres in the deciduous lands of southeastern Michigan, French Detroiters were resistant to the reassignment of land lots via government auction. The great fire and mass exodus from the immediate town site had left the settlement in disarray and thrown the ownership of private land, much of it purchased from Native people or allocated in the French colonial period, into confusion. The nearly sixty homeowners who used to live within the town walls had been displaced; farmers outside of the walls along the river worried about whether the United States would view their eighteenth-century claims as legitimate. Augustus Woodward had crafted a plan for the redesign of the town that was approved by Congress in 1806 but disliked by local residents, who objected, in part, to Woodward’s naming a main thoroughfare Woodward Avenue, after himself. (Woodward later denied this accusation, saying that he had named the street after the forests around Detroit. Only a portion of Woodward’s design, between Grand Circus and the river, was ever realized.)³⁹ Governor Hull and Judge Woodward established a Land Board to hear residents’ claims and assign lots, then successively hired and lost three surveyors (then rehired the first) to plot out town lands. In addition to acreage within the town pickets that would be allotted to former residents who had lived there (at a small fee if lot sizes were larger than the originals), territorial leaders had gained permission from Congress to distribute by auction 10,000 acres north of the village to adult residents over the age of seventeen.⁴⁰ Much of this new acreage had in the past been used as a commons by the townspeople, who shared the swath of cleared land surrounding the pickets for daily access and pasture land, and who likewise used the land of Hog Island (now Belle Isle Park) to let their livestock roam. U.S. officials in Washington saw this “quantity of vacant ground” around the walls as “valuable” federal land that could be sold. Detroiters complained in a formal memorial to Congress in 1808 and in a petition to the governor in 1811 about the loss of the public lands that had once been equitably shared by the community. Their petition specified that they wished to see the area “held by the inhabitants of the town forever as a commons.” In valuing communal use of the land, the descendants of Detroit’s oldest white settlers of the farming and working classes shared a view with Native people in the region diametrically opposed to the federal position that land should be sold for profit. The old settlers’ vociferous protests, rendered in French and in English, yielded no change in policy, however; the land would be divided and “liberally” sold, making lots available to newcomers, to British residents who had not even sworn allegiance to the United States, and, remarkably, to the “wives and slaves” of some former in-town homeowners. Some residents were dismayed and even offended, feeling that struggling farm families and working-class laborers lost the use of the commons unless they could meet the “humiliating conditions” of paying for it.⁴¹

George Winter, Pottawattamie Indians Crooked Creek Indiana, 1837. Winter sketched this scene of a Potawatomi community near Logansport, Indiana, in August 1837, prior to the group’s removal. Courtesy of Tippecanoe County Historical Association, Lafayette, Indiana.

The designation of land lots took decades to settle due to unceasing conflict. While American and British residents benefited from the new system, so too did individuals designated as their subordinates: current and former bondspeople. Among the recipients of deeds were several individuals described as “negro” or colored, including, Pomp (“a negro man”), Thomas Parker (“a negro . . . employed in the Hull family”), Pompey Abbott, Cato (“Dodemead’s Negro”), Harry and Hannah (“Dodemead’s negroes”), London and Mary (living at the Watsons’), Margrett (at the Voyers’ home), Susan and Nell (at Mrs. Abbott’s home), and Hannah (“Coate’s Negro”). Joseph Cooper, “a negro,” was noted as not having drawn a lot. This record of black land ownership demonstrates two interconnected, critically important facets of life for African American Detroiters in the early 1800s. They were eligible for in-town land and were hence treated as municipal residents on par with Anglo settlers. They were at the same time usually noted by first name only, designated by race, and attached by the use of possessive punctuation to white Detroiters. The Land Board record does not indicate whether these individuals were enslaved or free at the time. Some were certainly free by this period but particular individuals (like Pomp) appear as slaves in previous town records. Still others held an even more ambiguous status poised between slavery and freedom. Hannah, described as “Dodemead’s Negro” in the land records, had evaded John Dodemead’s claim to her in court in 1809. While John Dodemead had requested a writ of habeas corpus to hold Hannah, a “black woman,” and Thomas, a “Mulatto” boy (probably her son), several witnesses, including Elijah Brush and Solomon Sibley, testified that Dodemead had previously declared that the two “were not slaves of him or any other person.” Perhaps Dodemead had been involved with Hannah, had a child with her, and intended to free them before changing his mind. Since prominent witnesses were aware of his past declaration of the woman and child’s freedom, Dodemead was unable to retract it. Augustus Woodward decided in this case that Hannah and Thomas were “free persons” who must be “discharged out of the Custody of the Marshall of this territory and of Said John Dodemead.” The appearance of Dodemead’s name next to Hannah’s in the land grant entry suggests that black land recipients depended upon a connection with or patronage from past or present white owners and employers, regardless of how tangled or contentious such relationships might be. Another black woman, also named Hannah, may have had a more constructive relationship with a patron, as she had the explicit help of Austin E. Wing, a Land Board official, in making her application. Significantly, Native people do not appear as designated by tribe or race in the Land Board lists.⁴² Mixed-race Native-French and Native-English town residents would be noted under their European surnames, and many other indigenous people had moved to different locations by the time these lots were assigned. The prominent Oneida woman trader, Sally (Sarah) Ainse, who had once owned a house and second lot in Detroit, had relocated to the Thames River in Upper Canada prior to the American assumption in 1787.⁴³ And through the Treaty of 1807, most other free Native Detroiters had been red-lined, so to speak, outside the district through land cessions. While Governor Hull had made it a priority to build a stone Council House for trade and political meetings with the Indians in 1807, he did not wish to see those same Indians dwelling too near as neighbors.⁴⁴

Even as the Native population within the town proper was dwindling, by 1810, rates of enslavement had also dropped dramatically in Detroit due to a bundle of factors. A number of black and Native bondspeople had been transported across the river by retreating British owners. The liquid international border, crossable by boat, was encouraging escape attempts. The ban on slavery legalized by the Northwest Ordinance made it more difficult to buy and sell human beings. In accordance with Judge Augustus Woodward’s decision in the Denison case, babies born to enslaved residents would now be free, and his decisions in the Pattinson and Elliott cases meant fugitives from Canada would also be treated as free people in Detroit. American Detroiters, such as the patrons in Richard Smyth’s tavern, began to connect slavery with a previous British colonial administration and supported black runaways as a means of distinguishing themselves from the British. But whether enslaved or free (a phrase containing a vast magnitude of difference), most of the black people in town were working for, living with, and viewed as possessions of white residents. As a result of this mix of multiple causes, the 1810 census enumerated forty-three “free colored” residents in Detroit Town proper and only four “slaves.” The tally for riverside suburbs totaled as follows: Cote du Nord-Est: six free colored; Cote de Poux: ten free colored and two slaves living within two slaveholding households; River Rouge: ten free colored and eight slaves living in two slaveholding households; Grand Marais: seven free colored and one slave; Grosse Pointe: three free colored and two slaves living in one slaveholding household. Several suburbs did not have residents listed in either of these categories. A tally of the census numbers indicates seventy-nine free people of color and seventeen enslaved people within a total population for the District of Detroit of 2,355.⁴⁵ The 1810 census did not note the race of these enslaved individuals. The use of the term “Negro” so frequently in Land Board records suggests that most people within the categories of “free colored” and “slaves” were black or of mixed African descent. The population of enslaved Native Americans had dropped significantly since the 1790s, but several people categorized as “Panis” were still present into the first decades of the new century. The registry of Ste. Anne’s Church (which had lost its original site due to the fire and Woodward’s town plan that ran Jefferson Avenue straight through the burial ground) notes twenty-nine enslaved congregants between 1800 and 1810. Ten were black; fifteen were Native; one was “mulatto,” and three had no racial identifier noted.⁴⁶ The term “mulatto” could indicate a person of mixed African descent of either white or indigenous parentage, and any of the non-identified individuals could have been indigenous.⁴⁷ Even as the practice of slaveholding faded in the second decade of the American era, unfree indigenous people still outnumbered unfree blacks in Detroit.

Enslaved and free black residents in the town saw their position improved through a land allotment process that included them. But longtime French inhabitants were vocal critics of the American attempt to rebuild the old town through a regularized layout, the grid that now characterizes much of the Midwest. It seemed to them that newer arrivals, namely influential Americans, were being awarded the choicest lots along the river and closest to town. Elijah Brush was a case in point; he had procured the first available farmland east of town in 1807. In February of 1808, Elijah and his wife Adelaide sold a prize parcel to William Hull, who made a series of personal purchases from previous settlers, many of them French, between 1808 and 1811.⁴⁸ But even as Governor Hull increased his wealth through land ownership and commissioned the first brick house in Detroit for his family, he operated in a state of constant conflict. Hull withdrew his previous support of Woodward’s newfangled town plan, and the two became political adversaries. Their argument over the black militia, which raged on from 1807 to 1811 and sparked Woodward’s testy missives to Hull’s superiors in Washington, contributed to the souring of their relationship. While Hull faced complaints from French residents and epistolary attacks from Woodward, he also contended with his wife’s anxiety about political tensions in Detroit. During one of William Hull’s trips to Washington in April of 1809, Sarah Hull wrote him a pointed letter that opened with the worrisome line: “My mind has been so agitated in thinking of the perplext situation you are placed in, that I find no relief but in writing. I shudder at the idea of you returning to Detroit, that never can be done with honour to yourself it is gone as much as if your commission was taken from you.” Sarah knew her husband was trapped. Detroiters did not like him, and federal officials were using him for their own political ends. “You have experienced enough of the treatment of this people already,” Sarah wrote of Detroit residents. And about government leaders in Washington, she warned: “the truth is they are the friends to Mr. Madison, not friend, to your character or interest.” Sarah wanted to see her husband “nominated to the senate” and perhaps dreamed of a life in relatively genteel Washington City. She resented influential politicians for not putting her husband forward, despite his sacrifice in traveling “through the wilderness” of the West and “render[ing] services to his country.” In large, dark lettering at the top of her final page, Sarah urged William to “Renounce all Politics Be Neuter.” In cautioning her husband to avoid political entanglement through a tactic of neutrality, Sarah went so far as to advise emigration: “if you cannot do this in America flee to some other part of the world, at least till a government arises that can estimate your talents and reward your virtue.” She concluded her sharp letter with the warm sentiment: “however disagreeable your situation is remember you have one friend that will devote her life to make you happy.”⁴⁹ Sarah Hull’s missive was a Molotov cocktail of smart analysis and tough advice that recognized her husband’s tenuous position. Within a few short years, William Hull would wish that he had followed Sarah’s sage, if fiery, direction and left the leadership of Detroit to some luckier soul.

The Denisons on the Border

While Sarah and William Hull brooded over their unstable situation in Detroit, Hannah and Peter Denison had accomplished, by propulsion of unjust circumstances, just what Sarah Hull had recommended to her husband. The Denison family had moved to another country by crossing the river into Canada. In Sandwich, a town more modest than Detroit with “fifty log or frame houses built near the Old Huron Church, a small shipyard, two small wharves, and a small government warehouse,” the Denisons made a new home. Several former Detroiters loyal to the British Crown had reconvened there, sometimes referring to Sandwich as “South Detroit.”⁵⁰ In Sandwich, the Denisons joined St. John’s Anglican Church, where they participated in the social and religious rites of baptisms, weddings, and funerals. Choosing a Protestant denomination after having lived in a Catholic town, the Denison parents soon formalized their commitment to the faith. In October of 1808, nearly a year to the day after their failed freedom suit in the Michigan Supreme Court, “Peter and Hannah Donnison Adults, free Negroes” were baptized at St. John’s. Elizabeth Denison, the couple’s eldest child who went by the nickname “Lisette,” served as sponsor for several Denison baptisms in the church. The merchant John Askin may have witnessed these baptisms, as he and other slaveholders who had recently moved from Detroit were also members of the congregation.⁵¹

While the Denisons had full lives in the province of Upper Canada, they also became denizens of the border, expertly navigating the river that separated the United States from British Canada. They crossed and recrossed the strait by choice between 1807 and 1812, never once being caught and arrested as fugitive slaves. Catherine Tucker did not fight to retrieve the children, seeing, perhaps, a lost cause since the Denisons could readily run. Neither did William Hull dispatch men to find the black militia leader who had abruptly deserted his company. Hull may have felt, morally, that Peter’s flight was just, or recognized, pragmatically, that the Denisons had influential friends on both sides of the border. Peter Denison found work as a “Negro servant” in the household of former Detroit slaveholder and lawyer Angus Mackintosh.⁵² Although life would never be for the Denison family what it was for a free white family there, and although the differences of race and class still structured their lives (as indicated by the limited work options available to Peter), the Denisons were integrated into a tight-knit network of Detroit River People: white and black, slave-owners and slaves, old settlers and new Americans.

In the years before the next conflict with Great Britain that Detroiters were anxiously anticipating, various members of the Denison family depended upon and renewed personal ties around Detroit steeped in a vexed history of slavery. In 1810, Elijah and Adelaide Brush were raising four boys in Detroit. Several people of color also resided with them, according to the Detroit town census. Six free “colored” people and one “slave” were listed by tally (with no names given) beside Elijah Brush’s entry. There is no indication of that single enslaved person’s identity, but precedent suggests this was an indigenous woman, a personal servant of Adelaide’s dating back to the Askin family slaveholdings. The free people of color in the Brush household were the Denisons, who also appear in Detroit account ledgers in these same years. An anonymous merchant’s sales ledger locates Peter Denison in town, describing him as “Peter Tucker’s negroe man” in 1808. Over the next two years, Peter purchased “Sundries” and flour from this shopkeeper, regularly settling his account “in full.” He also purchased 1¼ yards of “Humhum,” a cotton textile used for lining coats. Peter’s procurement of this fabric is a telltale sign that the Denison women were sewing for the family and perhaps for market. In 1809, the anonymous shopkeeper refers to Peter Denison as “Peter, Brush’s black man,” a shift indicative of the local acceptance of the Denisons’ separation from the Tuckers two years after the pivotal freedom suit. The Denisons acted like and were treated as free people despite Judge Woodward’s decision, benefiting from what legal historian Rebecca Scott has described as “the alchemy of creating status out of circumstances.”⁵³ But what had not changed in the time since the family fled to Canada and circled back to Detroit again was an insistence on the dependent attachment of black residents to white merchant elites. The use of possessive grammar and racial terminology to describe Peter in both ledger entries underscores the social hierarchy rooted in race and class that was still firmly in place in early 1800s Detroit.⁵⁴ Looking for work, for respect, and for the best hope for their future, the Denison family spanned the border, living at times in Sandwich under the auspices of the Askins and living at times in Detroit with Elijah Brush. For this African American and Afro-Canadian family, Detroit was experienced on the ground as a place that bridged the river, regardless of differing national claims to lands on each side. In both locations, white patronage was a necessary element of the Denisons’ personal security and livelihood. Their act of rebellion in taking Catherine Tucker to court and refusing to let the border box them in to slavery could only get the family so far in a larger society shaped by notions of racial difference and territorial conquest.

The Denisons returned to a place of compromised familiarity within the old town of Detroit, finding steady work with the Askin family, once among the largest slaveholders around. From 1808 to 1811, the Askin family ledger of credits and debits includes several mentions of the Denisons. Lisette (Elizabeth) is the most visible Denison family member in this record, followed by her next younger brother, James. Born in the mid-1780s, Lisette was in her twenties by this time. Her baby brother Scipio appears in the ledger too, as does her father, Peter. The absence of her mother’s name suggests that Hannah worked from home at the Brush farm rather than crossing to the Askins’ nearby property to provide domestic services. In the course of his accounting, John Askin carefully recorded the racial and caste status of the Denisons. In 1808, “James Dennison Negro Boy” is listed. In 1809, “Lisette negroes man & woman” appear, followed in that same year by an entry for “James and Lisette servants.” In 1810, an entry for “Lissette & Jm. Denniston formerly slaves” simultaneously reveals John Askin’s heightened awareness of the family’s past state of bondage and his acceptance of their current status as free people. Despite Judge Augustus Woodward’s legal affirmation of Catherine Tucker’s right to the children in the 1807 court battle, his decision was not being applied on the ground where human relations played out in the nuanced exchanges of the everyday. The Denisons were treated like free people in Detroit, albeit free people of color with a lower standing than whites that upper-class community members took pains to inscribe in the cramped pages of their ledger books.

The Denison family, especially the children, did all manner of paid work for the Askins. Lisette Denison was compensated most often for spinning and sewing work; various entries noted items she produced with “thread,” “purple cloth,” and “gray coating,” a fabric used for making coats. For a mixed variety of products, Lisette was paid in wages, sums for set purchases, as well as in bartered material goods. In June of 1809 she was due two months’ worth of pay, a frustrating situation that may have influenced the care she took later in life with her finances. In August of that year the Askins gave Lisette “cash” to “buy shoes.” In 1809 John Askin registered frustration with Lisette in a rare ledger entry composed in complete sentences rather than dry lists of services, credits, and debits. Lisette had managed to make herself unavailable to Askin, who complained that Lisette was: “Employed in the whole of the winter nights for herself & Brother without [permission] having refused to twist worsted saying she must mend her Brother’s clothes which time must be [nearly] 3 Hours Every night in winter.” Although John and Archange Askin wanted Lisette to spend time making the tightly twisted “worsted” yarn that the family could use or sell, they found that Lisette “has only spun or twisted yarn three times this winter though frequently desired to do so.” During the cold winter months when days were short in the Great Lakes, Lisette was spending her evenings as she chose, helping her brother—or at least, that is what she told the Askins. Lisette possessed three quite valuable skills that she must have learned in apprenticeship to her mother, Hannah. She could spin; she could sew, and she could also bake. Recognizing that her specialized labor was prized enough that she would not be let go by the Askins even if they grew frustrated with her, Lisette controlled her own productivity. When it came to meeting her employer’s intense demands, Lisette demonstrated a self-protective and even stubborn streak that would continue to characterize her personality into late adulthood and set her on a path to owning fine apparel of her own.⁵⁵

The Denisons provided essential services for the Askins. Under an 1810 ledger subheading titled “Lissette & Jm. Denniston formerly slaves,” John Askin entered a note with a tally of the payments owed the Denison family: “James his credit for services with 4 [1/2] Bushells of corn . . . his father . . . & Lisette.” James was performing agricultural labor on the Askin farm, and his father likely did the same. John Askin sometimes paid Peter in “bushelles of wheat,” “whiskey,” and “brandy.” At times he paid Peter, as well as Lisette, by way of Elijah Brush. Twice he paid Lisette in “alms,” church contributions that went to the pastor. Sometimes he paid in cash. John Askin regretted, though, that he was paying James more for fewer days of work than the slaveholder Captain McKee was paying “Geo” (George).⁵⁶ The Denisons, as a family, were skilled and versatile laborers who knew how to drive hard bargains after years of experience with the Tuckers, not to mention the Brushes, the Askins, and even Governor Hull.

In addition to their exchanges with the Denisons, the Askins maintained a series of economic relationships with people and families they had once owned or who had been previously enslaved in Detroit. John Askin recorded trades for labor with “Mary,” “Tom,” and “George formerly my slave.” Mary was paid an “allowance” and found herself in a similar situation as Lisette Denison when John Askin fell behind in paying her. In response, Mary, who was provided with leather supplies to make “shoe packs,” “said she would work for nothing” during this period, suggesting that she occupied an ambiguous status between slavery, indentured servitude, and freedom, much like the Denisons. The Askins also continued to own enslaved people, though fewer than before, in these years. In 1810 John Askin recorded paying “4.8” in “expenses for Jim my negero.”⁵⁷ The Denisons and other liminal laborers in Detroit of black or Native ancestry and ambiguous or former slave status were intertwined within a web of community economic relationships that allowed them to make a living but continued to privilege the European and American elite. “Negro” workers and former “slaves” constructed, baked, fixed, and made all manner of things on Detroit farms, at Detroit shops, and inside Detroit households. They cut wood and planks, worked with ice and powered through snow, sewed textiles, and made durable shoes for the harsh weather conditions. Peter Denison likely resumed leading the black militia once he was back in the home of Elijah Brush. By 1809, Peter had purchased a muff, three blue handkerchiefs, more than thirty yards of blue flannel, and one pair of “worked mockasons” for which he paid in full. The bulk flannel order may have been for uniforms. Peter also bought “8 plain flat plates,” butter, snuff and tobacco that year. Peter often paid cash for his items, and he accepted cash intended to go “to Hannah,” and “to wife,” for seamstress work. Peter’s expenditures were recorded in the anonymous merchant’s ledger among a mix of purchases made by diverse Detroiters. French old settlers like Pierre Chêne and Madame Macabe appeared in this record book, buying tobacco and calico, as did American professionals like Solomon Sibley, who purchased a lady’s parasol for his wife and two pairs of “fine kid gloves.” An indigenous man listed as “Na’auguaijigue Chief” paid for ten plugs of tobacco with “muskrats in full.” And two African Americans besides the Denisons were listed in the ledger: a woman described as “Mary Ann Negroe Wench,” who was paid for one month of “services” and a boy called “Jack the little Negro,” who was paid for his “services” of delivering green tea and sugar. While procuring household goods as “Brush’s black man,” Peter Denison seems to have been ever mindful of his unstable status. In the winter of 1810, Elijah Brush wrote to John Askin, explaining that “Peter goes across to see if he can get any allowance from Lisette to assist in the purchase of his liberty if you should happen to owe him anything and wish it I will endeavor to furnish the money.” That season, Elizabeth Denison borrowed £14 from Askin, which Askin passed along to Brush “on acct [account] of Lisette my letter.” Peter and Hannah, aided by their industrious and effective daughter, moved out on their own, leaving Adelaide Brush to bemoan to her brother: “Peter and his wife [left] us this fall therefore, I have nobody to depend upon.”⁵⁸

Formerly enslaved people—many of them now viewed as free people of color—were an integral part of the social and economic fabric that knit Detroit together in the years before the next war. The legal conditions of Detroit’s location in Michigan Territory of the Northwest, together with the town’s continued geographical isolation, meant that relationships had to be carefully negotiated. Such mediations provided a legally vulnerable family like the Denisons with the cover to live as free residents. At the same time, formerly enslaved people’s need for cover created opportunity for merchants and landowners, who could contract work for delayed pay or no pay at all, lend money or withhold it, to continue exerting significant influence over disadvantaged people’s lives. The Denisons met this overlay of obligation and control with a remarkable creativity and adroitness that simultaneously bespeaks their own aspirations as well as those of Detroit’s liminal working class of color for whom detailed accounts do not survive.

The Black Militia and the War of 1812

Governor Hull first said no when asked to accept the position of brigadier general of the Northwestern Army. He repeated his refusal upon the second request from Secretary of War William Eustis. Hull was not eager to take the highest western military commission on the eve of America’s second war with Great Britain. Perhaps age was an issue uppermost in his mind. A local hero of the Revolutionary War for his brave bayonet work, Hull was now fifty-nine years old and far less nimble. His wife Sarah’s warning must also have rung in his head as he weighed this momentous decision. She had told him three years before to beware the manipulations of Washington insiders. Or maybe Hull was feeling miffed, as he had offered to serve in the military during the preceding winter and was told his service was not necessary. A final barrier to Hull’s acquiescence was his reluctance to relinquish his gubernatorial post. But upon the third request of Secretary Eustis in the winter of 1812, and with the promise that he could hold both the civilian and military titles, Hull relented, agreeing to lead the forces of all federal troops in Michigan against a concerted British and Indian assault that was sure to come before long.⁵⁹ War had not yet been declared, but tensions were rising feverishly in hot spots around the country. First the attack of the Leopard upon the U.S.S. Chesapeake off the coast of Virginia had dramatically symbolized the campaign of British impressments and the Crown’s practice of bullying American ships and blockading American trade. Then the striking, Ohio-born Shawnee leader Tecumseh had gathered influence among several western and southern indigenous nations.

Tecumseh was organizing a coalition around the spiritual vision of his brother, Tenskwatawa, also known as the Prophet, in which indigenous people renewed their cultures, reclaimed their faiths, and took back their homelands. Tecumseh’s aim, fed by Tenskwatawa’s vision, was for Native independence won through a confederation of tribes, but he would ally with the British in order to achieve this goal. The Prophet had received permission from Potawatomi and Kickapoo residents to found a multi-tribal village of proponents on the Tippecanoe River in their territory of Indiana. A spiritual, intellectual, and organizational hub of the Native revolution, Prophet’s Town was a bright red flag waving in the face of a bullish American government. As Prophet’s Town drew adherents, Tecumseh, whose mother was Creek, traveled south into Cherokee and Creek territory sharing his two-pronged message of “prophetic nativism” and “intertribal unity.”⁶⁰ Watching the spread of Tecumseh’s message and the political and spiritual gathering of nations in the western interior pushed the Americans to the offensive. In 1811 troops led by Indiana governor and future U.S. president William Henry Harrison had closed in on Prophet’s Town, the source, Harrison believed, of a series of raids on Indiana settlers.⁶¹ Aware of Harrison’s approach, the warriors struck first and were counterattacked by Harrison’s men, who then burned the empty settlement to the ground, making Harrison into a frontier folk hero for segments of the American populace and inspiring the future pro-Harrison campaign rallying cry: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!” Tenskwatawa would not be deterred by American reprisals; he rebuilt Prophet’s Town and grew its size to eight hundred warriors. Tecumseh, who had been traveling during the battle as an ambassador of the Native resistance, had survived to fight another dawn against the Americans.⁶²

Governor Hull had been keeping track of these dire developments from the capital in Detroit, as had been local residents. As Tecumseh and the Prophet’s notoriety mushroomed with news of the Battle of Tippecanoe traveling across the forests and prairies, Detroiters were growing ever more fearful of an Indian attack on their town. In 1811, leading citizens drafted a memorial to the “president, senate, and house of representatives” in Washington, voicing their fears and urging “an increase in military force.” The memorial writers described “dissatisfactions with the aboriginal inhabitants of these countries,” which had “been kindled into an open flame.” They begged the government not to allow “conflagration” to spread “along the whole line of the frontier,” as “the Savage mind, once fully incensed, once diverted from the pursuit of their ordinary subsistence, once turned upon plunder, once inflamed by the loss of their kindred and friends, once satisfied with the taste of blood, is difficult to appease, and as terrible as subtle in vengeance. The horrors of savage belligerence description cannot paint. No picture can resemble the reality.” But paint it these authors did, and with a self-focused, stereotyping brush that refused to see the legitimacy in Native people’s defense of their original homelands and ways of life. This memorial, signed by Solomon Sibley, Augustus Woodward, George McDougall, Harris Hickman, and Richard Smyth, was the work of Anglo American professional and working-class men, who stressed the need for government “protection” in “their exposed and defenceless situation.”⁶³

Governor Hull, who may not have exactly appreciated the pattern Detroiters had set of going over his head with their letters and memorials, agreed with the townspeople’s diagnosis and prescription. The borderland northwest, Hull predicted, would be a front line of the international altercation to come. The British had already shown a willingness to abuse the power of the Royal Navy while carrying out their impressment policies. As a peninsula surrounded by coastline, Michigan was especially exposed to maritime attack, far more vulnerable than southern territories like Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A terrestrial threat also existed, deep inside the western woodlands. Although indigenous people had been pushed beyond a boundary in treaties at Greenville, Fort Wayne, and Detroit, they were inspired by spiritual renewal and outraged at the continual loss of land, and they were increasingly organizing across tribal lines. Hull, as historian Michael Witgen has put it, was “painfully aware that the United States, in stark contrast with the Canadians, had a troubled and violent history with the Native peoples living within the borders of the territory he claimed to govern . . . and assumed that the peoples of Anishinaabewaki [Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi country] would turn against the United States.”⁶⁴ Back in 1807, a wary Governor Hull had ordered the Michigan militia to rebuild the pickets surrounding the town to a height of eighteen feet. Lately, he had been fixated on the notion that the government should immediately build a naval fleet to patrol the Great Lakes. In March of 1812, he wrote to Secretary of War Eustis recommending that “A force adequate to the defense of that vulnerable point [Detroit], would prevent war with the savages, and probably induce the enemy to abandon Upper Canada without opposition. The naval force of the Lakes would in that event fall into our possession.” In April of 1812, Hull accepted his commission as brigadier general, but he never received the enhanced naval force he longed for.⁶⁵

The War of 1812: Indian Involvement 1811–1816. Map originally published in Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, edited by Helen Hornbeck Tanner. Copyright © 1987 by the University of Oklahoma Press, Norman. Reprinted by permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

While Hull was lacking in full support from the federal government on the waterways, he did have at the ready Ohio militiamen, Michigan militiamen, and, one rare source suggests, the black militia of Detroit.⁶⁶ Hull first had to gather his scattered troops from Ohio before preparing a defense of the northwestern border. According to a dispatch from New York written on July 18, Hull “arrived at Detroit, with 2,300 men, after a tedious march through the wilderness.”⁶⁷ In order to get there, Hull and his troops had been compelled to cut a trail through a portion of the thick and formidable marshland of northern Ohio’s Black Swamp, watered by the Maumee River and greater than one hundred miles in length.⁶⁸ Facing the acute challenge of traversing a difficult landscape weakened Hull’s army before the war had officially begun. At the Miami River, Hull chartered a private boat, the schooner Cuyahoga, to transport the wives and children of officers as well as trunks of records and medical supplies to Detroit. Because the War Department sent notice that the United States had formally declared war on Great Britain via the sluggish regular post, Hull found out the news days after British military leaders knew of it in Canada. Thus prepared to engage, officers at Fort Malden on the British side of the Detroit River dispatched a longboat, which captured the ship Hull had commissioned and commandeered Hull’s supplies. Even as a Washington writer cheered Hull’s arrival in Detroit, exclaiming Governor Hull “had arrived at Detroit on [July] the 5th, with his army amounting to nearly 2,500, all in good health and high spirits,” Hull had been disadvantaged by geography and his own government and bested by the British command.⁶⁹

The fate of the Cuyahoga foreshadowed the nature of this off-kilter conflict that tested, but in the end left in place, territorial boundaries established by the Revolutionary War. The War of 1812 was a series of odd engagements, missed opportunities, unfortunate accidents, and unanticipated atrocities, especially in Michigan Territory. Governor Hull, as well as the town of Detroit, would suffer from both mistakes and misfortune in a war that many Americans, especially Federalists in New England, were not even in favor of. But in the Great Lakes, from New York to Michigan Territory, fear of a Native alliance with the all too proximal British troops in Canada, fed a hawkish orientation. In New York, rumors circulated about the rise of an Indian force in league with the enemy. “Great exertions were making by the British at Fort Malden, to array the Indians against us,” a letter writer exclaimed, “Previous to the declaration of war, a tomahawk, stained with blood, had been sent from Malden to all the neighboring tribes.”⁷⁰ The United States planned to forestall attack by launching an assertive invasion of Canada from Detroit. Directed by Secretary of War Eustis to prepare to wage an offensive war, Hull and his officers began to plot a frontal assault on British targets. Eustis commanded: “By my letter of the 18th inst. You were informed that war was declared against Great Britain. Herewith enclosed, you will receive a copy of that act, and of the President’s proclamation, and you are authorized to commence offensive operations accordingly. Should the force under your command be equal to the enterprise, consistent with the safety of your own posts, you will take possession of Malden, and extend your conquests as circumstances may justify.”⁷¹

Hull and his men made an auspicious beginning for the American strategy by crossing the Detroit River and occupying the tiny town of Sandwich in July. Black militiamen may very well have been among this force. On July 20, 1812, an unsigned journalist’s dispatch written in Ohio described the scene at Sandwich based on an eyewitness account: “We are further enabled to inform our readers, that we have since our last learned from a gentleman direct from Sandwich . . . that the army crossed the river without opposition; that the inhabitants generally fled, but on receiving the proclamation they returned to their houses, and resumed their businesses.” After giving the account of the Sandwich campaign in which Hull had posted a proclamation inviting residents to join the American cause and assuring their protection, the writer of this piece made the following observation: “Previous to the army’s leaving Detroit, a company of the black infantry associated and requested to accompany the army in support of America and freedom. Governor Hull accept[ed] the offer and gave commissions. The captain is said to be a very intelligent man, and the company perform well.”⁷²

In a dispatch full of precise detail about troop movements, artillery pieces, and the eighty barrels of flour secured from the king’s commissary at Sandwich, the black militia was entered into the written record of the War of 1812. The “intelligent captain” must have been Peter Denison, who had spent ample time in Sandwich but had resettled in Detroit with Elijah Brush, colonel of the First Regiment of the Michigan Volunteer Militia, before the war began. The reporter from Ohio noted in his commentary that these black men offered to fight for “America” and “freedom.” However, the history of the Denison family, and of all enslaved people in the Detroit border zone, whether of black, indigenous, or Afro-Native ancestry, indicates a strategic lack of national allegiance. These were “revolutionary renegades,” who fought for freedom, for independence, and for dignity of life, in ways that could sync with or diverge from the aims of any particular colonial or state power.⁷³ As the first black military company on American soil authorized by a government official and commanded by black officers, the men of the black militia fought for the right of their families to be free from tyranny in any form.

Hull’s taste of victory in the occupied Detroit River town did not last long. On July 17, the British along with Ojibwe and Ottawa allies captured the American fort on Mackinac Island. Hull heard this portentous news from two Ojibwe travelers whose route took them through Detroit. Judge Augustus Woodward wrote about the loss of the fort in the concluding lines of his July 28 letter to Secretary Eustis: “You will, no doubt, have received, through other channels, the information which has arrived here of the capture of Michilimackina by the enemy.” It was in this same letter that Woodward complained about Hull issuing “three commissions to captain Denison, lieutenant Burgess, and ensign Bosset, black men.”⁷⁴ Would not these black soldiers have continued on through the next engagement of the war that unfolded in the town where they were stationed? In all likelihood, former slaves and men of color based in Detroit fought in the War of 1812.

On August 12, a British force led by Colonel Isaac Brock together with a Native force led by British Indian agent and slaveholder Matthew Elliott set sights on Detroit. At 1:00 p.m. on Saturday, August 15, Brock sent a message to Hull by way of a small vessel demanding Hull’s relinquishment of the fort. “The force at my disposal authorizes me to require of you the immediate surrender of Detroit,” Brock insisted, catching Hull by surprise. And then Brock’s letter included a line meant to stoke the latent fears of Hull and his constituents. “It is far from my intention to join in a war of extermination,” Brock wrote, “but you must be aware, that the numerous body of Indians who have attached themselves to my troops, will be beyond controul the moment the context commences.” Hull stalled, hoping for reinforcements that never came from troops that he did not realize were located just miles outside of town. At 3:00 p.m., Hull rejected Brock’s demand. By 4:00 p.m. the British were firing canons across the river. The Northwestern Army counterfired from artillery positioned in the heart of downtown Detroit. Hull directed Elijah Brush to guard the northern edge of the town, backing into the woodlands. If the black militia was activated, they were likely assigned a similar duty, positioning Peter Denison to coordinate with his colleague, Elijah Brush.⁷⁵

The British assault continued unabated into the night. Fitful residents who dared not sleep may have recalled stories of the siege of the village by the Ottawa warrior Pontiac two generations prior. The terrified occupants of Detroit Town desperately buried money and silver, or directed their slaves to do so. Women and children fled to the enclosed stockade at the fort as cannonball shots splintered the wooden walls, killing two soldiers.⁷⁶ Lisette and Hannah Denison would have been among these women, clustered, perhaps, with Adelaide Askin and her children. Resourceful and independent, Lisette may have joined local women in nursing the wounded. Her brothers, James and Scipio, may have been defending the fort with her father, Peter, and other men of the black militia.

With ammunition running low, no reinforcements, and the threat of Indian reprisals against the civilian population that he was duty bound to protect as governor, Hull decided, in a fateful choice that military historians continue to analyze and debate, to surrender the town. Elijah Brush was among the four officers who drafted the statement of Detroit’s capitulation, an American defeat that resounded across the country and brought harsh recriminations for Hull. Within forty-eight hours of the commencement of Colonel Brock’s attack, old Fort Detroit was British once again. Imagine the fear of fugitive slaves who had escaped from Canada, the rage of Richard Smyth and the men who frequented his tavern. As the outlying farmhouses along the river were plundered by Native warriors, the disgraced Governor Hull moved into his former brick home, now occupied by his daughter and her family, where he was placed under armed British guard.⁷⁷

On the following Monday, August 17, Hull, his officers and staff, and members of the regular army were taken as prisoners of war to Quebec. Elijah Brush was among them. The military historian Gene Allen Smith has written that “Peter Denison was taken off with other white and black prisoners to Canada before being paroled.” Although no apparent document directly points to this outcome, it is certainly plausible, as the British paraded nearly four hundred prisoners seized at Detroit.⁷⁸ If Peter was taken to Quebec but released early, he died just days later. On August 27 of 1812, Reverend Richard Pollard of St. John’s Church entered into the registry: “Peter Dennison . . . departed this life and was buried.”⁷⁹ The archival trail of Detroit’s black militia ends here, with him.

But the war went on after the death of Peter Denison in 1812 and after the death of Elijah Brush in 1813. The families of these men lived through the British occupation of Detroit that lasted for more than a year, during which time Augustus Woodward intervened on behalf of the populace and won protections from the British commanding officer. In the winter of 1813, British troops and Tecumseh’s warriors attacked French Town on the River Raisin in Michigan, a settlement that had formed when several French families migrated from Detroit in the 1780s. American troops were defeated, captured, and tortured there, a low point for American morale and a rallying point for demoralized U.S. soldiers who would take up the cry: “Remember the Raisin!” But by the next summer, U.S. forces were landing significant blows against the British. In 1813, after hanging his battle flag commemorating a quote by felled captain James Lawrence—“Don’t give up the ship!”—naval commander Oliver Hazard Perry won a dramatic sea contest against vessels of the British navy on Lake Erie, a body of water where William Hull had first said an American force was needed. In 1814, General William Henry Harrison, who directed the Northwestern Army in Hull’s wake, led troops to recapture Detroit for the United States. A series of clashes ensued in which British troops, Native forces, and American soldiers confronted one another but did not score victories decisive enough to tip the scales of war. In the Battle of New Orleans, which took place in January of 1815 just after American and British diplomats meeting in Belgium had signed the Treaty of Ghent in December, Commander Andrew Jackson amassed a multiracial force, including black and Choctaw soldiers, that prevented British troops from entering the city.

It was not until February of 1815 that Congress ratified the treaty and most Americans heard the good news that the war had formally ended. But neither the United States nor Great Britain had been victorious in the conflict. No territory had been gained or lost by either nation, though Canadians could take pride in having successfully fended off multiple American incursions. Native Americans in the region saw their influence severely reduced with the death of Tecumseh at the Battle of the Thames in 1813 and the reinstatement of American power at western forts at the war’s end. The War of 1812 would be the last moment when indigenous forces allied across multiple tribal lines to challenge the United States militarily. In the northern reaches of Michigan, western reaches of Wisconsin and Minnesota, and great west of the high plains and Rocky Mountains, hundreds of Native populations still organized autonomous societies outside the reach of American colonialism.⁸⁰ But in the Ohio Valley, the lower peninsula of Michigan, Illinois, Indiana, and the Southeast, the outcome of this war was “most ominous to the Indians.”⁸¹

While devastating for indigenous people, the conflict was a virtual “draw” for Great Britain and the United States, which has caused it to fade in memory for citizens of both these nations. But the War of 1812, often called the “forgotten” war of American history, marks a watershed moment for the story of slavery in Detroit.⁸² By the time war began, the number of enslaved people in the town and riverine suburbs had shrunk to a handful of individuals listed in the Ste. Anne’s Church register. In 1812, a black woman named Nansey was described as the slave of Jacques Laselle, as was her son, Jean Baptiste Rémond, conceived with an “unknown father.” Abraham Ford, a black man, was married to Marie Louise, a free Native woman of French and Native parentage, whose mother was “of the Sauteur nation” (Ojibwe); they had a child, Julie Ford, born in 1813. Abraham Ford is described in the register as “negro of Colonel Matthew Elliott.” By the end of the war, slavery in Detroit had nearly met its demise. In 1820, no enslaved people were listed in the Ste. Anne’s Church register or the Detroit census. The 1830 census noted one enslaved person within the borders of Michigan. Two years prior to Michigan statehood, in 1835, two enslaved people lived in Monroe and Cass Counties, Michigan.

Warfare, political struggle, and territorial laws had weakened the practice of slavery in Detroit during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but enslaved people themselves dealt the final blows. Adopting a renegade politics, traversing the border in pursuit of freedom, and fighting against those who claimed to own them with legal as well as lethal weapons, enslaved people undermined the corrupt, fraying, suspect system until it snapped. They no doubt shared the view of fugitive slave J. Levy, who wrote a letter back to his master from Canada in 1852, boldly proclaiming that “liberty is ever watchful” and “security” to “self” “demanded the sacrifice.”⁸³

During the War of 1812, hundreds of black men fought for the British as well as for the Americans, seeking freedom and respect for the priceless risk they took with their lives and futures. In the United States, African Americans sailed with Perry’s troops on Lake Erie, spying Canada just across the waters.⁸⁴ What these men learned about the secrets of the border, what enslaved Detroiters and black militia members had long known, became prized information for disparate black communities, especially after 1833 when Britain abolished slavery in its colonies and Canada became free soil. The stories shared by these revolutionary renegades traveled with military men of color and fugitives from slavery, adding a shimmering thread of hope to the collective consciousness held by African Americans and other oppressed peoples.⁸⁵