FIRST STATE ELECTION

Let’s talk about this painting: The First State Election in Detroit, Michigan, 1837. The artist: the wayward Thomas Mickell Burnham. The setting: the old state capitol in Detroit, long burned away, the seat of state government anciently removed to Lansing. The star of the show: the Boy Governor Stevens T. Mason, just twenty-six years old, wearing a silken top hat, smoking a cigar and grasping a voter’s hand.

It’s like Detroit’s Washington Crossing the Delaware. Only unlike Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, Burnham actually saw it happen. And, unlike the iconic American painting, everyone in the scene is drunk.

Michigan did not ascend quietly to the Union. In 1831, when he was just nineteen, Mason succeeded his father as secretary of the territory. When Lewis Cass left Michigan that year to join President Andrew Jackson’s cabinet as secretary of war, Mason acted as governor, even after Jackson appointed a new governor, George Porter, who spent a lot of time away.

In 1832, Mason began a territorial census. Before its completion in 1834, a devastating epidemic of Asiatic cholera wracked the city, killing nearly one-seventh of Detroit’s population, including Porter. Mason, at twenty-two, officially became acting governor. (Mason remains the youngest governor in American history.)

The census confirmed that the territory had a population of more than eighty-seven thousand—way over the minimum requirement for statehood. The territorial legislature asked Congress for permission to form a state legislature, but Ohio disputed the territorial borders, and Congress rejected the petition.

The First State Election in Detroit, Michigan, 1837 (oil on canvas), by Thomas Mickell Burnham. Detroit Institute of Arts, USA/Gift of Mrs. Samuel T. Carson/Bridgeman Art Library.

In 1835, Ohio passed legislation asserting claims to the disputed Toledo strip and forming county governments within its borders. Mason responded with the Pains and Penalties Act, which made it a crime for Ohioans to govern within the strip. Both states called their militias to the border.

No life-threatening casualties were incurred during the conflict that followed, and parties disagreed on whether any shots were ever fired. The “Toledo War” was mostly scuffles between roving posses, citizen arrests and mutual harassment. But President Jackson was concerned that the skirmish could get serious—and he was frustrated with “that young hotspur” Mason. So he removed the governor from office and had him replaced.

Luckily for statehood, nobody liked the new governor, John “Little Jack” Horner, who released war prisoners almost immediately, angering citizens who were already irked by Mason’s removal. Just a month after Horner took office, in October 1835, Michigan voters approved the state constitution and elected Mason governor.

Congress wouldn’t admit Michigan to the Union until it ceded Toledo to Ohio, and throughout 1836, legislators rejected the president’s consolation: the Upper Peninsula. But Michigan was almost bankrupt, and Mason kept pushing for compromise. Finally, in December 1836, a convention in Ann Arbor approved it. Statehood at last!

News that Michigan had become the nation’s twenty-sixth state spurred, as such news tended to, celebrations in Detroit’s grand old fashion: twenty-six-gun salutes, spontaneous parades, closed businesses, open bars and throngs of sauced-up revelers in the streets. But by the fall of 1837, the glow of pride and cheer had dimmed, and our hero, Stevens T. Mason, was back where all politicians inevitably end up: the slimy maw of politics.

When the curtain opens on Burnham’s painting, it’s November, and Mason is running for reelection. His opponent is Charles Christopher Trowbridge, a Whig, a prominent pioneer citizen and a former mayor of Detroit. With banks across the nation in tumult and the local economy in a panic, the Whig party is bent on crushing its incumbent contender. Editorials lambast Mason for losing Toledo. Rumors begin to spread that the governor is a hard drinker and a gambler, as well as taking for himself five paychecks a year instead of the prescribed four—detractors dub him “five-quarters Mason.” To demonstrate the depth of the state’s poverty, Whigs organize a bread line stunt, designating in the morning paper a time and place where they will distribute free food for the poor. (Mostly Irish farmers from Ontario showed up, so the ploy backfired.) Meanwhile, those clever Democrats create a fake third party to try to split the Whig vote. (This strategy also failed.)

It’s election day in Detroit, and for some reason there are people with pickaxes everywhere. The streets, as we read in so many contemporary accounts, are just mud. Spooky black clouds are heaving into the rowdy town.

And Mason, shaking hands with that voter? Look a little closer: he’s actually passing that voter a buck—for his vote! And the guy behind him is so drunk that he’s spilling his jug of whiskey all over the place.

In the lower-right corner rides James Stilson, grand marshal of the Democratic procession, on a horse draped in golden blankets. He’s waving a flag that reads: “No Monopoly! Regular Democratic Nomination! Stevens T. Mason for Governor!”

Stilson was one of Detroit’s silliest people: a notoriously vain auctioneer who fancied himself a Napoleon although he was tall, blonde and fair. Once he closed an auction of an antique French hand mirror by smashing it with his gavel rather than sell it to a lowballing bidder. In the ultimate fop move, he retired into toy dog breeding. But on election day in Detroit in 1837, he led a grand parade to the center of town, where his company was met by the Whig procession, led by a giant scale model of the schooner USS Constitution, which we are at liberty to imagine was a pretty ridiculous thing to drag through those swampy old streets.

One firsthand observer was Joshua Toulmin Smith, a British writer recently arrived in Detroit, who at the sound of cheering in the streets ran to his window with “true English expectations” to see a vast and spectacular crowd. He found only:

A long wagon some 20 feet from prow to stern drawn by four clumsily harnessed horses, and all bespattered with mud; in this are seated a dozen drummers and trumpeters, who with infinite skill so contrive to agitate the airy medium that it is quite impossible to distinguish any sequence of tones, at all in accordance with any known melody. Then follows a political emblem the execution of which is well worthy the rude attempts of an infant state, a huge canoe or badly shapen boat mounted on wheels, whereof the sailors perform their characters by diving and rowing the surrounding atmosphere with wooden oars…Of this succeeds another vehicle equally ingenious, for the accommodation of Tory voters whose zeal is either asleep or questionable. These two other common carts drawn by ghosts of horses and their owners in everyday brown coat, followed and surrounded by 30 or 40 ragmuffin looking men and boys all of which look as tho they had escaped from prison, formed the procession which supported Governor Mason in Oct. 1837.

When the parades met in Capitol Square, there was a great mock battle over the model ship. Except maybe it was a real battle. “Then the fun began,” wrote General Friend Palmer, who witnessed the event. Wrote another spectator, Robert Ellis Roberts, the fight resulted in about two hundred casualties—“many bruised heads, black eyes and bloody noses and no fatalities.”

So the first state election held in Detroit killed no one, and Mason squeaked to victory over C.C. Trowbridge. The next year, Burnham, a Bostonian who came to Detroit in 1836 to work as a sign painter, left Detroit for greener pastures. It’s likely that his painting was meant to ridicule the Mason campaign and local Democratic organizers. It’s also possible that he was paid by the Whig party to paint it.

Even though it is satirical and a little ugly, it’s also lively and hilarious, and I love it for introducing me to the faces of so many Detroiters I’d never have otherwise known, and a Detroit I barely recognize. Raucous, charged and full of theater, it is a rare window into an otherwise unknowable world—an old, smoky city at its most feverish pitch.