Dawn of Detroit by Tiya Miles

Author:Tiya Miles
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781620972328
Publisher: The New Press
Published: 2017-09-13T04:00:00+00:00

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.

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