In 1816, however, the Rev. John Montieth arrived and founded the
First Protestant Society, an all-inclusive organization for the city's
non-Catholics. As the tide of Yankee immigration increased, Montieth's
group quickly began to divide along denominational lines. In 1821
Detroit's Methodists formed their own society. The Episcopalians formed
St. Paul's Church in 1824, and in 1825 Montieth reconstituted his
society as the First Presbyterian Church. In 1827 the Baptists formed
their own community and, interestingly, in 1836 a group of thirteen
African Americans left this Baptist Church to form the Second Baptist
Church.
The founding of Second Baptist Church reminds us that there
were blacks in Detroit. Many had come as slaves. Slavery was common in
both French and British Detroit. Both blacks and Indians were made
slaves. In 1773 a British census counted ninety-three slaves in Detroit.
Over the next decade the number of slaves in the community grew to
almost two hundred. Although slavery would officially end, it lingered
on through a curious set of circumstances.
In 1787 Congress banned slavery in the Northwest Territory,
and equally important, in 1792 the ruling British authorities determined
that no new slaves could be introduced to Detroit. When the Americans
finally took control of the city, a legal question occurred as to
whether or not the Ordinance of 1787 meant that all the slaves in
Detroit were free. It was not until 1807 that Judge Woodward ruled on
the question. Woodward concluded that slavery was illegal and that
slaves were to be freed, with the exception of slaves held by British
citizens prior to the American occupation of Detroit in 1796. This
exception was based on a clause in Jay's Treaty, which guaranteed
British subjects full possession of their property when the American
authorities took control of Detroit and the other British held forts in
the Northwest. As late as 1830, the federal census found a few slaves in
Detroit but by the time Michigan was admitted to the union all the
remaining slaves in the state had either died or been voluntarily freed.
As English-speaking Americans came to vastly outnumber the
descendants of the French inhabitants the disdain that Hull and Woodward
held for the French remained. Occasionally, some accommodation was made
to the French. The first regular newspaper published in the community,
begun in 1817, summarized its primarily English text in a French
section. Similarly a law in 1827 established the principle of local
control of schools and purposefully authorized instruction to be carried
on in either English or French. But these accommodations tended to be
superficial. Basically the Americans saw the French as a community more
interested in a lifestyle than in economic development. Lacking the
Yankee drive for profit, the French were regarded by the relocated New
Englanders, even those who had sympathy for the French, as "quaint" or
picturesque. More commonly, the New Englanders simply condemned the
French as lazy or worse.
The Indians fared little better. At best, sympathetic Yankees
labeled the Indians, as they had the French, a remnant of a bygone era
that deserved a modest understanding and accommodation. But more
commonly Indians were simply pushed out of the way by economic progress.
Detroit society would henceforth be run along New England models with
little understanding of and even less tolerance for alternate
viewpoints.