In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

153 ChAPter 13 Michigan’s “Wonderful Revolution” Oh, shame! Who then are these free people, among whom one is not allowed to hate slavery? —GustAVe De BeAuMoNt Michigan in the 1840s was an unlikely place for the start of a revolution that would shake the civilized world by ending slavery, which had persisted for two centuries in America. the state was remote and sparsely populated with scattered crude frontier settlements. in prehistoric days, groups of paleo-indians had subsisted by hunting mastodon, musk ox, giant bison, elk, moose, caribou, and wooly mammoth. Roaming the peninsula were saber-tooth tigers and huge wolves, along with beaver, bear, and small game like deer and rabbits in what had once been a giant lake gouged into the land by glaciers. the french, who had kept black and native slaves at their far-ranging forts, had fought the British for years in the “Beaver Wars,” finally surrendering in 1760. the state was so remote and populated with so many natives that the British had determined that if they won the Revolutionary War, they would make it their indian Country. fur-bearing animals were so numerous and profitable that the British refused to abandon the state after they lost the war in 1783. incomprehensibly, Michigan continued to be governed as a province of Canada for thirteen years until the Jay treaty finally allowed the stars and stripes to be raised over fort Detroit on 11 July 1796. even at that, British traders could not be controlled and continued to bribe the indians to obtain beaver, otter, mink, marten, fox, and other animals until Congress passed 154| Chapter 13 an act forbidding the fur trade by foreigners in 1816. the state was slow to grow, primarily because u.s. Army survey crews had marked their maps of the land with the word “uninhabitable” because of its numerous swamps. Because four of the five Great lakes surround and isolate Michigan, it was not until the erie Canal in New york opened in 1825, opening a pathway from Albany to Buffalo on lake erie, that Michigan’s population began to grow. the newcomers included egalitarian, independent easterners and foreign immigrants who knew nothing of slavery and rejected the authoritarian social ideas that were prevalent in the south. thus was the way prepared for Michigan to be the wellspring of what lincoln later called “a rebirth of liberty.” Michigan had been only a little more supportive than the rest of the country of New yorker Birney’s liberty party candidacy in 1840, giving him only 321 votes, less than a quarter of 1 percent of the total state vote for president of 43,969. His 7,453 votes nationwide amounted to just .03 percent of the total vote of 2,411,187. the nation, even in the North, was far from ready to seriously consider a candidate who advocated abolition of slavery. Distressed after receiving tepid support for his antislavery message and achieving poor results in the election of 1840, Birney sought a place of exile but also one that offered opportunity to profit in land and recoup losses incurred down south. He had invested in land in ohio and indiana and considered moves to each of those states, along with illinois. then his old friend from princeton, Dr. Daniel fitzhugh, a physician, member of the New york legislature, and land speculator, not only interested him in land in Michigan but also in his sister, elizabeth, a thirty-eight-year-old spinster . Birney had first met elizabeth while visiting Gerrit smith, the wealthy upstate New yorker and leading abolitionist who was married to elizabeth’s sister. Birney and elizabeth married in early 1841, and along with four of his six children, they moved to saginaw, Michigan, in 1842. Michigan was wilderness; french writers Alexis de tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont had visited saginaw in July 1830, finding little but a few indians, mosquitoes, and snakes, as they wrote in their famous report, Democracy in America. the frenchmen were lawyers studying the American penal system for the monarch louis-philippe. their nine-month trip broadened their study and report to a comprehensive social commentary that included tocqueville’s conclusion: “the most formidable evil threatening the future of the united states is the presence of the blacks on their soil. the greatest American tasks—and failures—have been in expressing the solicitude, what solicitude there is, of the conquering white race toward [18.221.146.223] Project MUSE (2024-04-25...

Share