The Underground Railroad in Michigan Territory: Reverend Alfred Brunson's 1822 Visit to Monroe

Sometime in the latter part of 1822, Reverend Alfred Brunson visited Monroe in Michigan Territory as part of his work as a circuit rider for the Methodist Episcopal Church. There he witnessed firsthand the workings of the nascent Underground Railroad, interviewed a fugitive slave couple, and spoke at length to a local Underground Railroad activist, Judge Isaac C. Lee. It made such an impression that Brunson recorded it in incredible detail half a century later in his memoir. Brunson's account of this visit provides one of the first substantial windows into the operation of the Underground Railroad in Michigan Territory in its earliest phase.¹

The twenty-nine-year-old Brunson had arrived in the territory only a few months before. A descendant of New England Puritans, he grew up in Connecticut and New York. Converted to Methodism as a young man, he soon felt the call to preach and was licensed as an exhorter in 1810. His ministry was interrupted by service in the Twenty-Seventh U.S. Infantry Regiment during the War of 1812, which brought him to Michigan Territory for the first time. Returning to his ministry after the war, Brunson tilled the spiritual soil of Ohio's Western Reserve and western Pennsylvania for the next seven years. In 1822, the Ohio Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church appointed Brunson to serve an emerging circuit on the Michigan-Ohio frontier.²

Brunson's new circuit ranged nearly ninety miles from its northernmost to southernmost points. Although he and his junior colleague, Reverend Samuel Baker, counted only 130 Methodists in this region, they were responsible for meeting the spiritual needs of twelve distinct preaching stations. To accomplish this task, Brunson would travel northward from Detroit, where he resided, to the village of Pontiac, down the Clinton River to Mount Clemens, then along the shore of Lake St. Clair back to Detroit. After reaching Detroit again, he would head southward to Monroe on the River Raisin, nine miles upriver to an "upper settlement," back to Monroe, then down to a settlement at the rapids of the Maumee River in Ohio. The circuit concluded with a seventy-mile trip back to Detroit and took four weeks and nearly 250 miles to circumnavigate. In the course of one of these monthly swings around the circuit, Brunson made the 1822 visit to Monroe about which he reminisces in his memoir A Western Pioneer (1872).³

Brunson's visit came at an important moment in the development of the Underground Railroad in the Old Northwest. According to the late Canadian sociologist Daniel G. Hill, "the first major wave of fugitive slaves arrived in Upper Canada [contemporary Ontario] between 1817 and 1822."⁴ Hundreds of runaways from bondage in Kentucky, western Virginia, and Tennessee made their way through Ohio and southeastern Michigan Territory during this time. Most followed Hull's Trace, a log military road constructed on earlier Native American trails during the War of 1812. It ran some 175 miles from Urbana, Ohio, to Detroit, crossing the River Raisin at Monroe. Remnants of the road can be seen today at Monroe's River Raisin National Battlefield Park. A majority of the early freedom seekers on this road eventually traversed the Detroit River from Brownstown to Fort Malden, the first convenient crossing point to the Canadian shore. A few swam across. Most built makeshift rafts or took passage on boats, with or without the cooperation of the crew. In winter, some simply walked over the ice. By the time Brunson visited, fugitive slaves regularly passed through Monroe on their way northward to the Detroit River borderland.⁵

The movement of freedom seekers from the Upper South to Upper Canada began with a trickle in the 1790s. Precipitating this migration was the 1793 passage by the Upper Canada legislature of the Abolition Act, which not only provided for the gradual emancipation of slaves already in the province but declared that any Black persons coming into the province would be free. After the War of 1812, veterans returning to...