Independent Man: The Life of Senator James Couzens

• 1. THE BEGINNING
• Chapter
• Wayne State University Press
• pp. 11-14
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CHAPTER I

THE BEGINNING

Properly the story of James Couzens had its real beginning in the fall of 1870, two years before he was born. This was when his father stepped off a train in the windswept little town of Chatham, Ontario Province, Canada.

An immigrant tossed up by economic depression and also propelled by deep-seated inability to get along with his own father, this traveler, then twenty-one, had been en route to the United States from London, England. His goal was a better living than he believed he could achieve at home, for he was convinced that London in 1870 was “finished and had no future.”¹

To be sure, this precise-looking, sober-miened Englishman named James Joseph Couzens was not so dull as to believe with any strong faith that nondescript, tiny Chatham really promised a much better future for him than had London. The fact was that he had not even heard of Chatham in Ontario before arriving there by the slow train he had boarded at Levis, Quebec, where his ship had docked.

But he had rechecked the contents of his purse and concluded that the little funds he had left made it impractical for him to travel the fifty miles farther to Detroit, his original destination. So with British prudence he decided to stay right there at Chatham.

2

This was a mistake. Though not a man to admit error readily, he sometimes conceded this in after years, especially since his decision deprived his children, in particular his first son, of something that might have made a great difference: United States citizenship by birth.

However, he did have a sentimental rationalization to justify the error. He asserted later that he had rather fancied the idea of settling in a town, even an unattractive one, that bore the same name as the great naval-station city of Chatham in England, which was the home of the girl to whom he had become betrothed just before leaving London. But if this was a factor, one can be sure that not often afterward did James Joseph Couzens permit any such romantic notions to shape his conduct. Practicality was stamped all over him.

3

His training was that of an ordinary grocer’s apprentice, and he knew his status. Yet in his manners and bearing there was a kind of special promise, a certain aristocratic air, a kind of self-assured dignity almost out of place, even somewhat humorously incongruous, in Chatham at that time, especially for an immigrant, job-seeking grocer’s clerk. Years after he had left Chatham, people there still remembered this characteristic that had marked him when he first arrived. They also remembered the fact that, very early, he revealed an ingrained streak of belligerence (something he was destined to pass on to at least one son), the trait that had made his relationship with his father, a bailiff, less than tolerable.

He had a way of speaking that of itself set him off from others. He spoke in an especially polite and trimmed way. His style was not, to be sure, the cultivated one of Mr. Gladstone, the Prime Minister. But neither was it the cockney style of the submerged London masses. It was something in-between. And this was interesting, for he really had had only a little schooling.

He carried himself, too, with uncommon erectness. Clearly, he thought well of himself. Yet when he set about getting a job in Chatham, he made no pretense of seeking more than an ordinary one. He was satisfied to start at something even lower than what he had had in London and soon he was working as a handyman in a grocery owned by one Andrew Crow, a crude, shantylike establishment of the kind one associates with a general store at some crossroads in, say, Kansas, or in a mining camp in the Colorado territory of that same period.

4

Chatham, Ontario, did in fact seem just then like a Western outpost, a settlement in a state of arrested erosion. Years before, it had had a period of growth, even of excitement. It had been intended, by its original settlers, as a shipbuilding center for a Canadian navy because of its location on a river called the Thames. Hence its proud name, after the naval center on the Thames in England. But nothing came of the shipbuilding idea. As stated in a town chronicle, “Several gunboats were built, but it is questionable if they ever left the stocks.”² In 1870, it was just a seamy settlement, quite as ordinary as its newcomer.

Yet the town had been brushed by history. During the War of 1812, the battle in which Chief Tecumseh had been killed was fought nearby. In this same war, a regiment composed largely of Chathamites helped to capture Detroit. Some years later people quipped that this was not the only time “Chatham captured Detroit.” A second capture occurred, they said, when a man born in Chatham and named Couzens became its mayor.

5

In the 1850’8, the organized Abolitionists in the United States selected the town as the end of the line for the Underground Railroad that helped slaves to freedom. In consequence, for a period, Chatham’s population was comprised more of blacks than of whites. In search of material for Dred, her sequel to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe visited there.

In 1858, John Brown held a meeting in Chatham for the purpose of organizing an armed invasion of the United States. Of course, nothing came of Brown’s “Chatham Plan,” and after the United States had fought the Civil War, most of the Negroes left town. The former Abolitionists ceased to visit Chatham—and also stopped sending funds to help the colony of black freedmen there. Then the town became as slow-paced and inconsequential as its meandering little Thames. When James Joseph Couzens settled there, it had acquired a nickname: Mudtown.

6

A year later, young Mr. Couzens, now wearing a beard, sent for the girl who had been waiting patiently in England for his summons—and a passage ticket.

Emma Clift, of the other Chatham, was the daughter of Thomas Clift, who had served in the Crimean war as a member of a commissary unit. After that war he had prospered moderately as a confectioner and may have sold some of his sweets to Charles Dickens, then living in Chatham, England. The war service of Emma Clift’s father provided what was perhaps the one bit of “color” in the Couzens-Clift family history up to then. Moreover, Florence Nightingale had visited his regiment, led the soldiers in some singing, and asked Tom Clift to stand with her on his trunk while doing so. Emma’s father liked to talk of that incident, as did some of his descendants.

Blue-eyed Emma Clift brought with her the “Nightingale trunk,” when she made her own trip from Chatham, England, to Chatham, Ontario, to marry James Joseph Couzens.³

The couple set up housekeeping in a boxlike little brick “row-house” in “the cheapest and muddiest district” of the town. There, on August 26, 1872, a boy, blue-eyed and full-faced like Emma Clift Couzens, was born to them.

One thing only seemed remarkable about the birth of the couple’s first child. James Joseph Couzens, Junior (as the boy was christened in the St. Andrews Presbyterian Church), was born with a caul, a fact, according to the old folk legend, that foretold special good fortune in life.

7

Young James grew up fully conscious of the supposed meaning of his caul. It was often a topic of conversation in the family and among the neighbors. His mother saved the caul, keeping it in a little silk sack that she made for it, and parted with it only when he married, presenting it to his bride, who also saved it.⁴ After he had reached maturity, he scoffed at the superstition—“That nonsense!”—concerning his caul. Yet almost from the beginning of his life, his outlook toward the world, and his estimate of himself and his destiny, may well have been influenced by the story.

It is certain that for a boy who grew up in the forlorn neighborhood of Elizabeth and Grand in Chatham, he carried himself as if aware that a special destiny of fortune was his. Perhaps this was something acquired in part from his father. But, if so, it was more than just emulation. His pronounced assurance, apparent quite early, that he was an especially favored child of fortune plainly was one dominant factor that helped to make his later life so extraordinary, even startlingly so, in view of how and where it had begun. But that was all in the future.

That hot summer of 1872, when he was born, nobody in Chatham would have wagered twopence that the new baby out on muddy Grand Avenue would leave any special mark any place.