Among the several riveting discoveries disclosed in Tiya Miles’ book “The Dawn of Detroit—A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of Straits” (The New Press, 2017) is the extended discussion on Elizabeth Denison Forth.
Forth, Miles wrote “had grown up enslaved on a farm in the Detroit River hinterlands.” Miles continued, “She had no formal education and never learned to read or write.”
Despite being born in bondage—and her parents Peter and Hannah Denison are prominently featured in the book—Forth became the city’s first Black landowner in the 1820s.
We first hear of Forth when she and her siblings are at the center of a “freedom suit” filed by Catherine Tucker to maintain the children, her “property” after the death of her husband and the provisions of his will. “She argued,” according to Miles, “that she was due…the protection of property guaranteed by the Jay Treaty, as the children were born to Peter and Hannah, slaves of her husband purchased for ‘a valuable consideration.’”
In effect, Tucker’s claim that she was a British subject who resided on the American side of the Detroit River and that the children belonged to her hinged on “the fine-grained interpretation or territorial and international law.”
Because this piece is a profile of Forth, there isn’t space here to review the complexity of the Jay Treaty and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 (which was authored a year after Forth’s presumed birth) and how they related to and governed the condition of Blacks as well as Native-Americans in the region. In short, Tucker lost the case and thereby ended her quest to retrieve Forth and her siblings. Forth was briefly married to Scipio Forth, but not much is known about where and when this union occurred, although it might have been in the late 1820s.
Like her father, Forth possessed a skillful business acumen, using her abilities as a cook and seamstress for notable families, including Eliza Biddle, to amass the money to purchase land. It was during her tenure with the Biddle family where she not only was a cook, housekeeper and nanny but also gained wide recognition for her ingenuity in the kitchen.
In 1855, she accompanied Biddle to Paris, Miles wrote, and was the toast of Paree with her buckwheat pancakes. The Parisian jaunt proved very beneficial for Forth, and she was able to save much of the earnings she accumulated from her buckwheat pancakes. Her ability to acquire money and her innate frugality was not to her employer’s liking, and Biddle tried several ways to separate her from her savings. But to no avail.
Ironically, as Forth aged and increased her savings and land ownership, she hired William Biddle, one of Eliza Biddle’s sons who was an attorney and graduate of Harvard University, to oversee her estate. As executor of her estate, William Biddle followed her orders to divide her savings among her living relatives between $50 and $100 apiece (mainly nieces and nephews).
She authorized Biddle to devote the remainder of her estate—an estimated $3,000– to the building of a Protestant Episcopal Church. “She knew the bitter taste of poverty and the withering touch of slavery,” Miles summarized. “A free woman who had stolen her own life with the loving aid of her family, she now wished to help others who suffered in want. Lisette signed this will, the only surviving document generated by an enslaved resident of Detroit, with her X mark.”
Miles, as she does throughout her engrossing study of slavery in Detroit, notes the connection between the enslaved and the region’s indigenous people. She concluded that is essential we know that Forth “derived much of her wealth … from investments in land that Michigan governors William Hull and Lewis Cass had wrested from the families of the Wyandot, Ottawa, Potawatomi and Ojibwe nations.”
Forth’s executor chose Grosse Ile, not far from Detroit’s core, for the site of the church she envisioned. Her generosity spurred other donors in the completion of Saint James Episcopal Church. “This church,” said the bishop when the church was consecrated in 1868, “is the fruit of a life of toil and service of a faithful colored servant of Christ. She had, for years, husbanded her earnings for this purpose, and, long before she was called away from her life of probation, had solemnly devoted them to the Church of Christ. This was done in connection with the design of one, whom she had, long and faithfully served, to unite with her in the holy act. Providential circumstances having prevented the accomplishment of the wish of this person, it was faithfully carried out by two of her sons, who liberally supplied the funds required to complete the church; and it now stands, in all its simplicity and beauty, as the joint act of a Christian household, to provide a house of prayer for the rich and poor.”
“The only existing original portrait of Forth,” wrote Miles, “still hangs today in that house of worship, but Lisette herself attended Mariners’ Church on Jefferson Avenue in downtown Detroit in the last years of her life. Is it ironic that a church made possible by a woman once enslaved in Detroit was built on Indian land illegally purchased by Detroit’s largest slaveholder?”
Self-reliance and determination were watchwords for Forth, and there is no way to properly measure the extent to which her pioneering efforts paved the way for a generation of African-Americans who arrived in Detroit as fugitive slaves and went on to build the city’s infrastructure and legacy.
Forth died Aug. 7, 1866, a year after the Civil War ended. She is buried in Detroit’s historic Elmwood Cemetery.
