Afterwards
editNews of the soon to be signed peace treaty between Britain and the United States arrived in Detroit on 6 May 1783. DePeyster, who had recently been promoted to Lieutenant Colonel, immediately recalled any war parties and attempted to ransom captives still held by Britain's Indigenous tribes. The 492 prisoners held by the British at Detroit were sent to Montreal to be repatriated. Although the peace treaty included Detroit in the new republic, DePeyster received no orders to evacuate the fort. When American Indian commissioners visited Detroit in July 1783 they were treated politely, but no commitments were made to turn over the fort.[1]
Britain retained control of Detroit, Fort Niagara, Michilimackinac and three other outposts until 1796. The official reason was that the Americans had failed to comply with portions of the treaty. Debts incurred to British merchants prior to the war had not been paid, and the confiscation of Loyalist properties continued.
Until 1796, the British maintained a strong military presence at Detroit and continued policies that supported their Indigenous allies. During the Northwest Indian War, British Indian Department agents based at Detroit secretly supplied muskets, powder and lead to the Northwestern Confederacy that had formed in response to American encroachment on Indigenous territory north of the Ohio River. There is evidence that some Indian Department agents, notably, McKee and Simon Girty, participated in raids. (Sword, 1993). Following the disastrous campaign of Lieutenant Colonel Josiah Harmar in 1790 and the defeat of Major-General Arthur St. Clair in 1790, the Northwestern Confederacy was decisively defeated by Major-General "Mad Anthony" Wayne at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. The resulting 1795 Treaty of Greenville ceded roughly two-thirds of the Ohio Country to the United States.
On July 11, 1796, under terms negotiated in the Jay Treaty, the British surrendered Fort Detroit, Fort Lernoult, and the surrounding settlement to the Americans, 13 years after the Treaty of Paris ended the war and ceded the area to Britain.
The remaining vestiges of Fort Porchartrain were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1805. Fort Lernoult and a warehouse on the river were the only structures in Detroit that survived the conflagration. The Americans referred to Fort Lernoult as Fort Detroit until after the War of 1812 when it was renamed Fort Shelby. By 1827 the fort was no longer needed and was dismantled.[2]