The Dawn of Detroit

If that Post be reduced we shall be quiet in future on our frontiers.

—Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark about Detroit, 1780

What was going through Ann Wyley’s mind when she entered and burgled the furrier shop of two of Detroit’s most successful merchants? Certainly not that she and her accomplice, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Contencineau, would escape unpunished if caught for theft.¹ Like most British businessmen in the bustling frontier maritime town, James Abbott and Thomas Finchley, targets of the break-in, dealt in furs and imported goods. Their job was to procure skins from local hunters or middlemen and ship those pelts to purchasers in the East in exchange for supplies; they then sold or distributed manufactured items to customers and American Indian trade partners. The pair operated a shop located near a host of others along the northern bank of the Detroit River, the liquid-gold main street of colonial Fort Detroit.² And in addition to co-owning the store itself, Abbott and Finchley co-owned Ann Wyley, an enslaved woman of African descent. Abbott was an Irishman by birth whose arrival in 1768 had been timed to take advantage of opportunities afforded by the British assumption of former French posts. Finchley, his business partner, is a more reclusive figure in the records of early Detroit, who appears only infrequently in conjunction with shorthand notations about the pair’s firm. Both men were slaveholders, as were other members of the newly arrived British merchant elite. Between Pontiac’s Rebellion and the American Revolutionary War, these men joined their French and Euro-Indian mixed-race counterparts in the capitalist enterprise of the Great Lakes skin trade, acquiring the pelts of beasts and bodies of humans to build wealth and influence. Between the waning years of the French period and the rise of the British period, the ratio of indigenous to black slaves tilted only slightly. An approximate count of the Ste. Anne’s parish records indicates sixty-four Natives to five blacks in the 1760s and forty-six Natives to eight blacks in the 1770s. It would take a revolution and shifting political balance of power for numbers of enslaved blacks to substantially increase in a town defined as part of the American Northwest Territory.³

Ann Wyley was among few blacks, enslaved or free, living in Detroit in the early 1770s. How the firm of Abbott & Finchley came to count her among its assets is unknown. Equally mysterious are the precise details of what took place on the night the storehouse was robbed, as the fragmented testimony of participants varied at the time, and the testimony of Ann Wyley, portrayed as the instigator by her co-conspirator, was not preserved in the record. In the spring and summer of 1774, a series of petty thefts had been taking place inside the walls of the fort, wrangling the frayed nerves and thinning the pocketbooks of resident merchants. Ann Wyley, “a negro slave” of Abbott & Finchley, Jean Contencineau, “a Canadian of humble station” in the employ of Abbott & Finchley, and Charles Landry, another laborer at the firm who worked alongside Jean packing peltry, were all suspected as perpetrators in “a system of small pilfering that had been going on for some time.”⁴ The most dramatic of these crimes—the burglary at Abbott & Finchley’s store apparently facilitated by an act of arson—was the final straw, the bold incident that led to a government crackdown, Ann Wyley’s jailing, and Jean Contencineau’s death. The violation of property rights within the heavily guarded fort unnerved the moneyed class in Detroit, and “a feeling prevailed that there could be no security until such worthless characters were adequately punished.”⁵

In this heist that set the wheels of Detroit’s barebones justice system in motion, “eight pounds of beaver skins, two otter skins, and some raccoon skins, to the value of four pounds sterling” along with a handful of domestic items and “little knives” had been stolen. Of the spoils, Ann Wyley had come away with “a purse containing six guineas, the property of James Abbot . . . which purse were found on [her] person,” as well as “a handkerchief, containing two pair of women’s shoes and a piece of flannel.”⁶

Was Wyley making a statement of political import through her illegal action? Did she wish to adorn herself with the feminine items now in her possession, to embellish the rough apparel provided by her owners that likely marked her inferior status as a slave?⁷ Did she think she could improve her material condition by taking the goods and selling them on the illicit market? Or was there a deeply emotional element motivating her actions? Perhaps Ann had bonded with or felt indebted to her accomplice, Contencineau, who worked in the shop as a “servant,” and might have been indentured (bound for a period of years) to Abbott & Finchley’s firm.⁸ Perhaps Ann longed to strike a blow against her owners where she knew it would hurt the most—their commercial enterprise, the other valuable “things” they owned.

Whatever her reasons for taking the risk, Wyley, along with her accomplice, faced dire consequences for her actions. Arrested by the authorities, the duo faced indictment for “subtilly, privily [and] craftily . . . steal[ing], tak[ing], and convey[ing] away” the “goods and chattels of the said Abbot and Finchley” as well as “attempting to set fire to the house of the said Abbot and Finchley.” Confined to the barracks where prisoners were kept in the fort, the unlikely pair awaited trial for nearly two years, an expanse of time during which Wyley stood at the mercy of her military jailers, much like the unnamed “Panis” slave woman who was similarly imprisoned there for reasons unknown in 1763.

In the spring of 1776 Ann Wyley and Jean Contencineau finally had their day in court, but the proceedings of that court were far from regular. The passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 had established the boundaries of British Canada and included Michigan within the legal jurisdiction of Quebec.⁹ Officials in Quebec then appointed military and civil leaders to run the distant posts. In 1775, Henry Hamilton, a captain in the British army described as “overbearing and supercilious,” became lieutenant governor of Detroit. As the town’s chief civil leader, Hamilton worked closely with Philip Dejean, Detroit’s notary and justice of the peace since 1767, who was suspected of being “a bankrupt merchant from Montreal . . . that came west to better his fortune by leaving his debts and creditors behind.”¹⁰ Dejean’s mandate was never clearly defined by British officials in Quebec; nor were the legal rights of Detroiters in relation to local governance.¹¹ But there was a sense among residents that Dejean’s nebulous authority did not grant him the right to judge serious offenses or exact harsh punishments.

Lieutenant Governor Hamilton and Judge Dejean saw their roles in a different light. Operating within a gap of formal governmental oversight, they tended to settle minor disputes among residents in an ad hoc, heavy-handed, and even authoritarian manner. No regular court proceedings were held in Detroit in the transitional period between French and British rule, but Dejean did assemble a jury of twelve to hear the case of Wyley and Contencineau. Charles Landry, a third suspect in the Abbott & Finchley robbery, had escaped prosecution, having confessed to stealing “some beaver and otter skins . . . in the company of the said Jean Coutancineau.” Landry was viewed as a bit player in the crime. But Ann Wyley, according to Contencineau’s testimony, was the mastermind of the entire scheme. Contencineau testified that “he knew nothing whatever concerning the cash box that was in the storehouse; that he only saw the negress, Anne, who belonged to Messrs Abbott and Finchelay carry a little box into the kitchen, the day after the fire, but that he did not know what she did with it, and the instant later . . . the negress crushed the cash box with her foot and threw it into the fire.” While claiming no personal responsibility for the fire or missing money, Contencineau “confessed, nevertheless, and acknowledged that he stole a beaver skin, conjointly with a man named Landry who was making packs with him for Abbott and Finchelay.” Contencineau also stated that when he carried stolen items (the shoes, cloth, and handkerchief) to the house of a soldier’s wife, he did so at the direction of Ann Wyley who was “afraid that her master was about to look up his trunk.”¹²

Contencineau represented himself as someone who had made a mistake in the petty pilfering of furs and knives, but who lacked the premeditation, insider knowledge, and craftiness of his black female companion. Upon further examination in a second statement to the court, Contencineau even suggested that Wyley had planned the fire, placing “some powder in a horn . . . together in a piece of cloth with a piece of tinder” and “while her master was dining” giving the kindling to Contencineau to “place it upon a piece of English cloth” in the storehouse. He stated further that “after the negress had given him the six dollars [from the cash box], the negress threw the box to him and said ‘Empty it and throw it in the fire.’”

In the scant pages of testimony that have survived the centuries, Ann Wyley is only attributed two lines of speech: a directive to her accomplice to hide the evidence, and her own paraphrased testimony in which she “declared that she had given the four silver dollar to Mr Cenette, one of the paper dollars to Mr Chatelain and the other to Mr C Enfant” and that she “had given three pounds in paper to Jean Coutencineau, which said three pounds he carried to Samuel Denny” at her request.¹³ Ann Wyley, according to her testimony, was compensating Frenchmen of means with the stolen funds of her masters.¹⁴ Could she have been paying down debts, paying for silence, or purchasing the promise of future assistance in an even larger scheme, such as the theft of her own person from those who claimed her and her release from lifelong captivity?

Jean Contencineau’s attempt to shield himself from the worst of the charges did no good. He was viewed as equally culpable with Ann Wyley. In Justice of the Peace Philip Dejean’s makeshift court, “the prisoners were found guilty only of the trivial offense of stealing property of a total value of about fifty dollars and there was grave doubt whether the woman was guilty at all.” The charge of arson could not be substantiated, as the jury only found circumstantial evidence to support it. The pair was therefore acquitted of the more serious of the two crimes. Nevertheless Philip Dejean determined that the penalty for theft in this case should be death, a decision approved by Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton. The punishment was to be carried out on the town commons (at Detroit’s present-day Jefferson Avenue) on March 26, 1776.¹⁵

The handwritten note scribbled by Philip Dejean on the back page of the verdict in French revealed the tenor of his thinking about this harsh decision: “You shall be hanged-hanged-hanged, and strangled until you be dead,” he wrote of the pair. And then he entered more intimate words directed toward Contencineau, a fellow French Canadian and likely fellow Catholic whom Dejean addressed as “my dear brother.” “You see, my dear brother,” the justice penned on his notice of execution, “that it is neither the jury nor myself that has condemned you to death—it is the law that you violated. It is for domestic theft that you are now going to lose your life. According to the English laws, a domestic who steals a shilling, or the value thereof, merits death.” Dejean impressed upon Contencineau, in words that may have been read aloud, that even if “bad examples” had come from the servant’s own “masters,” Contencineau must “understand that God and the laws will not excuse you, and say with me the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria.”¹⁶ Dejean intended to hold the Frenchman accountable not only to the law, but also to a higher power. As a member of the servant class, Contencineau was ordained by God to mind his place in the social hierarchy. Wyley, too, would hang for her crime as part of Dejean’s final judgment, but her soul was not of interest to him, and he penned her no parting words.

Dejean’s choice to punish Contencineau just as harshly as Wyley points to the quixotic character of slavery in colonial Detroit. This remote fort had nothing like the regimented racial systems of bondage found in larger and older slaveholding communities in places like South Carolina or even New York. A coherent system of laws organizing the practice of slavery did not exist and would never fully take shape in Detroit. The physical isolation and in-limbo jurisdictional quality of the western settlement, which lacked a stable, rationalized civilian government, led to a form of slavery that was fluid and even capricious until its eventual demise in the first decades of the 1800s. In this unusual instance, a white man faced the same punishment as his enslaved, black female codefendant. And the case would take an even more shocking turn when the day of reckoning arrived.

No hangman could be found to put the condemned Frenchman to death, perhaps due to the extremity of the punishment in relation to the scale of the offense. Undeterred, the justice of the peace devised an ingenious solution. He offered Ann Wyley a gruesome choice in order to avoid her own death sentence. The prisoner “was released and pardoned of the said sentenced judgment of death, by the said Philip Dejean . . . on condition that [she], the said negress, would by herself as executioner, execute and put to death, the above named John Coustantininau.”¹⁷ Wyley consented, playing the part of hangwoman in exchange for her life, and according to one source, her freedom.¹⁸ If the sinister deal was solely to save her life, it may have been extended in recognition of Wyley’s value to Abbott and Finchley. If the offer did indeed include a promise of freedom, it parallels another example of a French colonial practice of bribing enslaved people with the dearest reward in order to compel them to do the government’s dirtiest work. In the same period in New Orleans, a black man named Louis Congo won and maintained his freedom as well as his wife’s by serving as the city executioner.¹⁹ Ann Wyley’s participation in this ghastly affair hints at the desperation of a life lived in slavery, a desperation that exploded into theft, possibly arson, and finally murder.

According to the historical record, Dejean placed the noose in Wyley’s hand because no one else was willing to undertake the deed. Perhaps this is so. And just as likely, this sadistic form of retribution in which a slave was made to kill her accomplice, even an accomplice who had betrayed her in his testimony, had a secondary purpose beyond utility. Judge Dejean was no stranger to slaveholding. He had personal stakes in the practice, as evidenced by a transaction in 1777 in which a man named Thomas William had sent Philip Dejean a bill “for vending a Negro.”²⁰ Dejean and other Detroit slaveholders would have been familiar with the toxic effects of holding people in chains. They may well have known about the New York slave revolt of 1708 when a Native man and black woman murdered their owner’s family before escaping, or about the larger New York uprising in 1712 when blacks adopted arson as a weapon.²¹ They would have worried about such aggressive tactics, the stuff of outright rebellion, being taken up by enslaved people in Detroit. Dejean explicitly fretted, too, about the “domestic” nature of this crime. While James Abbott had been contentedly enjoying his evening meal, his servant and slave had violated the sanctity of his storehouse, testing the security of the entire merchant class. Together, these offenders represented a threat of symbolic proportions—not from outside the fort walls, but from within. Dejean’s harshly creative reprisal therefore served as a warning to slaves like Ann Wyley, who might see arson as a tool of self-liberation, as well as to poor whites like Contencineau, who might perceive an interest in common with enslaved people of color.

On the day that a Frenchman was publicly hanged by a black bonds-woman, poor whites and indentured servants living in Detroit could glimpse, in terror, what their fate might be if they dared collaborate with slaves. As late as the 1940s, the descendant of an old Detroit family still recalled the sting of this public rebuke, writing in a family history that: “On the day appointed the Detroit Common witnessed the degrading spectacle of the Frenchman being done to death by the slave woman.”²² Racial categories linked to social status mattered and were monitored, even on the Great Lakes frontier, where a civil official skillfully deployed this social hierarchy to control the behavior of a class-stratified, multiracial populace.

Indigenous people fell into a gray area between the racial boxes taking shape in Detroit, categorized as Negro-like if they were enslaved (as designated by the term “Panis”) but viewed as having other essential characteristics that differentiated them from blacks. Unlike individuals of African descent, Indians were members of polities in North America: politically organized groups with military might and economic influence that European imperial powers were compelled to recognize. Pontiac’s Rebellion had failed to capture Forts Detroit and Pitt, but did force the British out of several western garrisons and frighten colonial authorities. In order to improve relations with restive Native groups, British military officials restored the practice of gift giving, and the British Crown passed the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which forbade colonial settlement west of the Allegheny Mountains.²³ Because of indigenous political organization and the essential role of Native hunters and traders in the commercial fur trade market that spanned eastern North America and crossed the Atlantic, it was impossible for American Indians as a whole to be reduced to the degraded category of “slave” and hence racialized as a fixed, inferior caste.

Some Natives were being enslaved, but others were free individuals of influence. This did not mean, however, that members of the Detroit elite shied away from trying to control American Indians, even those who were free. The purpose of Fort Detroit, dating back to its founding, had been the formation of a military and mercantile post that structured the presence of indigenous people, strategically leveraging these communities as a source of furs as well as a physical barrier to the advance of European competitors.²⁴ After ousting the French from their prize western post at Detroit, the British recognized, with irritation, that the Great Lakes Indians had not been conquered or displaced. They then followed the previous prescription of Detroit founder Antoine de La Mothe Cadillac, seeking to keep neighboring Indians amiable and pliable in the interest of building a trade monopoly.

So even as town leaders made an example of Wyley and Contencineau to enforce control over colored slaves and poor white servants, they also sought to exercise authority over free Native people who did regular business in town. Most Indians linked to Detroit lived in their own villages but constantly moved through the fort to engage in trade, attend religious services, and socialize with friends and family members. In the 1770s, at least eighteen free Indians attended Ste. Anne’s Church, participating in marriages, baptisms, and burials. Most were identified simply as “Indian” in the priest’s registry; three were described as Huron, three as métis, and one as Iroquois. These individuals would have been connected to relatives whose names were not necessarily listed when a religious event was recorded, making the estimated figure of eighteen a certain undercount. The number of free Native people involved in the church amounted to less than half of the “Panis” slaves there, whose population in the church registry of 1770–79 reached forty-six.²⁵ In a fort that imposed geographical intimacy on its residents and visitors due to its diminutive size and tightly intersecting roads, indigenous people would have made up a highly visible, as well as significant, minority group.

The importance of the indigenous presence in Detroit was readily apparent in the plan and architecture of the town. Negotiating with Native people was so crucial to the security of Detroit that an Indian Council House would be constructed in 1779, long before the existence of a courthouse or school. The wooden building provided a place for military officials to woo Indian allies, for town officials to talk with Native political representatives, and for merchants to meet with Native traders; it also became the only sizeable social gathering spot beyond the austere Ste. Anne’s. Trader Alexander Macomb, apparently fond of a lively night out, remarked to Lieutenant Governor Hamilton that the Indian Council House, one of few public buildings other than military structures, was “a very excellent house for haranguing as well as for dancing.” Macomb’s offhand remark reveals the dependence of Euro-Detroiters on the secondary, as well as primary, benefits of the “Indian trade.”²⁶

Indians were essential to the mix of diverse peoples that made up Detroit. Nevertheless, church and civil officials felt anxious about having Indians so near. They balked, especially, at what they saw as the “disturbances occasioned by Indians made quarrelsome by the use of liquors.”²⁷ These liquors consisted mainly of brandy and rum customarily provided to Native people in diplomatic exchanges and traded to Indians by European merchants, a practice that, not coincidentally, often had the effect of bettering terms for whites. In April of 1774, the same season that Wyley and Contencineau robbed the store of Abbott & Finchley, British officials compelled Detroit merchants to limit alcohol sales to just one glass per Indian and to stock all rum in a “general” storehouse in order to prevent trouble. Major firms in the town agreed to the prohibition, including Abbott & Finchley. James Abbott then joined James Sterling, Alexander Macomb, and John Porteous to form a committee charged with penalizing Indian liquor transactions. Restrictions on alcohol consumption became just one way in which colonial officials sought to control Native freedoms.

Land Grabs in the Shadow of War

Soon after a Frenchman was hanged by the slave of James Abbott on the orders of the justice of the peace at Detroit, the Continental Congress of the American colonies proclaimed political independence. It was early July of 1776. From Philadelphia, where the Continental Congress met, to the colonial population centers of New York and Boston, news of the momentous decision to sever ties with Great Britain and throw off the mantle of King George III traveled by horseback and word of mouth. In the public houses of New York, officers of the Continental Army proceeded to “testify our joy at the happy news of Independence.” When read aloud on July 9 on the order of General George Washington, the potent words of the Declaration of Independence penned by the young Virginia planter and lawyer Thomas Jefferson reverberated across the Philadelphia Commons.²⁸

While rebellious residents of the eastern colonies readied themselves to defend these words that formally commenced the American Revolutionary War, Detroit merchant William Macomb was otherwise occupied, sealing a stupendous land deal. Like Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, William Macomb was a slaveholder. Unlike these “founding fathers” of the republic, Macomb would develop his wealth on the riverbanks and islands of the Great Lakes fur trade region rather than in the agrarian South. When William Macomb and his elder brother Alexander strode across the Detroit River’s largest island in the summer of 1776, they were aware of the fate of the black slave Wyley and the French servant Contencineau, and they knew something of the trouble brewing back East. New York traders Phyn and Ellice had complained to the Macomb brothers about the disruption that mounting hostilities were causing as early as June of 1775, informing them that shoes on order might not be delivered. “Such is the distressed situation of this Country that nothing can be positively promised,” they wrote. “We are not allowed to send Riffles [sic] out of the Country there are not any servants to be had.” The brothers were likely unaware, however, of the drastic escalation of the diplomatic impasse that led to the Americans’ declaration of independence. The catastrophic impact of a burgeoning revolution had barely rippled through the western populace. Great Lakes garrisons at Detroit and Michilimackinac had seen soldiers transported to Boston via Quebec in the spring of 1775, and some of these men had been present at the Battle of Lexington. But news traveled slowly to the interior, and word of America’s formally declared intention to break from Great Britain had not yet arrived.²⁹

For the Macomb brothers, the pressing matter in July of 1776 was securing the purchase of Grosse Ile, the largest among twenty-one islands in the Detroit River archipelago.³⁰ In the 1770s and in the wake of increased British immigration following Pontiac’s quelled rebellion, leaders of the Potawatomi, the Detroit-area indigenous group that claimed this island, had been selling several stretches of land to newly arrived residents. These transactions were technically illegal, as only the British Crown held the authority to carry out land transactions with Native people in the West. But British settlers elbowed into off-limits areas despite the Proclamation of 1763. In Detroit, a far remove from effective British political authority, even members of the military participated in and sanctioned illegitimate land exchanges. So on July 6, 1776, two days after the American Colonies declared independence, William and Alexander Macomb signed a parchment contract made of smoothed animal skin. Along with fifteen Potawatomi leaders, who entered their signatures beside exquisitely hand-drawn animal symbols representing their clans, and in the presence of two French witnesses, the brothers entered into an agreement. The contract read: “We the Chiefs and principal Leaders of Potterwatemy nation of Indians at Detroit . . . bear unto Alexander and William Macomb of Detroit, merchants . . . that messuage or Tract of Land known by the name of Grosse-Isle, and call’d in our Language Kitché Minishen or Grand Island, situate, lying, and being in the mouth of Detroit River where it empties itself into Lake Erie.” No price of exchange is recorded in the document. Soon after this momentous, under-the-table purchase, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton gave William Macomb permission to take possession of the island. In 1780, this vague deed would be affirmed as a “voluntary act of the chiefs of the Pottawatome Nation” by the British commander in Detroit at the time, Captain Arent Schuyler De Peyster, who would later marry into the Macomb family. In 1820, Alexander Macomb would defend himself against stories that the Macombs bought the island with “only trinkets,” writing: “I had little to do on that score. We made several purchases of the Indians, which were in a manner forced on us by their importunities. Our influence with the pottawatomies was great & they were the proprietors of the lands below Detroit.”³¹

If Alexander Macomb and his future son-in-law, Arent De Peyster, protested too much in the aftermath of the Grosse Ile deal, insisting that the massive sale was the result of the Potawatomis’ entreaties and therefore voluntary as well as ethical, William Macomb quietly profited from the land grab, becoming one of the wealthiest men in Detroit by the time of his death in 1796. Owning vast swaths of land as well as several slaves meant that William Macomb could lay claim to the game hunted there, harvest natural resources, extend agricultural development, and charge other residents for rent, creating capital and income streams that would allow him to do more of the same: trade goods, acquire acreage, buy slaves, and put those slaves to work on his property as caretakers, farmers, builders, transporters, and domestics.

The Macomb brothers’ conduct is an exaggerated example of the mode of settlement and urban development adopted by most elite British residents in the late eighteenth-century Detroit River region. They moved to the area, imported and produced goods for the local market, processed and sold furs collected by Indian hunters, acquired tracts of Native land under specious circumstances, built homes and operated farms with slave labor, and used slaves to transport raw materials and finished goods from west to east and east to west. The most successful of these men attached themselves to a branch of official government business, principally supplying the British military or serving as Indian agents, and they used the pressure of rising white land speculation as well as wartime violability to further encroach on Native territories. In short, British subjects, who did not want for ambition, combined access to Indian land and Indian-procured furs, slave labor, and government connections to build their businesses, and with these, the town of Detroit. Like the metropolis of New York whose backstory of black slavery is now widely recognized, the great industrial and cultural center of twentieth-century Detroit had its roots in greed, graft, and forced racialized labor. Those roots crossed the cultural lines of British and French elites, whose family trees began to merge in the 1760s and ’70s. Some British merchants were wise enough to marry into wealthy French families, like James Sterling, the well-positioned trader whose shop was in place before the outbreak of Pontiac’s War, and like Alexander Macomb, who married Catherine Navarre, daughter of the French notary and slaveholder Robert Navarre.³² Within decades, the bicultural daughters of these first British residents would be attractive mates to incoming American businessmen who eyed Detroit as a space of new opportunity at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The networks and commercial ventures built by British Detroiters linked that interior hamlet to towns and cities near the eastern Great Lakes. Although Detroit was remote on the map of northern colonial settlements and surrounded by forests and Indian villages, it possessed close ties to colonial New York, which sat on Lakes Ontario and Erie. Indeed, Detroit resembled New York in situation and characteristics. Like New York City, Detroit was sculpted by waterways that moved around and through the town, forming a series of inlets and islands. Like broader New York, Detroit adopted an urban-style slavery oriented around skilled trades, manufacturing, shipping, and small-scale agriculture. Decades into the future, Detroit would follow the ambivalent and stuttering lead of New York in the development of gradual emancipation for its enslaved population.³³ And consequentially in 1776, like New York City, Detroit was a British military and loyalist stronghold. Although they lived at “the edge of the West” and deep inside Indian territory, Detroiters were no country bumpkins as some easterners at the time liked to think.³⁴ Detroit’s intrinsic relationship with the people, goods, and ideas of New York was one essential way in which this fortified frontier town was “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery, and imperialism and localism.”³⁵

The power brokers in Detroit at the outbreak of the American Revolution were cosmopolitan British traders who trafficked in slavery and misappropriated indigenous lands. They were also members of a tight-knit economic and social circle, aiding one another, intermarrying, trading goods, and exchanging the bodies of slaves. British loyalists nearly to a man, these English, Scottish, and Irish businessmen found opportunity as well as difficulty as the once distant war for independence exploded, drawing ever nearer to their Great Lakes enclave.

War Comes to the Northwest

William and Alexander Macomb were sons of the British Isles, born to Scottish parents who were living in Ireland in the late 1740s and 1750s. Their father, John Gordon Macomb, relocated the family to Albany, New York, in 1755. There the Macomb men entered the brisk business of trade. With the blessing and financial assistance of their father, the adult-aged Macomb sons moved to Detroit in 1769, where they set up shop as traders and merchants, taking advantage of their father’s contacts and access to suppliers in the east. The Macomb, Edgar & Macomb mercantile company supplied British military personnel and other residents in Detroit with imported goods, plunged into the pelt trade that was Detroit’s chief commercial activity, and acted as local bankers. Besides the profitable land of Grosse Ile “purchased” from Potawatomi leaders, Alexander Macomb attested: “the Ottawas & Chippewas also granted us large tracts back of the Settlement & from the River.” The Macomb brothers did well for themselves despite the eventual refusal of the American Congress to affirm these latter land purchases. While Alexander would move back to New York after the Revolutionary War, William established a strip farm immediately west of Detroit’s fort pickets and, later, had a large log home built on Grosse Ile.³⁶

In the summertime, William Macomb occupied the “Mansion House,” his breezy island abode on Grosse Ile, with wife Sarah Jane Dring Macomb and their children. In cooler weather, the Macombs resided at their townhome on seven acres beside the fort, sending their enslaved woman, Charlotte, to manage the island house.³⁷ And William Macomb found no shortage of bondspeople to task with work on his various properties. He steadily increased his slaveholdings in the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s. In November of 1776, “Mr Macome,” a Protestant, had a Panis male slave buried at Ste. Anne’s Church. In 1788 he was paying off the price of a “negro wench” to Detroit merchant James May.³⁸ Macomb would come to own scores of slaves by the time of his death in 1796, and many of these had been acquired in the tumult of the Revolutionary War era. That massive conflict disrupted stability and threw lives into disarray, providing a golden opportunity for Macomb and other prominent Detroiters to snatch up slaves, mostly African Americans from the Upper South who were forced to Detroit at the hands of British soldiers and their Native allies. Gradually, over several years between the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris that cemented the war’s end in 1783, Detroit’s enslaved population increased by nearly a third.³⁹

Although William Macomb was focused on acquiring land rather than fighting a war in the summer of 1776, by 1777 he and other Detroiters felt a mounting anxiety. William and Alexander Macomb’s father, John Macomb, was being frightfully harassed back in Albany for his Tory allegiance. By the summer of 1777 John Macomb was fleeing the Rebels, having, as he described it in an appeal for help to the Governor of Quebec, “just time to leave his House when the Rebels enter’d and Plunder’d it of every moveable thing also every living creature & thing out of doors to a very large amount.” John Macomb requested placement in Detroit as “commissary for that garrison,” for which he would “Relinquish his Salary.” He explained that “all his Family are now settled at Detroit [and] he wishes to live there with them.”⁴⁰ He also hoped this move would bring relief from Rebel assaults. But given the strategic position of Detroit, the brawl between American revolutionaries and British loyalists would soon extend even there.

General George Washington had firmly felt, since 1775, that the northwestern forts were key to a Continental Army victory. He had written to General Philip Schuyler (uncle of Detroiter Arent Schuyler De Peyster, who stood on the opposite side of the conflict and would marry into the Macomb clan), saying: “If you carry your arms to Montreal, should not the garrison of Niagara, Detroit & c. be called upon to surrender, or threatened with the consequences of a refusal?”⁴¹ Although a Rebel attack on Quebec had failed in 1775, the prolonged conflict and a competition between the Crown and Continental Congress over the allegiance of various Native nations increased Detroiters’ fears that they could be targeted. Indigenous people figured prominently in the struggle between the Rebel and British forces, with each side desperately attempting to recruit Indian allies and fretting over the damage that Native warriors could unleash. While British leaders in Detroit managed to secure the support of the Detroit Potawatomies, Ohio Shawnees, and various bands of Ojibwes, Hurons, and Ottawas, they failed to gain the assistance of Potawatomies in Wisconsin and Illinois. By July of 1778, Lieutenant Governor Hamilton in Detroit had succeeded in passing a war belt to Shawnee, Ottawa, Mingoe, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Delaware, Mohawk, and Miami representatives, cementing an alliance that greatly distressed the Continental Congress.⁴²

With important Native allies in place, British military officials sought to shore up Detroit’s defenses as well as prepare the way for offensive action using the fort as a staging ground. The British concentrated strength and strategy in Detroit, moving personnel to the settlement from New York and making Detroit the center of the western theater of war. Captain Richard Lernoult, reassigned from Fort Niagara in 1776, would oversee the building of a substantial new fort in Detroit located on higher ground behind the dwellings and mercantile shops rather than near the riverbank. Lernoult placed responsibility for the details of construction in the hands of his second-in-command, Captain Henry Bird, who had been transferred from Niagara in 1778. Bird served as the engineer for the new fortification, a star-shaped structure named Fort Lernoult, “which dominated the town of Detroit for almost half a century” (and is marked today by a plaque at Fort and Shelby Streets in downtown Detroit).⁴³

Meanwhile, the threat of Rebel attack grew, as Virginia militiaman George Rogers Clark launched an aggressive plan approved by Virginia Governor Patrick Henry to strike at the British in the western interior. Clark’s advance into the West was spurred by Thomas Jefferson, who held grave concerns about the fort at Detroit. Jefferson saw Detroit as a pocket of strength that would facilitate Great Britain’s ability to maintain Indian allies and attack American settlements in the East and South. “It becomes necessary that we aim the first stroke in the western country and throw the enemy under the embarrassments of a defensive war,” Jefferson wrote to Clark on Christmas Day of 1780. “We have therefore determined that an expedition shall be undertaken under your command into the hostile country beyond the Ohio, the principal object of which is to be the reduction of the British post at Detroit.” According to Jefferson’s instructions, Clark and his men should be ready “at the Falls of Ohio by the 15 of March,” when “the breaking up of the ice” on the Wabash River and nearby lakes would allow for water navigation. And Jefferson had more than military strategy in mind when he considered Detroit. He was also thinking forward about financial gains that America would reap. If Captain Clark could successfully capture the post at Detroit, Jefferson wrote, “we shall be at leisure to turn our whole force to the rescue of our eastern Country from subjugation, we shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices.” But this would depend on the Indians, to whom Jefferson told Clark to “hold out either fear or friendship as their disposition and your actual situation may render most expedient.”⁴⁴ America, Jefferson imagined, could control the posts of the profitable western fur trade, displacing the British, who had displaced the French only decades prior.

Commander Clark partly succeeded in his invasion of the western front, taking control of former French towns in eastern Illinois including Kaskaskia, which had a large intermarried Native-French population, and Cahokia (where visitors today can tour a reconstructed indigenous Mississippian village). While holding control of the Illinois posts, Clark issued a Christmas Eve statement aimed directly at black and Native slaves. This population, Clark opined in his proclamation of December 24, 1778, had “too great a liberty . . . that prevents them from accomplishing the different pieces of work in which their masters employ them.” Clark stated that the mostly French slaveholders of Illinois had “begged” for help, as their slaves’ lack of productivity was “causing a total loss of this colony.” He intended to crack down on such license by prohibiting alcohol sales to “red and black slaves” and by disallowing “any red and black slaves” from renting private homes or public buildings in which they might gather for “dancing, feasting, or holding nocturnal assemblies.” In order to prevent robberies, he planned to forbid “red and black slaves” from leaving their masters’ homes after curfew without permission. He would also prohibit them from trading, selling, or buying items such as wood and pigs in exchanges with free residents without a master’s permission. Clark’s dictate included an enforcement measure, to “enjoin all captains, officers of the militia, and other individuals to enforce the execution of the present proclamation, and all white men to arrest the red or black slaves whom they shall meet in the streets of each village.”⁴⁵

George Rogers Clark’s proclamation, a wartime slave code, reveals the extent to which enslaved people of Illinois, a Great Lakes area more connected to the South than was Detroit, were biracial in ways similar to Detroit’s unfree population. While indicting enslaved people for practicing “disorders, abuses, and brigandage,” Clark repeatedly emphasized their color as “red and black.” He also called for “white men” in the towns to help police this unruly colored population. Importantly, Clark was highlighting race in a way that had not been so clearly defined in the French and British periods of holding “Panis” slaves. In the eyes of this Virginian, there were categorical differences between “reds and blacks” versus “whites.” Indigenous people had been reduced to a color category and thrown in with African Americans, which occluded the tribal specificity of Native backgrounds. Even the French term “Panis” that flattened some Indian people into one subjugated group had been derived from a series of indigenous tribal names (such as Pawnee) and recognized an Indianness—albeit an unfree Indianness, that was not yet reduced to purportedly biological difference. Clark, a southern military man who had penetrated the Great Lakes at a time when “only a handful of American soldiers and settlers” had ever been there, focused on skin color as integral to caste. In his detailed proclamation we can glimpse the beginnings of the American racialization of Native people as “red” in this region, and the yoking together of redness and blackness as inferior states of being.⁴⁶ On the cusp of the nineteenth century in the western interior, Americans were already exaggerating these fixed understandings of red, black, and white racial difference.⁴⁷

Captain Clark saw “red and black slaves” as a group gone out of control, but his formal attempt to manage them revealed their own self-actualization, their social ties to one another, and their ability to negotiate with white residents even within a society that held slaves. If Clark had to pass a code prohibiting trade, space rentals, dancing, theft, and evening strolls around town, enslaved people must have been engaging in these activities and finding the wherewithal to gain bargaining power. They were turning to their advantage the needs of white settlers in an isolated environment where slaves were harder to come by and labor was dearly sought. Although Commander Clark stated that enslaved people in Illinois had been fomenting “disorders” “of so long duration,” it is probable that they, like enslaved black people in the eastern states, had seized upon the war as an opening for increased disobedience, recalcitrance, and escape. Clark never took the Michigan forts during his campaigns, and so we have no similar record of what he might have witnessed among the unfree population in Detroit. It is possible, though, that enslaved people in that town also used wartime disruption as an opening to push for a greater scope of action.⁴⁸

While George Rogers Clark proved that he could march his men through the dense western territory, British military commanders in Detroit anxiously anticipated a Rebel advance further north. To stave off an attack by the Continental Army and weaken “a wedge of colonial settlement thrust into the heart of Indian America, Captain Henry Bird led expeditions deep into Kentucky.”⁴⁹ Marching with 150 soldiers and volunteers, hundreds of indigenous allies, and forty-three men charged with carrying supplies and armaments, Bird set out from Detroit in May of 1780, heading for Ohio. The soldiers, most of whom hailed from French families, were being paid by none other than the Macomb brothers, whose company, Macomb, Edgar & Macomb, held the government contract for fiscal agent to the British military. The number of men counted in the supply chain convoy most likely included enslaved blacks. By the time Bird and his contingent reached Kentucky, they comprised a force of one thousand men, large enough to crush the rural settlements of Ruddle’s Station and Martin’s Fort. And this they did, destroying homes, seizing booty, and taking more than three hundred prisoners.⁵⁰

Bird would write to his superior officer in Detroit, Major De Peyster, that the Indians were the ones responsible for cruelty in excess that had occurred during these raids. While Bird had “entreated every Indian officer that appeared to have Influence among the Savages, to pursuade [sic] them not to engage with the Fort until the guns were up—fearing if any were killed it might exasperate the Indians & make them commit cruelities when the Rebels surrendered,” he claimed that he could not control “the Savages” who “tore the poor children from their mothers Breasts, killed a wounded man and every one of the cattle, leaving the whole to stink.” Nevertheless, Bird and his men, as well as their besmirched Indian allies, stood to gain from these attacks in the form of prisoners and plunder. Bird wrote of the grueling journey back to Detroit: “I marched the poor women & children 20 miles in one day over very high mountains, frightening them with frequent alarms to push forward, in short, Sir, by water & land we came with our cannon & c 90 miles in 4 days.”⁵¹ Although neither Bird nor the other officers mentioned enslaved blacks among the prisoners, several were seized in Kentucky and claimed by these men, as well as by Native combatants.

Bird acquired “the Wench Esther” at Martin’s Fort “whereby the Inhabitants and Defenders agreed to deliver up their Blacks and moveables to the Indians as their property, on condition that their persons should be safely conducted to Detroit . . . the said Esther became my Property by consent and permission of the chiefs.”⁵² Here, as in his earlier report on the raids, Bird disassociates himself from Indian actions that might be viewed as uncivilized. It was not Bird who took this woman in his account of events; rather, it was the Indians, who then bestowed her on Bird, in all likelihood, to strengthen that alliance. Perhaps Bird was aware of the Rebels’ penchant to smear British soldiers by describing them as virtual “savages” and used rhetorical distance to protect his reputation. Certainly by 1780, Detroit officials such as Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton had come under special attack by American illustrators and writers, charged with barbarity and with accepting the scalps of colonists from bloodthirsty Indians.⁵³

The Americans as well as the British positioned Indians as scapegoats, seizing on cultural practices as well as skin color as markers of difference increasingly defined as race-based. While disavowing the Indian allies that were so crucial to his campaign, Captain Henry Bird personally profited from them. He soon turned Esther, the slave he had acquired during a Kentucky assault, into human capital. And by the time Bird sold Esther in 1784, she had borne a son to an unnamed father. Bird decided, as recorded in the deed of sale, to “Make over and give way my right and Property in the said Wench and her male child to William Lee in consideration of his having cleared for me Sixteen Acres of Land.” William Lee was a free black man, which raises uncomfortable questions about his purchase of Esther. Was Lee planning to treat Esther as valuable exchange commodity just as Bird had done, or was Lee seeking to help Esther? Perhaps William Lee was a relative or lover of Esther’s and sought to secure her freedom by trading his labor. We can only hope that her situation improved, as Esther’s documentary trail ends here, with the transfer of herself and child to William Lee. But the cleared land she was traded for, the land that Captain Henry Bird sought, has a traceable future in the record. The parcel would later become part of the ground upon which the defeated British military built a stronghold in their remaining Canadian territory: the town of Amherstberg, home to Fort Malden.⁵⁴ In this transaction in which the future of a woman and her child hung in the balance, the value of slaves, as well as land, was paramount to British settlement. Each form of property reinforced and enhanced the other, as slaves were used as capital to acquire land and then to make that land habitable and profitable.

Pathways to Wartime Detroit

When Henry Bird and his compatriots returned to Detroit in 1780, they dragged along “the largest body of people ever gathered in the wilderness of Kentucky . . . about 1,200 of these consisting of the invading force, and about 470 miserable prisoners, loaded down with household plunder from their own cabin homes.” Many of these captives, like Esther, were enslaved. Prisoner Agnes LaForce owned thirteen slaves seized by the British and their Native allies during the raids.⁵⁵ After having been relocated to Montreal, LaForce, who it turned out was a loyalist from a prominent Virginia family, enlisted the aid of Sir Frederick Haldimand, governor and commander in chief of Quebec, Canada, to recover her slaves. “On the 25th of June last year,” she wrote in her appeal, “your petitioner together [with] her five children and thirteen negro slaves belonging to her, were disturbed in their (as they thought) safe retirement by a party of Soldiers and Indians of his Majesty, and were by them taken Prisoners and carried to Detroit where on their arrival said negro slaves were sold and disposed of without your petitioner’s consent or receiving any benefit thereby to her great detriment said slaves being her only resource she had and her only property in this country.”⁵⁶ Despite the governor’s effort on her behalf, the petitioner did not recover her slaves, who constituted a valuable infusion into Detroit’s labor force. Agnes LaForce’s African American property included Scipio, Tim, Ishener, Stephen, Joseph, Keggy (Kijah), Job, Hannah, and Candis—now in possession of French traders, British officers, and Indian interpreters in Detroit—as well as Bess (Betty), Grace, Rachel, and Patrick—now in possession of Indians. Joseph, the son of Bess, and his sister Keggy, were held by Captain Matthew Elliott, who would soon grow rich on such acquisitions. Job, the son of Hannah, fell to Jacques Duperon Baby, one of Detroit’s most successful French traders and an Indian interpreter for the military.⁵⁷ These black captives joined a Detroit population swelling from an influx of American prisoners (such as Daniel Boone, the famed Kentucky frontiersman, and Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, the successful black trader who had married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa and became the first non-Native settler of Chicago), as well as many more black southern slaves whose names would never be recorded, and Native refugees from villages devastated by Rebel attacks.⁵⁸

Just as captives, slaves, and exiles were crowding into Fort Detroit, two high-ranking officials were fleeing. Justice of the Peace Philip Dejean and Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton saw their past deeds catch up to them. The pair had lost favor by meting out harsh punishments to residents. Their authoritarian bent had irked influential Detroit merchants, like James Sterling and William Macomb, who served as witnesses to a Montreal grand jury that indicted Dejean and Hamilton for “divers unjust and illegal, tyrannical and felonious acts, and things contrary to good government and to the safety of his Majesty’s liege subjects.”⁵⁹ The protest may have begun with an anonymous letter, likely penned by James Sterling, in September of 1777.⁶⁰ The letter called Hamilton “cruel and tyrannical” and expressed “how unhappy we are under his government.” The complainant then listed among his grievances “the cruel manner in which he [Hamilton] treated Mr. Jonas Schindler, silversmith” as well as the appointment of “a certain Philip DeJean.” With Hamilton’s approval, Dejean had taken out an “Advertisement” in 1777 announcing that German silversmith James (or Jonas) Schindler had been imprisoned in the garrison and would be driven out “with infamy and sent in the country below” for practicing without an apprenticeship.⁶¹ Dejean had, further, according to the whistle-blower, “passed sentence of death” upon a furrier named Joseph Hecker, accused of killing his brother-in-law in a “quarrel,” and “condemned and hanged, also, Jean Contancinau, a Canadian, for having stolen some money &c. from his master, and being concerned with a Negro wench in attempting to set fire to his master’s house.” While the writer allowed about the servant and slave, that “these criminals deserved death,” he angrily queried: “but how dared Lieutenant-governor Hamilton, and an infamous Judge of his own making, take upon them to try them, and execute them without authority?”⁶² Even loyalist Detroiters seem to have caught the revolutionary zeal that led them to question undue assumptions of power.

Amidst the turmoil of war, Dejean and Hamilton chose to run rather than face questioning in Quebec. They used the conflict as cover to escape, eluding officials in 1778 by marching out with British troops traveling to Vincennes, Indiana, to retake Fort Sackville from the American army. It was there, in 1779, that Hamilton, caricatured by Rebels with the scathing epithet “the hair-buyer general” for purchasing American scalps, was captured. Captain George Rogers Clark marched him toward Williamsburg, Virginia, where Hamilton, a man who had overseen the jailing of Detroiters, would take his turn as prisoner.⁶³

Detroit was tense and full to bursting by 1782, when the enslaved population had increased to 180 souls, when desperate, hungry indigenous people pressed into town seeking assistance and shelter, and when Native military allies came to receive dramatically increased quantities of British gifts, including alcohol.⁶⁴ At this moment, slaves of color and free Indians shared a slice of experience, all having been driven to Detroit by the chaos of combat. Native refugees did not always find a warm reception in Detroit. Put off by the expectation that they would support displaced Indians, even though those nations were their allies in battle, military officials sent Native men to attack southern settlements as a means of reducing population pressure in the fort.⁶⁵ These attacks led to the capture of slaves from the South, and the vicious cycle of violence, captivity, and disruption continued.

During a period of intense growth born of upheaval, trader John Macomb joined his sons, Alexander and William, in Detroit. He had not been able to secure the commissary post that he had requested as a means of escaping Rebel assaults in New York. Nevertheless, he worked to advance his sons’ endeavors throughout the war. Trader John Askin also saw wartime Detroit as a refuge. In 1778, he had suffered the indignity of being fired as deputy commissary at Fort Michilimackinac, for “dispens[ing] the King’s stores too loosely.” Under Askin’s watch, quantities of rum, flour, pork, and butter had come up short, raising the suspicion of his boss, the newly appointed (since 1775) superintendent and lieutenant governor of Michilimackinac, Patrick Sinclair. Sinclair had replaced Askin with local physician David Mitchell, who would later be a supplier of slaves to Detroit, since the role of fort commissary in the Great Lakes came with a secondary, implicit duty: the role of slave trader.⁶⁶ Just as historical research on slave traders in the South has found that, unlike the popular stereotype of uncouth and outcast brokers popularized in works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these men had close ties with the planter class and often became planters themselves, in the Great Lakes, slave-dealing was not a marginal or socially sullied enterprise. Well-positioned fort officials engaged in the practice, and supplying customers with slaves became part and parcel of supplying them with wheat, rum, and other necessities.

As professional tensions about the distribution of military wares in Michilimackinac grew, John Askin cast his eyes south to Detroit. He was deterred, though, by the hostilities between Great Britain and the colonies, writing in 1778: “I have changed my plann of settling at Detroit untill the war is over, indeed in the present Situation of affairs, it’s hard to undertake anything.”⁶⁷ Moving to Detroit, giving up his farm, and transferring his fleet of trading boats seemed a gamble to Askin, but so did remaining in Michilimackinac, where “everything [was] so scarce and so high-priced” and where he had lost his government position. Disgraced and financially weakened, Askin decided he could not wait out the war after all.⁶⁸ He relocated his family and slaves to the hometown of his wife, the French Detroiter Marie Archange Barthe Askin. Archange Askin was a Barthe on her father’s side and a Campau on her mother’s side, and thus descended from one of Detroit’s oldest slaveholding families. Due to the influence of his in-laws, Askin acquired a choice piece of land east of the fort pickets in 1780. This ribbon farm, described as Lot 1 “above the fort” in a 1765 survey of Detroit, had been in the possession of the Barthe family prior to the war. Askin also relied on the help of his friends, like Commander Arent De Peyster, who vouched for Askin’s character, and James Sterling, who had been Askin’s local agent on the ground in Detroit during Askin’s Michilimackinac days. Gradually, Askin rebuilt his trade and mercantile business, as well as his thriving farm, with the essential aid of key local contacts and highly skilled slaves.⁶⁹

Back at Fort Michilimackinac in the 1760s and 1770s, Askin had acquired a handful of African and indigenous people whom he held as property. The Native domestic, Charlotte, cooked and served in the house. Askin’s possessions also included two adroit black men, Pompey and Jupiter Wendell, whom Askin had purchased from Abraham Douw of Albany in 1775 for “the Sum of One Hundred & Thirty five Pounds Lawfull Money of the Province of New York.” Jupiter Wendell fashioned barrels, an essential task in an economy oriented around the storage and shipping of goods, and he also labored as a maritime crewman. Pompey was a skilled sailor who operated Askin’s trading vessels. A man named Toon, whose race was not identified in Askin’s records, also worked Askin’s ships and lost his life doing so, as Toon “was Drowned out of a small canoe coming from the Vessell” while laboring on the lakes. These ships on which Jupiter and Pompey drudged, and on which Toon had died, skimmed the Great Lakes and interconnected rivers, moving goods from Michilimackinac, north to Sault Ste. Marie, northwest to Grand Portage, and southeast to Detroit, where military Commander Arent De Peyster was a regular customer.⁷⁰

John Askin was fastidious about satisfying those he supplied, holding the view that: “We must never disappoint people in the matter of shipping goods.” This is why enslaved men with construction and transportation skills were essential to Askin’s enterprise. Pompey was especially valuable, and Askin at times could not “do without him,” preferring to hold Pompey in reserve for vital tasks while finding others to fill Pompey’s shoes for certain outings. When Pompey sailed Askin’s ships, he did so with a multiracial crew. One of Askin’s employees, referred to as “the Indian,” was a free Native sailor, “a good man,” according to Askin, “if one could only understand what he says”; another crewman, Mr. McDonald, was a white employee, “somewhat overbearing,” but kept on by Askin due to a wartime labor shortage. Askin supplied all of the men with rum during these trading trips “as an incentive to good work besides keeping them from helping themselves from the cargo.” However, “Pomp,” as Askin called him, only received “half that quantity,” a lesser amount than the free white crewmen on the boat. Pompey was crucial to Askin’s outfit, but still a slave, entitled to neither his freedom nor equal rations.⁷¹

During his time as commissary at Fort Michilimackinac, John Askin had done double duty as a slave broker. In 1778, he informed Jean Baptiste Barthe of Sault Ste. Marie: “I sold your panis to Lavoine for 750 livres. He is too stupid to make a sailor or to be any good whatever.” A month before he so crudely sold this man using language that may hint at a burgeoning racialization of “Panis” Indians as unintelligent, Askin also sought to procure young Native female slaves. He wrote at the end of a missive to Mr. Beausoleil in which he had already addressed the need to “divide the merchandise equally” among merchants and reported the delay of a shipment of “liquor and provisions” from Detroit: “I shall need two pretty panis girls of from 9 to 16 years of age. Please speak to these gentlemen to get them for me.” The attention paid to the girls’ youth and appearance in this order suggests their intended purpose for household ornamentation and eventual sexual service in an eroticized gutter of the Great Lakes slave market. John Askin himself had kept an enslaved Indian woman, Mannette, as a sexual object before freeing her in 1766. These “panis girls” may have been sought by Askin for undisclosed personal reasons, or through him for local male associates with illicit designs on the victims of this trade. The direct reference here to physically appealing Native girls stands alone in the extant Detroit records. However, we can read into the silences in this regional history a pattern that has been confirmed in the southern states. In the U.S. South, white men developed an extremely profitable “fancy trade” in which African American women, most often of mixed-race ancestry, were sought for sexual slavery. Marketed at exorbitant prices, these women referred to as “fancy girls” or “fancy maids,” were sexually abused by slave dealers in slave pens, markets and prisons along trade routes, as well as by a string of buyers. While we do not have a record as explicit in its ugliness as that which exists in the South, this particular order for young girls in Askin’s letter whispers of unseemly ends, especially when viewed in the context of the numerous Native women who were bearing babies to unknown fathers in Detroit. We have now come to recognize the horrendous trials and compromised survival strategies of “fancy girls” in the southern slaveocracy. On the shores of interior lakes and rivers of the West, women sold as “pretty panis” likely suffered similar fates. And in the Great Lakes, as in the South, protected white women benefited from wealth derived from the sale of “pretty panis.” In the same month that John Askin was ordering up Indian girls to satisfy himself or his clients, he was also ordering twelve pairs of fancy shoes in the “French fashion” for his French Canadian wife. But the reality was not so simple in its color coordination; women of Native descent could also be members of the slaveholding class. While attending to his white wife’s specialty footwear, Askin also ordered in from Montreal a wedding gown of “light blue Sattin” in “the french fashion” for his daughter, whom he affectionately called Kitty. Kitty was a girl of mixed Euro-Native parentage and herself the daughter of an Indian slave. She nevertheless luxuriated in the lifestyle generated by the sale of other indigenous girls, whose impending sexual subjugation allowed her to enjoy a proper continental wedding.⁷²

In another transaction that year, Askin attempted to protect one Native slave at the expense of another whom he deemed less valuable. Askin informed Charles Patterson that an Indian boy in whom Patterson should have an interest was in the possession of Ottawas. This boy was Patterson’s son conceived with a Panis mother. Askin, who had claimed and cared for his own children from an Indian slave, including the favored Kitty, wrote in rebuke to his friend: “there is a Boy here who was sold to the Ottawas, that every body but yourself says is yours, he suffered much [,] poor child [,] with them. I have at length been able to get him from them on promise of giving an Indian Woman Slave in his Stead—he’s at your service if you want him, if not I shall take good care of him untill he is able to earn his Bread without Assistance.” In concern for this mixed-race child, Askin got the boy back by trading an “Indian Woman Slave” for him, proving again the vulnerability of Native women in the Great Lakes slave market. One wonders if this unfortunate woman was the rescued boy’s own mother. John Askin’s letters reveal nothing of her identity. This indigenous enslaved woman, a member of a class of people whose bodies were “routinely violated,” also became disposable in the historical record.⁷³

Patrick McNiff, A Plan of the Settlements at Detroit and Its Vicinity from River Rouge Upwards to Point au Ginglet on Lake St. Clair, 1796. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan. This map depicts French-style ribbon farms as strips along the river and individual farmhouses as squares on the opposite bank. The farms of wealthy slaveholders William Macomb and John Askin, as well as members of the Campau family, are prominently located near the fort.

At Fort Michilimackinac, John Askin built his wealth by diversifying his interests: serving as a commissary on the payroll of the Crown (while allegedly misappropriating military provisions); managing the infusion of Indian furs from the privileged vantage point of his government position; securing land and operating a farm; acquiring boats for the shipment of goods; and using, selling, and placing slaves to strengthen trade and satisfy desires. He would seek to reproduce this winning pattern in his new home at Fort Detroit, which he made with his wife Archange and their multiracial household of young adult Anglo-Ottawa children (the progeny of Askin and his former slave, Mannette), Anglo-French children, and black and Indian bondspeople. John Askin settled near William and Sarah Macomb, whose farm was located on equally prized riverfront property immediately west of the fort.

The Macombs and the Askins, who would become business associates and family friends, were transplanted Detroiters in the opening years of the American Revolution. Also new to Detroit, but not of their own volition, were Protestant missionaries of the Moravian Church who had run afoul of the British authorities. Accused of harboring an allegiance for the Rebels despite a profession of pacifistic neutrality, Moravian ministers David Zeisberger, John Heckewelder, and others stationed at the church’s Ohio missions were captured by pro-British Native warriors in 1781. In 1782, the ministers were ordered to appear in Detroit on suspicion of “sympathy and complicity with the American cause.” And indeed, the ultra-observant Moravians had been operating as pseudo-spies, passing along messages to Rebel leaders about intended attacks on a nearby Ohio fort. This may have been why the Moravian’s “taciturn” leader in the region, Reverend David Zeisberger, expressed relief when Native combatants burned mission diaries and letters, confessing he was “glad that they fell into the flames and not into strange hands.” While their writings escaped capture, the Moravians themselves did not. A forced relocation to Detroit swiftly followed the assault on their missions.⁷⁴

The Moravian Church, which was founded in Moravia, Central Europe, in the seventeenth century and retained a strong German cultural heritage, had its northern American headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A fervent commitment to evangelism had led Moravians to carry the word of their faith into American Indian communities in the West and Southeast in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It is from Pennsylvania and in service of this cause that the Reverend David Zeisberger had set out as the lead minister on a proselytizing expedition to the Ohio country, once depending on an “old Mulatto” who had lived with Shawnees for twenty years “to translate for them.” The Moravians made successful forays into Delaware and Shawnee country and saw their Ohio missions enlarged by Native converts who formed a string of small Christian Indian towns. Pro-British forces ransacked these settlements as the Moravian leaders were seized.⁷⁵

On the arduous march from central Ohio to southern Michigan, Reverend Zeisberger described trudging through “deep swamps and troublesome waters” and passing by a constant stream of people in motion: “a multitude of Indians of various nations, who were all bringing from Detroit horse loads of wares and gifts.” These were individuals who had spent time in Detroit, trading goods and receiving presents from British officers as tokens of goodwill meant to secure economic and military alliances. When the Moravians finally reached “the city” and saw “the whole country round about, on both sides [of] the river . . . about a mile wide,” they had passed through a territory made wild by the vagaries of a natural water-rich environment as well as by the vicissitudes of an unpredictable war.⁷⁶ The Moravians had likewise passed through lands inhabited by indigenous people whose villages and trade routes surrounded Detroit from as near as the Detroit River to the southern reaches of Ohio and into the Cherokee territory of the Southeast. The scene was similar far north of Detroit where Fort Michilimackinac was situated and far west of the city at the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan: Native people and Native lands encompassed Detroit, a center for distributing goods, passing information, and crafting wartime strategy that pulled in people of various colors, cultures, and creeds.

At Fort Detroit, Commander Arent De Peyster summoned Reverend Zeisberger and members of his congregation, including Delaware Christians, for questioning. He released the group soon thereafter, apparently convinced of their innocence, but ordered them back to Detroit within a matter of months to hedge his bet. While this subset of the Ohio Moravians was being held captive at the fort, Native converts to the faith back in Ohio faced a horrible fate. In March of 1782, American militiamen from Pennsylvania had attacked two Delaware villages at Salem and Gnadenhütten, taking the lives of nearly one hundred unarmed Indian Moravians in a senseless massacre. Heartbroken by this crime perpetrated by Americans that they had once secretly assisted, the Moravians could do nothing. They stood at the mercy of the British commander at Detroit, who treated them well, according to Zeisberger, but would not let them leave the area. With their remaining missionaries and a smattering of Indian followers, the Moravians moved to the outskirts of Detroit by order of the British, who wished to keep them under surveillance and had secured a parcel of land from a band of Ojibwes on which the Moravians could reside.⁷⁷

Captives of the power-center at Detroit and refugees from the western theater of war, the Moravians established a mission and farm on the Huron River (now the Clinton River), twenty miles northeast of Detroit near the edge of Lake St. Clair. They resumed their longtime habit of diary-writing, observing the soldiers who had intended to keep a watch on them, and jotting notations about the activities of Detroit traders and farmers that offer clues about the slaves these men and women held. Mourning the loss of their fellow congregants, the Moravians and Delaware converts watched developments of the war from their vantage point on the Huron River. In late spring of 1783, upon returning from a supply trip to Detroit, the Moravian Brother Edwards “brought word that peace would certainly be made.” One month later, the Reverend Zeisberger penned in the mission diary: “from the articles of peace it is plain to be seen that Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac will be ceded to the States.”⁷⁸ But even under the coming sway of an upstart nation that had risked all for liberty, slavery would remain a feature of the Detroit landscape as prominent as the river.