3

The Wild Northwest (1783–1803)

           By an ordinance enacted by congress, dated July 3, 1787 . . . there was a clause in Article VI saying that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” This was a safeguard by congress to prevent the extension of slavery northwest of the Ohio River. Notwithstanding this wise provision, our ancestors paid little attention to it, for whenever a spruce young negro was brought by the Indians he was sure to find a purchaser at a reasonable price.

—General Friend Palmer, Early Days in Detroit, 1906

The Great Lakes region could have been different. Acquired by the United States after a bloody revolution that had championed the principles of equality and liberty, and separated from the entrenched slaving stronghold of the South by physical distance, cultural makeup, and economic interdependencies that leaned northeastward, this might have been a place where freedom won in full-throated fashion, matching hot revolutionary rhetoric with reality. In the northern states, the Revolutionary War had generated a sense of disquiet about holding human beings as chattel. Enslaved petitioners and plaintiffs in Massachusetts had exposed the blatant hypocrisy of this upstart would-be country espousing ideals of liberty while maintaining a slave society. Prompted to act by burning desire and the opportunities afforded by wartime disarray, thousands of slaves in the North as well as the South had escaped during the war, evidencing the “contagion of liberty.”¹ New England colonists who had employed the rhetoric of slavery as a metaphor to describe their political relationship to Great Britain could not help but see the irony in Americans owning humans as things. This recognition of hypocrisy, and indeed, immorality, at the center of American life fed the gradual abolition of slavery in the New England states, with Vermont at the lead in 1777. In the northern mid-Atlantic states, including New York, emancipation would come even more incrementally as legislatures adopted molasses-like plans for bestowing upon enslaved people the right to personal liberty.

America was no innocent when it came to the beast of slavery. When we look back on decisions made at the founding moments of this nation, we cannot in good conscience claim that political leaders were ignorant of scathing critiques of the practice. Slavery had in fact been a subject of fierce debate in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Some of the country’s leading men were sickened by the vile mistreatment of a whole subset of the populace; others saw slavery as an unfortunate but necessary economic practice that should be phased out over time, and still others felt that slavery was a social and financial good, ordained by a Christian vision of paternalistic social hierarchy based on natural strengths and deficiencies that fell along racial lines. These differences in points of view were mainly, but not fully, regional, with New England and southern states chafing against each other’s interpretations of how the new nation should be imagined. But the seeds of deep division that would later explode in a Civil War were buried by the state representatives who met in Philadelphia that May to September in order to establish the nation’s governing text. Flushed with their unexpected military victory over a global superpower and chastened by the grave import of their collective task to build the legal scaffolding of a free democratic republic, northern and southern attendees found their way to compromise. They banned the ugly international trade in slaves after the passage of twenty years and developed the callously creative Three-Fifths Clause, which counted enslaved people as equivalent to three-fifths of free people toward congressional representation for the states. This meant that slaveholders, especially those in the South where the majority of unfree laborers lived, could deny enslaved people freedom and citizenship while using these same enslaved people’s presence to amass greater congressional power for white male citizens with property. This three-fifths provision, in the words of the historian Edward Countryman, “made slavery the only special social interest that the new national order explicitly recognized.”²

The freshly acquired region of the Great Lakes, or Northwest, as it came to be called, also triggered tension over the place of slavery in the nation and the boundaries of slavery’s expansion into the West. Two months before the delegates of the Constitutional Convention finalized that foundational document in preparation for ratification in the states, the Confederation Congress had laid out a plan for western terrain ceded by Great Britain. Building on a document drafted by Thomas Jefferson and his committee in 1784 that had not been adopted due to perceived insufficiencies, the final legislation written by a new committee in 1787 provided for the division of these lands into three to five states and created a process for the admittance of those states (later, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a portion of Minnesota) into the Union after a temporary territorial stage. The previous text penned by Jefferson’s committee had addressed the difficult matter of slavery, recommending that: “after the year 1800 of the Christian aera [sic] there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty.” The final legislation adopted in 1787 included this language nearly verbatim, principally to encourage the immigration of white northeasterners into the region.³

In July of 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, representatives adopted the Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio, handily shortened to the Northwest Ordinance, with a prohibition against slavery modified but intact. Always reaching for compromise, architects of the nation’s founding documents made the ban on slavery immediate in the Northwest and added a fugitive slave clause. The finalized language of Article 6 included reassurance for southern slaveholders: if their human property should abscond to western lands, that property would be returned. The text also legalized the bondage and forced labor of convicted criminals as a form of punishment. On the issue of slavery, Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance declared: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.”⁴ (The logic of this careful wording that managed to prohibit slavery while simultaneously protecting some forms of it still operates today in the legal use of prison labor to perform some of the country’s most dangerous jobs.)⁵ But what of the hundreds of Native and African-descended slaves in Detroit who were not runaways from the states and had not been convicted of crimes? They found no safe haven in this new Northwest. As legal historian David Chardavoyne has baldly put it: “The arrival of American rule and enactment of the Northwest Ordinance did not emancipate any slaves in Michigan—on the contrary, for many black and panis slaves, the words of Article VI of the Ordinance were just words, seemingly incapable of freeing them.”⁶ Riven with loopholes that revealed its ultimately equivocal stance toward slavery, the Ordinance, functionally a constitutional document for the region, left people of color at the mercy of previous customs.⁷ Under American jurisdiction, the Northwest would become a wild, wild West for enslaved people, who had very little protection under legislation that upheld a compromised form of abolition and included no enforcement provision. Colonialism and slavery would remain braided together in the new national terrain, as this “foundational document of American expansionism” was careful to protect the property rights of southern slaveholders and to legalize the theft of prisoners’ labor on lands still claimed by Native societies.⁸

While the Northwest Ordinance banned blatant slavery in what would later be called the Midwest, it protected access to slave labor. It was not long before the region’s slaveholders and would-be slaveholders devised strategies for taking advantage of wiggle room in the federal law. They interpreted the prohibition of Article 6 as applying only to incoming residents in the territory (not to previous settlers) and aided in the seizure and return of fugitives. The Northwest Ordinance, which is often imagined today as outlawing slavery in the interior North, actually allowed for “a de facto slavery through a system of long-term indentures, rental contracts, enforcement statutes, and the recognition of the status of slaves who had been brought to the territory before 1787.”⁹ In a Revolutionary era characterized by radical talk of natural rights, American leaders came close to abolishing slavery in the new western territory that was, by right of prior occupation, indigenous land—but “close” was not good enough to make an immediate, meaningful difference for those enslaved in Detroit.

Betting on Detroit

To elite Detroiters, the settled peace in 1783 represented a startling turn of events. The Treaty of Paris, negotiated by John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin at the behest of the Continental Congress in 1783, called for the relinquishment of the interior region east of the Mississippi to the nascent American government. The specter of occupation by a foreign military force and unfamiliar political authority, and the threat of draconian laws and taxes, hung like a scrim over British Detroit. In a place peopled mostly by loyalists and an even larger longtime French population, the loss carried the potential for political unrest and social instability. Worse, in the aftermath of the war, inflation and a scarcity of goods were ravaging the local economy.

One slice of luck for Detroit’s white settlers was the physical soundness of the settlement. Detroit had been a military hub during the conflict but had seen no immediate fighting, which could have devastated buildings and cropland. With the town structurally intact, trade could resume as soon as the market recovered. A second boon was the promised protection of colonists’ property under the new American government. Even before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson, hoping for a capture of Fort Detroit, had directed Commander George Rogers Clark to safeguard the inhabitants’ material possessions, writing: “Should you succeed in the reduction of the Post, you are to promise protection to the Persons and property of the French and American inhabitants, or of such at least as shall not on tender refuse to take the Oath of fidelity to this Commonwealth.”¹⁰ Clark would have seized upon this directive, especially regarding the security of human property, as he had already demonstrated in his Illinois Proclamation of 1778 that he believed “red and black slaves” should be kept in their place as chattel. Beyond Jefferson’s dictate to an officer in the field to guard the property rights of previous settlers from New France and newcomer Americans, the formal Treaty of Paris sought to further ensure Americans’ investment in slaves, insisting that: “his Brittanic Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his armies, garrisons and fleets from the said United States.”¹¹ Although the British did in fact remove from American territory former slaves who had been promised freedom for serving on their side of the conflict, Great Britain did not yet condemn slavery unilaterally. Neither did the United States, which would permit certain forms of slavery on Great Lakes lands just as Great Britain had done. Weighing out all of these factors—politics, economics, infrastructure, and slavery—British merchants had to determine whether making a life in Detroit still made sense.

Some British-identified residents, such as John Macomb and his son Alexander Macomb, chose to leave Detroit for New York after the end of hostilities; but others, such as John Askin, stayed on. Askin’s neighbor and fellow Scotsman William Macomb wagered on Detroit as well. While the political terrain on which they planted their personal flags was still uncertain, the legal terrain was secure enough in one key respect: the protection of present colonists’ right to hold slaves. This proved providential for Detroit’s Anglo elite. Men like John Askin and William Macomb would benefit from the weak prohibition on slavery, numbering among the town’s eighty-four slaveholding households and steadily accruing more human chattel to work or sell at a profit in the 1780s and ’90s.

The slave trade among Detroit merchants boomed during these postwar decades. In 1789 William Macomb was attempting to sell two African Americans belonging to Alexis Masonville for £200. The black woman, he vowed to Charles Morrison, the recipient of his letter, was “very handy & a very good cook.” The black man was “a very smart active, fellow and by no means a bad slave.” Macomb wanted them “disposed of,” preferably by the fall and not on “a longer credit than the first of June.” He added in a postscript that he hoped Morrison could purchase him “a very good Carabois [caribou] skin” while he was out making trades, as their “hair” was “most esteemed.” Directing the sale of “disposable” black bodies in this letter, Macomb then immediately turned to procuring the skins of valuable beasts whose numbers were then in decline due to overhunting. Macomb was less than pleased a month later about the intended sale of the slaves to a Mr. Ceré and wished Morrison had instead accepted Mr. Ainse’s offer. Morrison corrected his error, soon responding that he had indeed made the better sale to Ainse but “had not seen a Carabois skin.”¹² The black man and woman had been passed on to other owners in the Northwest. The woodland caribou had perhaps escaped with their lives farther north where their habitat still remained intact.¹³ In 1794, James May sold “a certain negro man, Pompey,” to John Askin for £45. The next year, Askin made a profit by selling Pompey to James Donnelson for £50.¹⁴ In 1801 John Askin received a request from James Mackelm, a colleague downriver, to “part with your Negro (who can do every thing).” After asking to be informed of Askin’s “price” and “line of payment,” Mackelm promises to “look for the feathers and Cyder” already on order. In a follow-up letter, Mackelm again presses for the black man, asking if “he is a slave for life, how old he is, and [if] his price [is] payable six months after Delivery.” Those who held on to their slaves rather than selling them in a hot market used them to keep business brewing, especially through the transport of goods, including Elijah Brush, Dr. Thompson, and Robert McDougall, who all sent “their” black men and boys to Joseph Campau’s general store to pick up silk, bushels of corn, rum, flour, and gunpowder.¹⁵

Askin, Macomb, and others in their circle also seized the opportunity to grab more indigenous land. The American Revolutionary War had been waged not only between the British and the Americans but also between both these powers and scores of Native nations that strategically fought with either side or strove to remain neutral, all with the goal of maintaining indigenous strength on a rapidly changing continental map. The Revolutionary conflict had therefore been “a continuation of the struggle about Indian land and who was to get it.”¹⁶ Now that the United States had proved itself the victor, indigenous lands were among the spoils. The Crown granted the United States sovereignty over the original thirteen colonies as well as over western territory that was predominantly occupied and claimed by Indians, drawing national boundaries between Great Britain (Canada) and the United States across the Great Lakes and northwest waterways. The negotiation of this treaty in Paris neither included nor consulted indigenous leaders, whose lands—at least on paper—were diced and distributed by European and American colonial powers.¹⁷

Land lust took hold in Detroit as elsewhere. The region became a microcosm of the larger American bid to obtain huge swaths of Indian ground on the cusp of a new century defined by westward expansion. As the historian Alan Taylor has noted, U.S. leaders relied not only on territorial enlargement at the federal level through treaty provisions and massive acquisitions like the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also on the actions of individual Americans who sought private land purchases. There was, Taylor writes, a “power of property lines in weaving a settler society.” Along the Detroit River, this effective power of private property to extend the footprint of what would become white America was well underway at the turn of the century. William Macomb already owned Grosse Ile and was raking in proceeds from tenants on the island. Before his death he would purchase Hog Island (now Belle Isle, the beautiful island park known as the “gem” of Detroit), which had served as a commons for settlers who kept pigs there during the French period. John Askin purchased land on both the northern (American) and southern (British-Canadian) sides of the Detroit River and engaged in numerous land speculation schemes, including an attempt to purchase the entire Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”) of present-day Michigan.¹⁸

The war would end with a surfeit in slaves and shifts in land ownership that further secured the powerful position of British merchants. And for them, another blessing sailed on the horizon. Despite Americans’ wishful plans for the governance of the Northwest, the British Crown did not keep its promise to relinquish control over Great Lakes forts. Instead, the Red Coats stood their ground, defying the terms of the Treaty of Paris while claiming that Americans still owed unpaid debts.¹⁹ And the Americans, now crippled with war debt, a spent army, a citizen revolt against taxes in Massachusetts (Shays’ Rebellion), and a barely formed, untested national government, had little power to force the issue. Throughout the 1780s and most of the 1790s, Detroit and the interior Northwest were American in name only. British authorities, now officially ensconced at Fort Malden in Ontario, brazenly ran Fort Detroit. The British were even so bold as to include Detroit in a new political district in 1791—the District of Hesse, located in the province of Upper Canada, Quebec. And the British would continue the practice of slavery in the posts they so blatantly held. In 1793 the Hesse district government official, Detroit military commander, and mapmaker Major David William Smith wrote to his colleague John Askin to share news of a Canadian legislative meeting in Niagara. “We have made no law to free the Slaves,” Smith exclaimed in relief. “All those who have been brought into the Province or purchased under any authority legally exercised, are Slaves to all intents & purposes, & are secured as property by a certain act of Parliament.”²⁰

Slaves to All Intents and Purposes

Despite a spectacular American victory in the Revolutionary War, little had changed on the ground in Detroit, especially for the enslaved. French, Euro-Native, and Native residents still made up most of the population. British military officials dominated the governing structure of the town. Slaveholding merchants constituted the economic elite. African-descended free people of color (gens de couleur libre), who comprised sizeable communities in the culturally French towns of New Orleans and St. Louis, were absent in the Detroit records before 1800 and were likely only present in very small numbers. Few people claiming a declarative American identity were anywhere to be seen. And now, from the perspective of those who wished to get ahead through the mechanism of owning slaves, there were even more unfree inhabitants available to operate the town’s shops, storehouses, kitchens, industries, ships, wagons, and farms. Ste. Anne’s Church records show “Master Girardin, baker of the town” with a “Panis” named Antoine in 1786, and “Mr. Payet, Parish Priest of Detroit,” with a black enslaved woman called Catherine in 1785. British military officers also had slaves, acquired through wartime raids and recent trades within slaveholding circles. “Mr. Grand (Grant), commandant in the navy” buried an unnamed black woman in 1784 and baptized a “Panis” man, Jean Baptiste, in 1793 and another “Panis” man, Paul, in 1794. Grant had married into a prominent French Detroit family in 1774, a reliable way for British residents to increase wealth in slaves.²¹

In addition to individual ownership, corporatized groups of Detroiters could collectively leverage their resources in slaves, as when William St. Clair and a “Co of Detroit Merchants” sold Josiah Cutten (also known as Joseph Cotton), a black man, to Thomas Duggan, an officer in the British Indian Department. The price for Josiah Cutten was “One hundred and twenty Pounds New York Currency payable . . . in Indian Corn & Flour.” By the time that he was traded for corn, Cutten had already been sold at least once in Montreal. He would later become the property of John Askin, who pledged £50 for a half share in Cutten in 1792 while Cutten languished in prison for robbing Joseph Campau’s store. Askin insured this risky investment such that he did not owe when Cutten, a young man just in his twenties, was later executed for theft in Upper Canada.²²

John Askin Estate Inventory. The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

While a greater supply of slaves existed in Detroit after the war, there was also a higher demand for their labor. Captain Alexander Harrow, an officer of the British navy who had previously manned the king’s ships in Great Lakes trades, owned slaves in Detroit but tried and repeatedly failed to acquire more in the 1790s.²³ In 1794 he sent a 33.6 pound payment to Dr. Mitchell at Michilimackinac, the man who held Askin’s former job as commissary, for “a little Pawnese” the doctor had sent. In 1794 Harrow wrote to Mitchell about sending “the boy he mentioned of 12 or 16 years old” and added “if the Boy was a little negro the better.” As in earlier decades, a preference for difficult to acquire black boys showed in Harrow’s request. The preference was, in some ways, irrational, as Indian slaves from the same locality would be better skilled in working the waters or traveling across the region. But the blackness of an enslaved child conferred a certain status upon an owner in Detroit, showing that the person could obtain rare commodities and marking, through oppositional skin tone difference, a starker social division between the owner and the owned. Black slaves were also far less likely to be confused for free people than Indian slaves in a region peopled mainly by Indians, and were less likely to make successful escapes due to a greater distance from their original homes. In May of 1795 Harrow was seeking a “Slave man or woman, Negro or Pawnee,” indicating by word order his racial preference but stressing his willingness to buy any slave. Two months later he pressed Dr. Mitchell at Michilimackinac for “a wench for country work” and “a Slave Boy of 10 or 15 who would suit me.” In May of 1796 Harrow was expecting “the Pawnese & 2 children if settled by Mr. Robertson for me.” He hoped this Indian would prove “a good Kit[chen] wench.” In July he was also trying to get “Black Bet and 3 children to get them by all means,” and by August, Harrow’s demands rose to a fever pitch of desperation, as he was “still looking for a wench, black or Yellow, young or old.”²⁴

Most Detroit slaveholders continued to hold just one or two slaves after the Revolution, but members of the merchant elite, their pocketbooks fattened by government-military contracts and Indian land purchases, owned several. In 1787 John Askin inventoried his slaves, listing Jupiter and Tom—both “Negro” men, George, a “Ditto [black] Boy,” Sam, a “Pawnis Blk Smythe [blacksmith],” Susannah “a Wench & 2 children,” and Mary “a Ditto Wench.” The combined value of these individuals totaled £760. The women in the inventory whose races went unmarked were valued at just £100 each, but the skilled male laborers of different races—Jupiter, a black boatman, and Sam, a Native blacksmith, were each worth £150.²⁵ Across the span of Askin’s preserved ledger and personal papers, more than thirty enslaved people of indigenous and African ancestry appear, fleetingly, in the non-emotional mentions of acquisitions, sales, tasks, and deaths. Even John Askin’s daughter, Catherine or “Kitty” Askin, had a slave of her own. A young mixed-race Ottawa and Scot woman herself, Kitty Askin possessed a female “Panis” named Cecile.²⁶ The outlines of Cecile’s personal history are unknown, omitted from the record that has preserved minute detail about the color and fabric of Kitty Askin’s blue satin wedding gown. And as was the case decades earlier under French rule, Kitty Askin was not alone as an indigenous woman with slaveholdings in Detroit. The most flamboyant Native American woman in town, Sally Ainse, was a savvy trader and slave-owner.

Merchant Slaveholders and Misplaced Missionaries

Sally (or Sarah) Ainse, an Oneida woman from Pennsylvania, had ventured into the business of trade back east alongside her husband, the French-Native trader and interpreter Andrew Montour. A “remarkably tall and elegant” woman who dressed in “English mode with a long gown and hair flowing behind,” Sally Ainse moved to Detroit during the Revolutionary War after a separation from her husband. There she found ample opportunity to establish her own networks for trade. Ainse acquired a prime lot within the fort next to Ste. Anne’s Church, where she had a wood frame home, kept livestock, and produced flour, corn, and cider for the market. Ainse owned three slaves in 1779 and one female slave in 1782, having likely sold part of her human property to others in the interim. Since Ainse had a previous business relationship with John Askin from a period when they both lived in Michilimackinac, and since she had extensive kinship ties through her former husband in the area, Detroit was a fitting place for the reestablishment of her female-run trading venture.²⁷ Her clothing in the Anglo style was an indication that Ainse adopted as well as flaunted the accoutrements of cultural intermixture. Ainse, like the French and British traders in town, was caught up in the “skin trade” of dual meaning catapulted by the capitalist enterprise of European exploration, colonization, and slavery. A brief notation in John Askin’s account book for 1781 notes that “Sarah Anis” (Ainse) received “1 smoaked skin from Thebeau for a boy at Mackina.” This exchange of a Native child for a finished animal pelt that transpired between an Indian woman and white man captures in elliptical snapshot form the intricate nature of slavery in the Great Lakes.²⁸ American Indians participated in this practice as both perpetrators and victims, while navigating changes, challenges, and chances wrought by the meeting of diverse peoples, the advance of European settlement, and the unseemly ravages of war. Indeed, one of Ainse’s indigenous neighbors in Detroit was the Shawnee leader and British military ally Blue Jacket, who, according to a white woman taken captive by a different Shawnee warrior in the war, had married “a half French woman of Detroit” and lived there “in great style, having curtained beds and silver spoons” and “Negro slaves” to serve tea.²⁹

Sally Ainse, also privileged with tea and slaves, prospered as a businesswoman in Detroit, living at times with a white man named John Wilson, yet acting as an independent trader. She received boatloads of goods and held accounts with various merchants, including her old associate John Askin and William Macomb. At one point the grand sum of her accounts reached over £2,000.³⁰ The well-being of the bondspeople owned by Ainse is, in contrast, impossible to determine. They are noted by number, and not by name, in the Detroit city census that lists their “elegant” Oneida mistress’s property.

Perhaps Sally Ainse ventured out to visit the Moravian missionaries to diversify her business affairs in Detroit. She had proven herself to be an ambitious and capable entrepreneur, and she was no stranger to the Moravian faith. Ainse had hosted missionaries from that church back in Pennsylvania when she shared a household with her former husband, Andrew Montour. She also had family connections to the Moravians of Upper Canada through her ex-husband and to the Moravians of Ohio as well as Detroit through her brother. The Moravians and their German ways would therefore have been recognizable to her, and the Delaware members of the Moravian congregation even more familiar. In addition to being Oneida, Ainse claimed an identity as Shawnee, an Ohio woodlands nation culturally close to the Delawares.³¹ Sally Ainse’s ability to identify a growing market for her trade goods may have been what previously led her from Michilimackinac to Detroit in the middle of a war. And the Moravians did need all manner of things. They had been forced to rebuild a settlement and seed a farmstead from scratch after their relocation from Ohio. While they had the benefit of Ojibwe lands and wooden “boards” for building that Detroit officials had negotiated for their use, the Moravians required a constant infusion of supplies and cash from town. Indian men of the congregation crafted bark canoes that they sold at the fort to provide “themselves clothes for the winter.” Indian women fashioned baskets and brooms, which they likewise sold to townspeople or traded for apples. In order to sustain families in this new environment, Moravian community members gathered wild cherries and whortleberries, dug wild potatoes, and hunted deer and bears. This nascent Protestant community outside of town represented a promising market for Detroit traders like Ainse, some of whom owned acreage near the mission on either side of the Huron River but, according to Reverend David Zeisberger, had “never seen it,” as this rural area near Lake St. Clair was considered “the bush” by Detroit urbanites, who rarely ventured so far out into “Indian land.”³²

Whether or not his business associate, Sally Ainse, beat him to it, John Askin was one of Detroit’s first merchants to trek into the marshy wilds north of town. He immediately drew the Moravians into his commercial orbit, offering them credit for provisions sourced in Detroit and becoming one of few white visitors to the mission in 1782. Over the next few years, other Detroiters began to stop by to view the Christian settlement, often traveling by sleigh or “sledge” across sheets of heavy ice that connected the Detroit River to the Huron River by way of Lake St. Clair. Visitors came to take in the sights of the mission, including its 117 resident Christian Indians; they also were keen to assess the valuable lands around the establishment, to set terms of trade, and to have marriages and baptisms performed, as, in the words of Reverend Zeisberger, “there [was] no ordained preacher of the Protestant church in Detroit.” The desire for Protestant religious services was one sign that Detroit’s population was gradually shifting, becoming more Anglicized as British officers, soldiers, and traders put down roots in the former French territory. Still, there were numerous French residents within the fort proper and living on farms alongside waterways, some of whom sold corn to the Moravian Delawares in exchange for venison.³³

In the winter of 1784 British Captains Alexander McKee and Matthew Elliott came “with two sleighs” to see the Moravian mission for themselves.³⁴ Both men had accompanied Captain Henry Bird on his raids into Kentucky and come away with valuable African American slaves that they promptly moved across the river after the conflict. McKee, now an official of the British Indian Department, was among the individuals sought out by the slave-hungry Captain Alexander Harrow, who begged McKee for “a wench for kitchen and country work [or] a Black boy or man to dispose of.”³⁵ Elliott, a trader and Indian agent for the British, styled himself like a southern planter with his stolen Kentucky bondspeople. He established a sizeable farm on the Canadian side of the Detroit River where, according to the Moravians, “an overseer and several blacks lived.” Elliott’s “Indian wife” enjoyed the niceties of an upper-class life and lived in a style even higher than that of Oneida trader Sally Ainse. Slaves attended to this Shawnee woman’s needs, and when she was out visiting, the Moravians observed, Matthew Elliott “sent his Negro” to pick her up “with a sled.”³⁶ Trader William Macomb became friendly with the Moravians too, forwarding parcels of “letters and papers from Bethlehem, together with Scripture-verses and texts” for the missionaries. The Moravians surmised that packages from their home church town in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which brought them such “joy,” had arrived on Macomb’s ship.³⁷

A comfortable farmer named William Tucker was the most frequent British visitor to the Moravian mission. Like Askin, Elliott, and Macomb, he was a slaveholder deeply entangled with Indians. Originally from a Virginia family, Tucker had been taken captive by a group of Ojibwes along with his brother when they were just boys. After killing the boys’ father, the Ojibwe captors adopted the eleven-year-old William and his brother Joseph, eventually bringing the children to the Huron River where the Ojibwes had a settlement. While a young man, William Tucker served as an interpreter at Fort Detroit and worked as a trader for George Meldrum, a Scottish merchant from Schenectady, before returning south to Virginia to marry in 1773. He moved back to Detroit with his wife, Catherine Hezel (or Hazel), and, according to county history, with “a family of slaves, consisting of father and mother and several children.” William Tucker’s Ojibwe friends then bestowed on him a large tract of land along the Huron River, making him one of the first white settlers in the area. As retold in local lore, the acreage William Tucker acquired amounted to “all the land he could walk around in one day.” Tucker built a one-story log house tucked among old-growth trees near the “mouth of the river.” He planted apple, pear, and cherry orchards, kept boats for transporting his crops for trade in town, and “settled on his farm with his bride and slaves.” His route to prosperity followed the usual pattern for European settlers in the Great Lakes region: trade, government work, Indian land, slaves—except that his enslaved labor force was fully black rather than Native.³⁸

William Tucker made his living as a farmer on Indian land “eight miles down the river” from the Moravians, who were among his closest neighbors. Tucker befriended members of the Christian sect and acted as their advocate in tense conversations with nearby Ojibwes, who began to feel that the missionaries were overstaying their welcome on the borrowed parcel of fertile land. While Tucker served as a buffer between the missionaries and local Indians, he also found that he needed the help of Moravian Delawares. In 1783, Tucker came to the mission with his wife, Catherine, asking “for an Indian sister to be at the lying-in of their negro woman.” This unusual request revealed not only the expertise of Delaware women as midwives but also the everyday proximity of diverse peoples on the waterways: Europeans of different backgrounds, Native people of various ethnicities, and enslaved African Americans from the South. As the Reverend Zeisberger would record in the mission diary, whites as well as blacks began to attend Moravian services in the 1780s.³⁹ One of these attendees of African descent may well have been the woman on the verge of giving birth on Tucker’s farm in 1783.

Events that unfolded at the Tucker family homestead are hazy, yet pivotal to the larger story of slavery in Detroit. The enslaved woman who gave birth in 1783 with the aid of a Delaware woman was most likely Hannah Denison, mother of the first African American family to file a freedom suit in Michigan. The conflicting nature of limited evidence makes the Denison family’s origins difficult to reconstruct. According to probate records, William Tucker owned one black family upon his death in 1805: Hannah Denison, her husband Peter Denison, and their four children: Elizabeth (Lisette), James, Scipio (Sip), and Peter Jr. Local oral history conducted by the historian Isabella Swan in the 1960s suggests that the first child in the family, a girl called Judy, was not listed in this official record. Slaveholder Catherine Tucker would later report that William Tucker had purchased Hannah in 1780 from “Joseph Mantour” at Detroit and bought Peter for “three hundred pounds” in 1784 from “Mr. Paulding,” also in Detroit.⁴⁰ After Peter’s arrival, Hannah and Peter coupled. If there was indeed a first baby within the Denison family whose name was left off the record, she may have been the child born with the aid of a Delaware midwife in 1783. The identity of this child’s father is not noted in any source. The spare existing record only reveals a description of Hannah’s owner, William Tucker, rushing to the Moravians’ farm for assistance with the delivery. The secret of the infant’s father may have been intimately known to him and, on an isolated farm, to his wife.

Catherine Tucker’s record of the purchase of Hannah and Peter Denison tied the members of this couple to two different routes into slavery. Hannah had been sold by the Montours, in-laws of the Oneida trader Sally Ainse, and she may even have briefly belonged to Ainse.⁴¹ Hannah was therefore a woman who had lived among Native and French people and whose own family history may have stretched back multiple generations in the Great Lakes, tracing to Montreal, Quebec or some other northern urban locale.⁴² Peter Denison, in contrast, came from a black family not many generations removed from the Upper South. County histories of the Tuckers trace the origins of the family they owned back to a purchase in Virginia before the Revolutionary War. This information is revealing, but not in the way that it at first seems. Based on a wildly expansive 1609 charter from King James I, the colony of Virginia claimed as part of its territory lands stretching past Lake Michigan. Since Virginia “held” this land until the Treaty of Paris concluded the Revolutionary War, enslaved people born in the Michigan region could, technically, be defined as having been born in Virginia. Peter Denison may have been “Virginia-born” right in Detroit with parents who had been seized from the South. William Macomb of Detroit had among his slaveholdings a man named Scipio, valued at £130, and a woman named Lizette, “Wife of Scipio,” valued at £80. It cannot be coincidental that this man and woman bear the names of two of the Denison children in such a small community. The elder Scipio and Lizette were likely captured in southern raids during the war and acquired by William Macomb. They then had Peter, who was later sold to Tucker by a man named Paulding, a broker or subsequent owner.⁴³ The origin of Peter’s surname is unclear. Perhaps his parents carried the name from the South (though Macomb’s records do not state as much), as “Denison” does trace back to Scots-Irish settlers in southwestern Virginia.⁴⁴ While Hannah had compulsory ties to a French-Native slaveholding circle, Peter came from a British household in which his southern parents were held as slaves. The range in the couple’s backgrounds, together with the wide network of people their lives had touched, broadened their combined experience as well as their social connections, positioning them to face a future of drastic change.

The Denisons were essential to the smooth operation of William and Catherine Tucker’s farm. While Hannah handled all manner of domestic and gardening chores, as well as helping to care for the Tucker children, Peter performed agricultural and manual labor. Peter may also have honed specialized carpentry and boating skills of the kind evidenced by John Askin’s enslaved men, Pompey and Jupiter Wendell. Peter probably rowed Tucker’s boats to deliver wheat and fruit to Detroit, affording mobility that allowed for the maintenance of ties with relatives on the Macomb farm. The Denisons were likely conversant in local Native languages, including bits of Anishinaabemowin spoken by the Ojibwes who originally owned Tucker’s farm as well as Delaware spoken by the Moravian Indians. Hannah probably spoke French. Hannah and Peter’s children would have been linguistically adept by necessity, growing up as the only slaves on a large farm among a diverse population in the Indian country outside Detroit.⁴⁵ As a young black couple with multiple skills and cross-cultural literacy, the Denisons were well known, highly valued, and frequently sought after. During the time that William Tucker owned the pair, Captain Alexander Harrow angled to buy them, writing in his journal that he had asked if Tucker “would sell his negro man and woman and at what price for the whole.”⁴⁶ Years later, Tucker’s neighbor across the Detroit River, Matthew Elliott, would also try to claim the Denisons as his property. The Denisons clearly possessed ample talents, which would prove consequential when the town of Detroit finally succumbed to American territorial rule.

Postwar Land Dispossession

After the Peace of Paris was signed and the war formally closed, the Ojibwes on whose land the Moravians lived intensified their complaints about the arrangement. They had agreed to host the newcomers while hostilities ensued and had continued to access the Huron River lands for hunting during that time, sometimes leading to tense competition for game with the Moravian Delawares. But now that the war was over, Ojibwe leaders pressured the Moravians to pack up their things and move on. Reverend Zeisberger was anxious about the increasing pressure, imagining that certain Detroit merchants who wished to become “masters of our settlement” were “the real instigators of the Chippewas” and using the Indians “as tools.” While Zeisberger’s hunch about merchant land lust was accurate, he too easily dismissed the Ojibwes’ own motives. In January of 1786, Ojibwe leaders warned the missionaries that this was Ojibwe land, and the settlers must depart. When the governor at Detroit advised the missionaries that prudence suggested they heed this warning, the Moravians relocated, with reluctance, to Chatham, Ontario.⁴⁷

The contest north of Detroit between the Moravians and local Ojibwes was a microcosm of larger tensions still at play in the decades after the Revolution. Native nations that had been yanked into a devastating colonial war refused to accept the outcome. Many lake country bands had sided with the British, who had been less preferable than the French but better than the Americans when it came to the protection of Indian lands. At the close of the war, the British surrendered to the Americans, whose rising power the western tribes witnessed with a stubborn rage. Native Americans recognized that with the defeat of the British, “a new era had begun.” And this transformation worked to the detriment of indigenous land claims and political independence. Groups of Indian warriors in the Great Lakes as well as in the South refused to recognize American authority in their own homelands. They led attacks on settler settlements, continuing the revolutionary fight—this time for their own nations’ liberty.

Native people’s discontent with the shifting balance of power in North America cut into commercial transactions in Detroit. Due to overhunting and some Native men’s focus on attacking American settlements rather than hunting, the number of available pelts plummeted. Deteriorating living conditions worsened economic trials resulting from the scarcity of furs. The winter of 1784 proved relentless, described by “Old settlers” as the hardest they had ever seen. Poor crop yields and famine in 1784, 1787, 1788, and 1789, as well as a scourge of smallpox in 1785 and “pestilence and sickness” in 1789, wreaked more havoc, taking the lives of numerous Detroit River residents.⁴⁸

President George Washington and U.S. leaders in the East grew alarmed at the recalcitrance of Native people in the West, who far outnumbered white settlers in the interior and were organized as well as armed. The Moravian missionaries continued to observe developments from their new settlement on the other side of the river, recording the stealthy advance of American soldiers into the country. In 1791 Zeisberger wrote, “From Capt. Elliott, who came from Detroit, we learned that they had news that a strong army from the States was on the march out against the Indians.” In 1793 he recorded “news that those at Detroit fear the Americans under Gen. Wayne might attack.”⁴⁹ Led by General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, American soldiers were tasked with crushing Native military resistance, which had coalesced into a confederated, pan-Indian force centered in the Ohio Valley. In August of 1794, Wayne and his men defeated Miami, Potawatomi, Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Iroquois fighters, whose ranks had been depleted by long-distance travel and hunger.⁵⁰ One year later, in August of 1795, representatives of seventeen western Indian bands and nations signed the Treaty of Greenville with the United States. The treaty called for Native relinquishment of massive swaths of land in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan, including “the post of Detroit, and all the land to the north, the west and the south of it.” This left little else in the way of Indian land in Detroit, and those portions remaining would be taken by 1807. As indigenous people had suspected throughout the long years of war, the Americans fully intended to dispossess them, as the “revolutionaries who fought for freedom from the British Empire in the East also fought to create an empire of their own in the West.”⁵¹

Although the indigenous western resistance seemed to have been quelled after the Battle of Fallen Timbers, one final barrier stood in the way of American expansion into the inland West: the British occupation of Great Lakes forts. A new treaty negotiated by John Jay in London won the Crown’s forfeiture of these forts and signaled to Native people the final withdrawal of their British ally. The U.S. Senate ratified the Jay Treaty in the summer of 1795, just before the ink dried on the Treaty of Greenville. One year later, Jay’s treaty would take effect. The border established between the United States and Great Britain that separated territory with “lines drawn upon the water” would now be recognized by each country.⁵² The Detroit River was no longer a thoroughfare that joined settlers on both banks under the shared identity of Detroiters. On one side of the waterway, American stars and stripes would fly; on the other bank, the Union Jack would sway in the rippling wind.

In 1796, thirteen years after the official close of the Revolutionary War, America would finally seize control of the Northwest Territory won back in 1783. “The States,” Reverend Zeisberger penned, “have occupied Detroit.” After his decisive victory over the western Indian nations with a force of just over a thousand men, General Anthony Wayne swaggered into town to oversee the departure of the British military. Zeisberger noted the transfer-spectacular in his mission diary: “When Gen. Wayne marched in with the garrison by water, and, when Wayne got to the city, the English commandant discharged his cannon from the ship, and was saluted in return, in like manner, from guns great and small, whereupon the new owners moved in.”⁵³ Despite the fanfare, British officers did not remove a great distance away. They simply resituated across the Detroit River at Fort Malden in Amherstburg, Ontario, on land cleared after the war in exchange for an enslaved woman named Esther. Their close proximity and ongoing ties with indigenous groups meant that tensions between the British and the Americans, while lessened, would not disappear until a second major war purported to settle them.

Meanwhile, the “new owners,” or American officers, to whom Zeisberger referred now commanded Detroit. Zeisberger would have described the “old owners” as British officers, but there is a second, more accurate meaning of that phrase. The “old owners” were also Detroit’s French and British merchant elite who now faced a concrete changing of the political guard but held a core notion in common with the provisions of the Jay Treaty. Their status as “owners” of people in a slave society would continue to be safeguarded, and now even more emphatically, into the American era. The Jay Treaty, which defined the rights of Detroit’s prior residents of European descent, guaranteed: “All Settlers and Traders, within the Precincts of Jurisdiction of the said Posts, shall continue to enjoy, unmolested, all their property of every kind, and shall be protected therein.”⁵⁴ Now it was not only French slaveholders whose rights to their slaves would be formally honored; British slaveholders could claim the same protections. And any of these Europeans could shift their loyalties to the United States and gain recognition as American territorial “citizens” under the Jay Treaty. They had only to maintain residency for a year or to swear an oath of allegiance if they preferred.⁵⁵ The Jay Treaty opened the gate to American belonging for longtime Detroiters and broadly sanctioned their continued possession of Native and African-descended slaves. In a painful irony for enslaved people owned by French Canadian old settlers, France had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794.⁵⁶ Together, the fundamental legal documents of the territory—the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and Jay Treaty of 1794—functioned in a way that allowed Detroit to become a hub for slaveholders and a prison for captive people decades into the nineteenth century. As Christopher Phillips, a historian of the borderland Midwest and self-identified descendant of slaveholders there, has put it, “slavery and white supremacy were interwoven into the fabric of the entire western region.”⁵⁷

William Macomb Account Book (c. 1796). The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. A list of enslaved people with their individual monetary values is included in this bound record of Macomb family accounts.

Preserved property records of Detroit merchants demonstrate the robust continuation of slavery. In 1787, when John Askin inventoried his human chattel in a ledger book along with his other accounts, he enumerated eight persons: three men, two boys, two women, and two children of unspecified gender. Half of these individuals were identified as “Negro”; both of the women and a “Pawnis” blacksmith were most certainly Native. In 1796, when the executors of William Macomb’s estate estimated his property holdings in the wake of his death, they listed twenty-six slaves: eleven men, seven women, and ten children. Charlotte was the wife of Jerry and mother of two. Bet (or “Black Bet,” as Captain Harrow called her in his bid for purchase) had three children. Betta, listed alone without a family, was nine years old; Phillis, also listed alone, was seven. Most, if not all, of these individuals were African American. The racial breakdown of the souls counted among the assets of two of the most prominent British traders, Askin and Macomb, revealed a shift in Detroit’s enslaved population. Before the war, indigenous slaves had vastly outnumbered those of African descent, who made up a tiny portion of the captive population. During the war, raiders into southern settlements seized African Americans who then became the property of traders, merchants, officers, and farmers. In the postwar years, the number of captive people reached an apex in Detroit. City census records from 1773 listed eighty-five enslaved people; in 1782 that number had jumped to 180. By 1796, 298 enslaved people lived in Detroit. The registry of Ste. Anne’s Church adds precious detail to these raw census numbers. In the decade of the 1780s, ninety-seven enslaved people appeared as principal entrants in the priests’ record book; sixty-eight of these were Native American, and twenty-six were African American. In the 1790s, Ste. Anne’s priests noted eighty-five enslaved members; fifty-six were Native, while twenty-four were black. In short, over the three decades since James Sterling had been the first British slaveholder to appear in the Ste. Anne’s registry with black slaves, the church’s African American population had increased nearly eight-fold.⁵⁸ British settlers’ desire for black slaves and their access to New York markets, together with wartime raiding to the South, gradually shifted the color of Detroit’s unfree class. The enslaved population was now approximately two-thirds Native and one-third African American. As the settlement moved into its “first American century,” slavery persisted as a more evenly divided biracial phenomenon, shaded black as well as red.⁵⁹

Theft, Fight, and Flight

After the Revolutionary War, enslaved people in Detroit carried on much as they had in prior decades—fighting for dignity, liberty, and a decent quality of life, trying to beat the odds in a frontier community that presented openings as well as barriers. In 1792 a “Panis slave” named Francois stood accused of stealing “two bed covers, two shirts, and some other things” from a house, the mode of rebellion taken by black bondspeople Ann Wyley and Josiah Cutten in previous years. Francois, who lived in “a hut in the rear of the house of Baptiste Meloche,” armed himself “with a knife” after the incident. When the homeowner, Michael Houde, pushed into Francois’s “hut” looking for evidence of the crime, he promptly withdrew upon seeing the weapon. Afraid to confront Francois directly, Houde took the matter to court. Hearing the case against Francois was none other than John Askin, who was enjoying a new appointment as “one of His Majesty’s justices of the peace for the District of Hesse” along with new buildings that he had conveniently acquired on the Huron River after the Moravians’ departure.⁶⁰

Besides stealing from wealthy merchants, unfree people attempted escapes from and to Detroit in the 1790s. On a snowy autumn morning in 1794, an enslaved man fled Detroit and made his way to the Moravian mission in Ontario. The Moravians did not aid the runaway, who was captured by “Mr. Parke” (of the prominent Meldrum and Park trading firm in Detroit) and then returned by Park to the town center.⁶¹ In 1798 John Askin lost a slave to escape. His daughter Madelaine Askin attempted to aid in the recovery of the man and wrote to her “dear Papa” in French: “I gave notice to several people that if they see your negro, to arrest him and take him to you, and I told them what reward you would give.” Madelaine reported that she had secured the aid of other settlers, who would help to capture the runaway “with pleasure.” Sampson, a black man owned by the slave-hungry Captain Alexander Harrow, fled in February of 1797. Sampson’s escape plagued Harrow for over a year, and Harrow was not quite sure if he wanted the difficult Sampson back. He determined in March of 1797: “I wish Sampson could be sold for £50 rather than have any more trouble with him.” By the summer of 1798, Sampson was working “in the service of Mr. Wells Attorney-at-Law” in Cincinnati. Harrow drew up a bill of sale for Sampson to Wells for “100 Dollars” and tried to hedge by getting Joel Williams of Cincinnati to purchase Sampson if Wells would not. In March of 1799, Harrow had still received nothing for Sampson, and he had not managed to have Sampson sent back to Detroit. Sampson’s trail in Harrow’s record ends here. Perhaps Harrow eventually collected funds for Sampson; likely, he did not. To engineer his escape, Sampson ran south to Ohio through the swamps rather than toward the legendary North Star. During Sampson’s lifetime and that of other slaves in Detroit prior to the turn of the nineteenth century, Upper Canada was as much slave territory as the United States, which meant fleeing either north or south held equal promise and risk.⁶²

Before Sampson seized his freedom, plaguing his frustrated owner who dared not enter Indian country to track him, a fugitive from Kentucky took the reverse of Sampson’s course. This man fled north into Detroit, where he formed a partnership with a Wyandot hunter and entered the fur trade between Detroit and Ohio. Unnamed in the record, this black trader represented an infinitesimal free black population in eighteenth-century Detroit. Another free man may have been the “coal maker” in town described as “Will the Negro” in John Askin’s ledger that recorded a debt Will owed.⁶³ Perhaps this was William Lee, the man who had cleared acreage to purchase Esther and her son from Captain Henry Bird during the war. If so, and if William acquired Esther to free her, they may have become one of Detroit’s scarce free black families.

But many more enslaved people, both black and Native, remained in the town and its satellite communities, failing to find their longed-for freedom in the aftermath of the war. A significant number of Detroit’s still-captive bondspeople worked on the farms and river islands of William Macomb, which included: a “farm near the fort . . . on the Detroit River” a “farm at the Grand Marrais,” “Hog Island,” a “farm on the south east side of [the] Detroit river,” three houses “in the fort,” “lands in the Ohio,” and “Indian grants” at “Grosse Isle, Stony Island & other small islands,” and lands “on the north of the river.” Before his death in April of 1796, Macomb ensured that his “moveable estate . . . Slaves, Cattle, Household furniture, Books, Plate, Linens, Carriages, and all [his] utensils of Husbandry” would be duly accounted for. He appointed as executors of his estate merchants from New York and Detroit and named his wife, Sarah, followed by their eight children, as heirs. The items listed in Macomb’s itemized account of “moveable goods” would be passed down or auctioned off for the proceeds. In September of 1796, the executors began to liquidate by shedding human chattel. They sold Antoine to F. Billettes, transported Ben and Guy to New York, sold Bet and her “three boys,” Sam, Isaac, and Charles, for £135, and sold the “Negro girl Betta” for “fifty.”⁶⁴

Settling the Country in the Lakes

William Macomb may have been Detroit’s wealthiest resident upon his death in 1796, but he would not be among those to lead the town into its first American century. That task fell to men like James May, a slaveholder; Solomon Sibley, a non-slaveholder; and Elijah Brush, a man with two “indentured” slaves. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1756, the nineteen-year-old James May had journeyed to Detroit in 1778, where he married a French woman, Rose St. Cosme, and began to engage in the chief business of the frontier: trade.⁶⁵ A man of massive stature, fine tastes, and “a strong virile intellect,” May had achieved solid middle-class merchant status by the time that William Macomb died. May further improved that status when he turned up among the crowd at the Macomb family estate auction. On that hot August day, John Askin bought rabbits; Jonathan Nelson bought a fox house, a mare, and a colt; Matthew Dolson and Jacob Flower bought cattle and a horse; and Francis Billettes bought the black man, Antoine, “payable monthly on 5 months.” It was James May, however, who made the largest haul. At a time when coins and bills were scarce and most economic transactions were made through a barter and debt system kept track of by local merchants, May paid 252 in “cash” on the spot and still owed 1,269 for the things he bought from Sarah Macomb. Because of the size of May’s purchase, his sundry items were not detailed in the Macomb family ledger book like Askin’s rabbits or Nelson’s fox house, but the purchase probably included unfree people whose lives were devastated by the death of the trader who had formerly owned them. For men, women, and children in bondage, the passing of a master meant certain change: often sale and separation from loved ones. And James May, like many of Detroit’s leading residents, dealt in slaves as both an owner and purveyor. In the 1790s, May owned a black woman named Jenny, acquired from a man named Grauchin “in payment of a debt,” as well as Jenny’s sister Chloe, and an unnamed “Negro boy.”⁶⁶ May sold John Anderson “a negro woman” in exchange for “200 good raccoon skins + 50 more if he is satisfied with her work.” And since Detroit merchants served as bankers for their customers, keeping logs of complex accounts, debts, and exchanges, among May’s business records are several transactions that he tracked for other Detroit slaveholders, including John Askin, who owed May for “a Negro Man named Pompey sold you,” William Hands, who owed May for “making a pr of shoe packs” (moccasin-like boots) for a “Pawney Girl,” and James Abbott, who owed May for “1 oak plank taken by your negro last fall.”⁶⁷ While some Detroit merchants were struggling in the postwar period when furs decreased in availability and value, May was enterprising enough to continue his upward climb by acquiring more property, leasing what he already owned, and becoming indispensable to the new American government.

Lieutenant Edmund Henn, A View of Detroit. July 25th, 1794. E.H. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. This image, rare in its lively depiction of the high level of activity on the Detroit River and its shores prior to 1800, appears to show people of color in the canoe in the foreground.

Chief among James May’s calculated moves was the strategic use of his schooner the Swan. In 1796, the year the American military assumed control in Detroit, May leased his ship to the U.S. government to transport soldiers to the fort, making the Swan “the first vessel in the lake region to fly the stars and stripes.” The next year, May followed the proven European settler pattern of getting hold of cheap Indian land. With two partners, he purchased “several thousands of acres” in Macomb County from six Ojibwe “chiefs” for $50, clothing, and corn.⁶⁸ While May was doing well under the occupying government, he lived in an unpredictable place still characterized as western and wild by most Americans in this era, a place where the population was small and culturally heterogeneous, the nearest city (Cincinnati, Ohio) was three hundred miles away, and the raw forces of weather and water could disrupt lives as readily as fluctuating commercial markets.

In the fall of 1801, James May learned what it meant to lose in a contest with the great inland seas. May’s schooner Harlequin had set out in late July with its captain, Joseph May, at the helm. Two months later, the ship had not reached any port and James May feared “that her and the Crew” had wrecked. Among the crew lost at sea were three sailors, including May’s brother Joseph, and three passengers. “The stroke,” May wrote to his colleague John Askin, “is a very severe one for me, the effects of which I shall feel for a long time; perhaps the rest of my days.”⁶⁹ Askin could commiserate with May. Askin had lost two ships of his own to storms and rough waters back in 1798 and had expressed the agony that ensued when “madame bad luck took a passage” on one’s vessels.⁷⁰ For May and Askin, the financial losses went beyond damaged ships and included human property never to be recovered. One of May’s sailors was an enslaved man, whose death, May feared, would have a disastrous domino effect. “The loss of the Negro man,” May confided to Askin, “will probably be the cause of my losing the negro woman, who ever since the misfortune happened, has been delirious and is now very ill, in bed.” May reached out to his friend for help in the form of a slave order, writing: “Being now deprived of two of the best servants, in this country, my sittuation [sic] is very distressing, unless you will condescend to let your Boy George, remain with me until I can have time to look about for a servant, his Mother is very anxious to have him stay with her, & says it will be the only comfort she has in this world now she has lost her Husband, to have her son with her.”⁷¹

The tragedy of the shipwrecked Harlequin unveils an extraordinary, if blurry, picture of an enslaved family’s circumstances in early American Detroit. James May owned the black father and mother of this family, while John Askin owned the couple’s son, George. Although they lived in the same town, this family was physically separated. George’s parents did not have the luxury of raising and caring for him. George’s mother, a domestic servant in Askin’s home, was crushed by the loss of a loved one at sea. This was a feeling she would have shared with other women attached to unfree men who plied the dangerous lakes not by choice and sometimes lost limb or life in the process. A man owned by William Macomb had injured a foot jumping between two vessels, a sloop and a canoe. John Askin’s bondsman, Toon, had died at sea while working Askin’s trading fleet. Other enslaved men had died in shipwrecks, clung to trees rooted in bare rock along the storm-swept lakeshores, and frozen to death while delivering letters in the harsh northern winter weather.⁷²

The wife of James May’s drowned sailor, named either Jenny or Chloe (May does not take the time to specify which of his enslaved women he means), was valuable enough to her owner in a town where slave labor was a sought-after commodity that she had a built-in bargaining chip. James May was willing to buy the mother’s son to assuage her pain, cut short her mourning, and get her promptly back to work. It is notable that this black family’s crisis dominates May’s letter to Askin rather than May’s own familial loss, the death of his brother Joseph. May revealed to Askin that he could not promise “Money down” on the black boy, but would “endeavor to give you the worth of him some way or other.” But despite his feelings of camaraderie with May, business was business. Askin did not make the sale, preferring instead to keep little George among his own property holdings.⁷³

John Askin had been living well since the war but was nevertheless anxious about his financial status. He watched the roller-coastering price of animal furs as beaver became scarce, values fell, prices rose slightly (for deer skins but not the more plentiful raccoon skins), and fell again.⁷⁴ He chafed at the American government’s imposition of duties on trade goods. By 1800, Askin was carrying uncomfortable debts and bemoaning the commercial opportunities in Detroit, woefully penning in his letters: “this Country is Over-done” and “Ruin, Detroit is not far from you.”⁷⁵ Discouraged, he shifted into semi-retirement and contemplated a move that would mean leaving behind his Detroit landholdings.

James May was not so pessimistic, even after the wreck of his ship Harlequin. He doubled down in Detroit, identifying with the fledgling American nationality that John Askin was loath to embrace. May became a justice of the common pleas court of the Northwest Territory and in 1801 accepted an appointment as Wayne County’s militia captain. A forward thinker, he obtained a ferry license to transport passengers across the Detroit River—the newly established border between the United States and Canada. He also kept the accounts of Detroit’s only printer and continued to trade in furs and goods.⁷⁶ May did well in those turbulent years when soldiers, territorial appointees, and incoming settlers from New England transformed Detroit into an American-run place, at least, by all outward appearances. His granddaughter recalled that the family sipped from “solid silver wine cups.” May himself remembered Detroit’s early American years as a grand string of parties. “The citizens all lived like one family,” he fondly reminisced. “They had assemblies for dancing and social intercourse, and the ladies never went without their silks. As a rule assemblies were once a week, and sometimes once a fortnight. Dining parties were frequent, and they drank their wine freely.”⁷⁷ It would have been black women like Jenny or Chloe who dressed white ladies in rustling silks, tended to guests at these balls, and laundered linens after scrubbing dance hall floors. And while enslaved women lived in close quarters with their owners in what was a densely packed urban environment, they may have differed with May’s portrayal of Detroit residents as one big, festive family.

James May became a pillar of Detroit civic society after the American assumption. He championed the rule of law and building of roads and became impassioned about bringing education to the territory. May accepted U.S. authority with little sign of reluctance, but his long tenure in Detroit and close affiliation with British loyalists made him a Tory in the eyes of eager American newcomers moving in from the East, such as Solomon Sibley and Elijah Brush. Sibley, a native of Massachusetts who had been trained at Rhode Island College (now Brown University) viewed May as a pompous Brit and referred to him sarcastically as “Sir James.” Sibley had first moved from New England to Marietta, Ohio, where he pursued the practice of law. He then relocated to Detroit in search of opportunity, and, by all indications, a wife. The move to Detroit would have made for dramatic change. Although Sibley had spent time within the Northwest Territory, he had resided in one of the areas most developed by Americans, where flagship Ohio River towns like Marietta and Cincinnati attracted settlers from New England as well as the mid-Atlantic and southern states. As a place where thousands of acres had been wrested from Native people in the Battle of Fallen Timbers and Treaty of Greenville, Ohio would soon become the first state to emerge from the Northwest Ordinance. The southern parts of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois were nothing like most of Michigan, where indigenous societies still held oceans of land and the infamous Black Swamp that stretched from Michigan to Ohio made land travel treacherous. To a polished man like Sibley, the isolated fort town of Detroit was like another country. Indians, whose motives Sibley would have been unsure of, lived in large numbers in villages across the watershed; French, a tongue unknown to Sibley, was the common language of local residents. But on the bright side for Solomon Sibley, when he arrived in 1798, professional competition in the field of lawyering was slight in Detroit. His arrival made for a sum total of two lawyers working in town. He had hardly been practicing a month when the attorney general of the Northwest Territory, Arthur St. Clair II (son of the territory’s governor), took advantage of fresh talent and named him deputy attorney general for Wayne County.⁷⁸ Promoted nearly upon arrival to a plum government post, Solomon Sibley, recognizing his good fortune, tried to settle in. He found Detroit rustic at first, complaining that the town was “without taste or elegance,” but he also called the bucolic scene of the fortified village at the river’s edge “exceedingly pleasing as you approach it.” Soon Sibley was writing: “I should feel myself quite contented to spend the residue of my days in this Country—But for one thing, we have no ladies here that I care a fig for—have been in company with some of the young French . . . but take no pleasure in listening to their French nonsense—They speak no English & I speak no French.”⁷⁹

Major John Jacob Ulrich Rivardi, Artillerists and Engineers, March 29, 1799. Plan of Detroit, 1796–1797. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.

As one of few American civilians in town—they numbered less than twenty at the turn of the nineteenth century—Sibley found himself in a foreign cultural environment. Detroit was not yet culturally American, and the Northwest region as a whole was far from being racially white. The Second Continental Congress had set in place legislation for “a territory that had practically no white population and which, in a sense, did not belong to the United States at all.”⁸⁰ Most of the 327 inhabitants within Detroit’s walls as well as those along the riverine suburbs were still predominantly French when Sibley arrived; even the British settlers who had chosen to stay and, through residency, become de facto Americans outnumbered American patriots.⁸¹ Along the banks beyond the fort’s wooden pickets, hundreds of French farmers extended Detroit’s social circles, as did indigenous families in settlements stretching beyond Lake St. Clair to the north and Lake Erie to the south.

An alliance of kinship existed between the early French and British settlers since many families were intermarried. Of the leading traders in Detroit during the British era, few wedded women who were not local. John Askin, who coupled with a French Detroiter, wrote many of his letters in the French language. But Solomon Sibley, a high-collared Massachusetts man with broad shoulders and a long patrician nose, was among an American professional class that did not care to mix intimately with the French habitants. French ladies, in turn, had their own reservations about “Yankee” men. Miss Navarre, a member of a French first family in town, had the misfortune of sitting in tobacco juice spat in her pew at Ste. Anne’s Church by young Americans Frederick Bates and George Wallace. She later opined that these men “had more ill-manners & less decency than even the Yankees generally had.”⁸² The cultural mosaic of Detroit confounded some Americans and delighted others. Frederick Bates, a quartermaster in the U.S. military, became smitten with the daughters of Commodore Grant, the British naval commander and slaveholder who had married a French wife. Bates, a handsome officer with wavy dark hair, thought Grant’s bicultural daughters were “the finest girls in this country.” He recognized his disadvantage, however, complaining that “the French girls” thought of Americans as “a rough, unpolished, brutal set of people.”⁸³

Solomon Sibley had difficulty finding a spouse in the remote French and Indian town with a British influence now ruled by the Americans. If French women thought themselves too sophisticated for the Americans, Sibley thought himself too ambitious for the French. Shaped by a Protestant work ethic honed by a New England upbringing, Sibley characterized the French as “exceedingly ignorant and lazy.”⁸⁴ Certainly he would not have agreed with James May that luxurious parties once a fortnight were fitting or even proper for a tiny town built of wood on muddy, narrow roads. Detroit left much to be desired when compared to the Americanized cultivation of New England, or even Ohio, in Sibley’s eyes.

Although he had been thus far unlucky in love, Solomon Sibley may have taken heart in his immediate rise in politics. The Northwest Territorial Legislature required a representative from Wayne County, where Detroit (and most of present-day Michigan) was seated. Although Judge James May seemed an obvious choice for the spot and ran with the backing of British loyalists, the Americans and, surprisingly, the French as well supported Solomon Sibley. Sibley won the seat in Detroit’s first American election, perhaps, May charged, because Sibley’s supporters provided free alcohol to voters and turned away others for being unfit for the ballot box. Victor nonetheless, the thirty-year-old Sibley began journeying back and forth to Cincinnati, Ohio, the seat of the Northwest Territory, and Chillicothe, Ohio, a second meeting place of the legislature. He once lost his way while traveling to attend a meeting, passing through forests and swamplands on buried paths.⁸⁵

As Sibley’s travels southward show, Detroit reoriented politically toward Ohio (even while continuing to favor suppliers in New York). The majestic Queen City on the Ohio River that bordered the slave state of Kentucky, Cincinnati was the source of the mail in Detroit (which was extremely slow to arrive) and also the source of the news (even more sluggish). Because there was only one newspaper circulating in Detroit and the whole of the territory, the Freeman’s Journal published in Cincinnati, Detroiters posted public notices in French and English and dispatched a drummer to the streets when announcements were urgent. None of this sat well with Solomon Sibley. He saw the necessity for drastic change in Detroit, starting with the layout and position of the settlement. He felt that the picketed town was “exceedingly crowded with buildings leaving no room for further improvement.” He was aware that his constituents fretted over the proximity of Native communities on the fragments of land that they still held. They urged Sibley to ask the “U. States” to “settle the lines between them & the Indians.” These free residents also wished to see more white Americans moving to the area, being “desirous the United States would give full encouragement to the settlement of the Country on the lakes.” A fair portion of Indian lands ceded in the Treaty of Greenville had not yet been occupied by whites, and Detroiters of that stripe were anxious to see the acreage settled, thereby “enableing” their region “to defend itself against their Indian neighbors, should a war take place.” Not twenty years had passed since the close of the Revolution, and Detroiters were anxious about the start of another major conflict that would set indigenous people lately dispossessed of the bulk of their land base against the village.⁸⁶

Sibley took this desire for local development seriously. His first order of business as Wayne County’s representative was to see Detroit recognized as a full-fledged town. On January 18, 1802, the territorial legislature approved Sibley’s bill for Detroit’s incorporation.⁸⁷ Upon returning home from Ohio after this victory, Sibley was greeted by candles lit in every window and a “general jubilee” in Detroit.⁸⁸ Loyalist John Askin watched these events unfold with vigilance, wariness, and a bit of pride, writing to an associate: “This place is incorporated. Mrs. Macombs farm and mine are in the Town. The legislature honored me so far as to make me one of five trustees . . . to whom they gave great authority.”⁸⁹ The French fur trading post and military fort established by Cadillac in 1701 was, one hundred years after its birth, an American town of the new Northwest.

By 1803, Solomon Sibley was scribbling sunny missives too, as he had found a fitting spouse and brought her back to his adopted hometown. “I am now settled at Detroit having removed the whole of my family, To wit, Mrs Sibley, to this place,” he wrote in August of that year. “The journey was fatiguing due to the heat of the weather & the lowness of the waters.” Despite the tiring travel, Sarah Sproat Sibley, formerly of Chillicothe, Ohio, was “pleased with the Country & its habitants,” according to her husband.⁹⁰ But while Solomon Sibley no longer felt lonely in Detroit, he was vexed by crucial changes taking place in Washington. In March of 1803, Ohio became the first state to emerge from the Northwest Territory. As a result, Congress placed Wayne County within Indiana Territory, the first territory to be carved from the larger Northwest in 1800. Detroit was now even farther away from the seat of regional government. The territorial circuit court judges who traveled to various locations hearing cases rarely made it to the Great Lakes interior. Sibley himself now had to travel an even greater distance—southwest to Vincennes, Indiana, in order to attend legislative sessions.

At these regional gatherings of territorial representatives, Sibley witnessed the tension that swirled around the subject of slavery. While existing records on Detroit do not reveal internal debates over slavery among town leaders who had mainly emigrated from the Northeast, other white settlers in the Northwest Territory, especially in Indiana and Illinois, vociferously resented the legal prohibition against slaveholding. Some of these individuals already owned slaves, and many of them hoped to acquire some to work in their salt and lead mines, convoys, and corn fields. Local officials on the ground in these parts of the Territory that had closer ties to southern states therefore interpreted Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance as going into effect at some indeterminate future time. Settlers there submitted petitions to the territorial legislature and U.S. Congress pushing for a repeal or modification of the antislavery clause at the federal level. At a special convention of representatives in Vincennes in 1802, pro-slavery officials asked for the right to bring slaves into the Northwest Territory for the next decade, arguing that they should be “permitted to enjoy their property.” In 1805, Illinois residents requested their own separate territorial government and the allowance of slavery. Although acquisitive settlers did not achieve these formal means of legalizing slavery, they concocted and regularized long-term arrangements of indenture that amounted to “de facto” slave ownership in sections of the Northwest Territory.⁹¹ Territorial leaders passed laws to make a virtual system of slavery possible by leaning on the fine line between involuntary and voluntary servitude.⁹² Supported by the wink and nudge of local officials, residents found ingenious ways to circumvent the general slavery prohibition of Article 6, principally by filing paperwork in the courts to transform slaves into indentured servants who were said to have freely consented to their status. It was possible, these Illinois and Indiana settlers realized, to find hundreds of “voluntary” servants among the enslaved population who had very little power of self-protection. Solomon Sibley may well have attended the meeting in Vincennes where the slavery issue was most hotly debated, but his own views on slavery are not disclosed in his papers. Sibley’s New England background and later assistance to the eldest child of the Denison family suggests that he may have looked askance at underhanded attempts to extend slavery northwestward. Even if this was the case, the son he raised in Detroit, Henry Hastings Sibley, would later become a slaveholder (and the first governor of the state of Minnesota).⁹³

Regardless of his personal views, in Sibley’s adopted home of Detroit, slavery was a system with deep roots, protected by French and British custom as well as by American law and international treaty. According to U.S. dictates, then, the eighty-four French and British families who owned slaves in Detroit before the close of the Revolutionary War had every right to continue possessing them after the passage of the Northwest Ordinance.⁹⁴ Their children could also inherit this human property. The one population legally barred from owning slaves in Detroit was the very small number of newly transplanted Americans. They could not bring slaves into the territory or buy slaves once they were in Detroit without violating the Ordinance. But they could marry into slaveholding French or British families, contract slaves through indenture, and hire the slaves of other residents at will. Although they were never so extreme in the pursuit of slavery as their Northwest territorial neighbors to the south, free Detroiters with an interest in maintaining or accruing wealth also found ways to evade the constraints of Article 6. At the same time, enslaved people in Detroit were pondering what this changed legal context meant for their prospects of freedom. As rules came down from the federal and territorial levels, and in the absence of any local laws structuring slavery in Detroit, unfree blacks and Indians in the town and surrounding suburbs prepared to capitalize on the fresh set of terms.

Between the unpredictable years of the Revolution and the heady first sessions of the Northwest Territorial Legislature, borders had been established and territories occupied in the Great Lakes. New flags had been planted. Imperial rivalries had cooled. But in the wake of a movement loudly proclaiming that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness,” couples like Charlotte and Jerry, children like Betta, and families like the Denisons were still enslaved in Detroit.⁹⁵ Today, reminders of the prominent people who stole the lives, livelihood, and labors of others dot the greening landscape of southeastern Michigan. The home of William Tucker, owner of the Denison family, still exists on the Clinton River, its original plainspoken farmhouse architecture occluded by a modern addition. Macomb County, where the Tucker home stands, carries the family name of Detroit’s largest slaveholder. Just off of Belle Isle, the Detroit River island illegally procured by the Macombs and later purchased by the Campeaus, a street named after Joseph Campau bisects the city. And Detroit itself is situated within Wayne County, named for the famously “mad” General Anthony Wayne, who proudly dispossessed southern Great Lakes indigenous peoples, laying the groundwork for American ascendance in the Old Northwest and the world.⁹⁶