It has risen from the ashes. We hope for better things.
—Seal of the City of Detroit, 1827
Detroit is a city of ash, the charred remains of a burning. For centuries the fire has raged, consuming lives, igniting passions, churning up the land and animals, swallowing humans whole. The burn that Detroiters feel—that the nation uncomfortably intuits as it looks upon the beleaguered city as a symbol of progress and of defeat—traces back through distant time, to the global desire to make lands into resources, the drive to turn people into things, the quest for imperial dominance, and the tolerance for ill-gotten gain. We attach a series of words—coded and clean—to the residue left behind by that fire: racial tension, white flight, industrial decline, financial collapse, political corruption, economic development, even gentrification and renaissance. But the challenges faced by the residents of this city, and increasingly by residents of all of our industrial urban places, are not neat or new. Deep histories flow beneath present inequalities, silent as underground freshwater streams. The racial and class divisions that set groups against one another are old, aquatic creatures. We sometimes sense this. We sometimes feel the nearness of history—the imprint of people acting and events unfolding in the past. Beneath the popular culture chatter that calls Detroit a “ruin,” grotesquely suggesting some natural process of decay at work, we can dip our fingers into the water and touch the outlines of an alternate, historical dimension. In this dimension, the firestorm that engulfed Detroit was not the result of inevitable decline brought on by invisible market shifts akin to the force of gravity. In this dimension, Detroit is not the scene of natural disaster, but rather the scene of a crime—a crime committed by individuals, merchant-cabals, government officials, and empires foaming at the mouth for more. This book reconstructs that crime, tracing it to the intertwined theft of bodies (both human and animal) and territories (both lands and waters) that we call slavery and settlement. The perpetrators are not always evil, the victims not always noble, and, at times, they join forces for reasons admirable or lamentable. This is the human relational muck of how a great city—how a great nation—came to be, pushed from the guts of an all-consuming capitalism.
Detroit was born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people and the taking of land occupied by Native people. Captivity and capture built and maintained the town, forged Detroit’s chin-up character as a place of risk and wild opportunity. Detroit was formed not only by the labor of enslaved people on indigenous lands, but also, and as importantly, by what those enslaved people came to signify for the identity of the city. It was ultimately through the dauntless acts of fugitive slaves, and the changing ideas about slavery held by free residents of the working and political classes, that Detroiters began to perceive themselves as distinctly American. Black and red people traversing the river between the United States and Canada compelled Detroiters to confront their long-standing, multinational practices of slaveholding. The presence of renegade bondspeople from British Canada tested Michigan’s limits on the legalization of slavery and led Detroit dockworkers, hat-makers, and sailors of European descent to threaten their own lawmakers if they returned runaway slaves. By the end of the War of 1812, the second war for U.S. independence, Detroit was an American metropolis that slavery had made.1
This is a chronicle of Detroit, an alternative origin story that privileges people in bondage, many of whom launched gripping pursuits of dignity, autonomy, and liberty. To tell the history of the dawn of Detroit with a focus on the experience of enslaved people reveals yet another chapter in the larger narrative of a national truth: America was a place ridden by slavery, where chains stretched as wide as the midnight sky, trapping diverse peoples in an ironclad hold that took generations and bloodshed to break. Even in Detroit, in the North, and in Canada—places that we like to imagine as free—slavery was sanctioned by law and carried out according to custom. And where there was slavery, there were efforts to wrest away indigenous territory, the lands from which elites could draw wealth by means of exploited slave labor. Slavery and colonialism were bundled together in Detroit as in the rest of North America, creating a complex ecosystem of exploitation and resistance. The Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen has succinctly observed about the Great Lakes region: “The two primary sources of wealth for Europeans who came to North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the profits made from this vast inland trade, and land.” He need only have added “slaves” in order to complete this catalogue. Productive plots, beaver pelts, black and red bodies—all were viewed as natural resources ripe for commodification.2
Remapping Detroit
Please rip your mental map in half and turn it upside down—the one that sees Detroit in Michigan, Michigan in the Midwest, the Midwest as fly-over country in the United States of America. That is a modern map, developed long after Detroit was settled by Euro-Americans and the grinding process of westward expansion gave some Americans a new West from which to turn back and view a “Middle West” and an “Old Northwest.” In the 1600s, Bkejwanong (an Anishinaabe place name) was a hunting ground and transitional village site for the many indigenous groups who peopled the lake country, expertly moving across this wetland terrain to suit their subsistence needs from season to season. At the end of that century, French explorers associated this spot with another name, Détroit, or “strait,” a narrow channel joining two bodies of water. It was the French who built the first permanent European post here—to foster the lucrative trade in fur-bearing animal skins. Detroit was therefore seen for over a century by Europeans and Americans alike as a Francophone place, as a subordinate and marginal “dependency” of French Canada to the north, and then of British Canada following a French military defeat. It would take two wars between Great Britain and the fledgling United States before the American claim on Detroit, and on the loyalty of Detroiters, was actualized. When Detroit became American in 1783 (or 1796, or 1815—the date was always in motion and a French elite maintained economic and social influence well into the 1830s), it was located in the “West,” a frontier post not yet matched by Chicago (in the Anishinaabe language, Chigagou, “the wild-garlic place”), let alone cities on the horizon of that mangled mental map. A linchpin port town in the Great Lakes by the mid-1700s, Detroit is the second oldest French settlement in what is now the United States, with roots dating back before New Orleans and St. Louis.3
The strait that inspired Detroit’s first European name stretches thirty-two miles in length and shelters twenty-one islands. This waterway, now the Detroit River, was the hinge that joined the Lower and Upper Great Lakes, a “junction of the continent’s major watersheds” that served as a hub of ancient indigenous travel and trade.4 Centuries later, these massive lakes so central to the continent would form the heart of America’s Old Northwest Territory. Water was the earth’s blood pumping to and from that heart, making all life and the growth of human societies possible. Le détroit joined Lake Erie to the south with Lake Huron to the north by way of the relatively delicate Lake St. Clair. Narrowing above Lake Erie and again below Lake Huron, the strait could duplicate itself, being first one channel, and then two. This waterway, fanciful in configuration, linked the Great Lakes freshwater chain, which merged with the St. Lawrence River, then spilled into the Atlantic Ocean that bound four continents together. North America, South America, Europe, and Africa joined in an embrace at once enigmatic, abusive, and consequential, reverberating inland by way of the rivers and lakes, a fluid “transit of empire.”5
The swaths of land rimming the Detroit River teemed with plants and wildlife at the moment French explorers arrived in the late seventeenth century. Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollet priest who traveled with René-Robert La Salle on the ship Griffon in 1679, called the river a “most agreeable and charming Streight,” overflowing with deer, bears, turkey hens, and swans.6 When Frenchmen journeyed there in the decades that followed, they encountered indigenous people who already knew the place and its bounty, principally Hurons (who came to be known as Wyandots in this region) and Ottawas. The Detroit River zone was chosen ground for Native hunters, including local Algonquian speakers and Iroquoian speakers from the northeast. Hurons, originally from Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, traveled frequently through the area from villages southeast of Lake Michigan and near the straits of Mackinaw. As intimates of the place, they called the Detroit riverbank “the Coast of the Strait.”7 This evocative Huron phrasing brings to mind not only the thin waterway connecting “inland seas,” but also land: the marshes, meadows, fields, and forests abutting that river. The strait formed a shoreline from which a signature city would spring. This was a place where the ground met the waters, as much riverscape as landscape. The indigenous phrase “Coast of the Strait” captures the sense that Detroit took shape on organic borders, edges between one kind of environment and another. Social and political life there would come to mirror that aspect of nature, taking on the quixotic qualities of a coastline surrounded by land. Here, where waters and lands made enduring and unpredictable contact, a diverse collection of individuals settled and built their lives. They would become River People who lived, in the words of Midwestern poet Richard Quinney, “on the border, on the edge of things.”8 The edge is not the most comfortable space for habitation, as the Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa explained when she characterized zones like this as “borderlands.” In her classic treatise on the U.S.-Mexico border, Anzaldúa called the borderlands (borderlands/la frontera): “This thin edge of barb wire.” For her, and for many others such as Detroit River People, spaces of merger shaped by conflict are difficult places to reside and, at the same time, are “home.”9 They were a motley bunch, the human inhabitants that would gradually populate the fertile strip along the Detroit River and give it the character of a bustling fur trade town. Hailing from points near and far—indigenous North America, French Canada, Great Britain, Africa, and what would eventually become the United States—with ranging ethnic and national backgrounds and competing cultural sensibilities, Detroit’s residents perfectly reflected the quality of the place where they dwelled. These inhabitants lived on the Coast of the Strait, on the edges of each other’s cultures, on the line between warring empires, on the border between bondage and freedom. Most of Detroit’s early residents arrived at the strait as free individuals, but a significant number of them were held as slaves. Working with, and just as often against, one another, free and enslaved Detroiters built a distinctive community that has faced down time despite its trials.
While the history of colonial and early Detroit has been told from many perspectives and is now a growing area of historical inquiry, published studies tend to render invisible or inconsequential the existence, struggles, and contributions of enslaved people in the city. In contrast to the existing historical literature, and as a hoped-for contribution to it, this book chronicles the rise, fall, and dawn of Detroit while centering the experiences of those who were held in bondage there from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. In the mercantile settlement that would eventually become an American urban behemoth, hundreds of people—Native Americans, African Americans, men, women, and children—were kept captive, stripped of autonomy, and forced to labor for others. The composite story of their lives across five decades and under three imperial governments illustrates the extraordinary and all-too-ordinary character of Detroit, reveals the role of enslaved people as key actors in the history of the city, and illuminates a defining theme, and indeed paradox, of American history: the breadth and elasticity of slavery and the epic, ongoing quest for liberty.10
Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans were differently positioned in this quest. The Coast of the Strait was a place where their varied fights to realize freedom played out in stark comparative relief, from the colonial conflict known as Pontiac’s War in 1763, to the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783, to the War of 1812 in which the young United States sought to reaffirm its political separation from Great Britain. Like the American revolutionaries who called themselves Patriots, enslaved people in Detroit exhibited a deep-seated drive for independence. They verbally and physically challenged their owners and, in the ultimate blow to the system of bondage, fled across the Detroit River to secure their freedom in another country. Native communities living near Detroit likewise adopted a rebellious stance against authoritarian imposition, laying siege to the city and competing with colonial authorities in the battle to retain autonomy in the region. Often these various freedom dreams clashed, but sometimes they coincided, when indigenous groups sided with the Redcoats or Patriots to better their own position, or when enslaved blacks took advantage of wartime chaos to launch escape attempts.11 Red, black, and white American freedom bids, three streams of purpose and passion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, merged at the turbulent site of Detroit just as the waters did.
Cadillac’s Town
Surrounded by rich, moist soils and deciduous woodlands, a community, a town, and even an empire, could be anchored at le détroit. Such a town could extend its economic reach across the western interior, accessing a vast array of indigenous trade alliances and moving prized materials from the Great Lakes hinterlands into the lucrative markets of North America’s eastern colonies and western Europe’s populous cities. These materials consisted in the main of treated and untreated animal skins and items crafted from peltry, like textured beaver hats of the kind we can imagine on the head of a mature Benjamin Franklin. The eighteenth century was the height of the international fur trade, which locked European colonial powers in fierce competition for indigenous trading partners: Indian men who had the skills to hunt the animals that were driving a fashion frenzy among the transatlantic cosmopolitan set. The vessels that launched from a site such as Detroit carrying away beaver, fox, and deer parts would return from the East with capital in the form of credits and payments, as well as with sundry practical wares like cloth, guns, and kettles. The town that stood at the western edge of so abundant a trading system would grow fat and important over time, raising its own status beyond that of outpost and stretching the imperial girth of its mother country, France.
This was the vision imagined by the officer and “opportunist” Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he founded Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit in 1701.12 Cadillac sought to expand the reach of the French Empire, then situated in the northerly region known as New France (now Canada), to block a growing exchange between Anishinaabe and Iroquois traders at the British post of Albany and thereby hem in the trading activity of British rivals, and to benefit personally from the results. He bet that by building a fort along the Detroit River, what was then a far western point for European colonists, the French Crown could hold back a British advance, buffer economic partnerships that French traders had cultivated with Ottawa, Huron, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi hunters, and gain still more trading partners to the west. “Dream[ing] of the personal riches that would accrue to him by making Detroit the preeminent post for a vastly extended trading network,” Cadillac proposed a trial settlement at the strait that would entice indigenous groups to move nearby, hence ensuring immediate access to the animal pelts brought in from their hunts.13 Native men were “procurement specialists” of these sought-after furs, and the women of their villages were expert at tanning and drying.14 By keeping Native trade partners close at hand, Cadillac aimed to dominate the region’s market in furs, thereby shoring up French supremacy in the eastern Great Lakes and stretching French influence farther west.
From the 1600s through the mid-1800s, the fur trade economy was an Atlantic world phenomenon that linked European and American continental societies by a common ocean and drive for profit. The European rage for apparel fashioned from beaver skins, “a scarce luxury product” then available only in the so-called New World, was augmented by a more mundane use for leather goods made from the thicker hides of species like deer and bison, including “shoes, belts, clothing, bags, book covers, housing, straps, fasteners, and floor coverings.”15 Although there were rises and dips, periods of growth and recession, in the fur trade over the centuries, the historian Claudio Saunt has estimated that in the last thirty-five years of the eighteenth century alone, nearly “six million beaver pelts were exported from North America.”16 The bodies of local animals became sought-after commodities and sources of startling profit, akin to oil in the twentieth century if only people could wear it (and we do, in the synthetic materials that make up much of our thin, breathable, water-resistant yoga and outdoor apparel, not to mention those millennial stretch-style “skinny” jeans).17
Skins fueled European expansion into the interior of the continent, becoming, as the historian Anne Hyde has put it, “an industry that dominated commerce in North America and provided the underpinning for its first capitalist boom.” That commerce had drawn whole villages and tribes into ferocious combat over position and primacy, including a series of bloody conflicts between Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) people and French-allied Anishinaabe (Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi) people, as well as Hurons, in the mid- and late 1600s. These wars ended in a costly victory for the French alliance in the form of the Great Peace Treaty of Montreal in 1701.18 In a contest between European empires dedicated to a modern capitalist ideology and longing to control the natural riches of North America, principally the animal pelts and hides of the trade, Cadillac vowed to deliver France the upper hand and schemed all the while to increase his own wealth and local authority.19 The French minister of marine, Jérome Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, championed Cadillac’s cause, leading reluctant officials in Quebec to grant him settlement rights.
Aware that the cost for prime positioning within the fur trade had meant warfare and bloodshed in the all-too-recent past, Cadillac nevertheless did precisely what he had plotted. He established a fort along the strait that joined the Great Lakes together as one mammoth commercial waterway. Westerly enough to connect French traders with untapped sources of furs in the interior, and far enough to the south to provide a longer agricultural growing season than could be had in Montreal or Quebec, or in the older French Great Lakes posts of Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, Cadillac’s preferred location seemed ideal for a settlement with staying power in the French pays d’en haut, “Upper Country” or “High Country.” From this strategic strait, he hoped to control one of the most powerful resources in the development of human civilization: water. Together with the interconnected major rivers that flowed across this central region—the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Red River, and the St. Lawrence—this tucked-away strait formed approximately “eighteen thousand miles of Inland navigation.”20
Cadillac sited his military fort where the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Detroit still tower today, favoring a spot on a slight incline at what he believed was the narrowest stretch of the river. The rise provided good sight lines and higher ground for the essential protection of the military post, while the river provided a ready thoroughfare for the transport of goods as well as people. A proximate stream flowing parallel to the river dipped below this incline, forming a natural barrier to the rear.21 Cadillac’s settlement on the ridged slope at the strait was special from the beginning. He had the self-advantageous insight to invite disparate Native groups to settle new villages on the outskirts of his fort, which some did in the hopes of bypassing tedious trading treks to Montreal.22 Cadillac also exhibited the unusual commitment to sustain long-term residency for not just lone French Canadian men but also their families, through extensive agriculture. Unlike other commandants of French forts and trading posts in the Great Lakes woods, Cadillac brought a sizeable contingent of one hundred people along, including farmers and artisans as well as military personnel. Enslaved people were likely among this group that settled Detroit and planted a crop of winter wheat that first season. By the fall of 1702, French wives of the leading officers had begun to arrive, making Detroit a settlement where families would grow in the houses abutting the wheat fields.23 The settlers established “ribbon farms,” vertical homesteads of just four hundred to five hundred feet in width that opened onto the banks of the river and backed into fragrant orchards and dense forestland.24 These ribbon farms, poetically named because of their thin, elongated shape, would, a few decades later in the 1730s, cradle French Canadian style homes inspired by those in the north of France.25 Dwellings featured wood plank or shingle-sided exterior walls, sloped thatch cottage-style roofs, massive chimneys made of stones, and distinctive glass windows of petite geometrical panes. Residents cultivated the fertile land around their homes, planting orchards of peach, apple, and most notably pear trees, which would come to signify the French botanical heritage of the settlement.26 The look of this charming, rustic village behind its protective walls was that of a European “fortress town.”27
In time, the population increased at the fort that came to be known as Detroit, a truncated version of its formal designation, Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit. As the settlement grew beyond its walls, it encompassed farms along both sides of the river to take full advantage of that magical liquid highway. The town grew long and slender, following the water’s edge and shaping Detroit’s early footprint into what we might now call sprawl. The settlement came to engulf the bight of the river, or bend in the coastline, stretching eastward to westward just as the river flowed. And as social relations became more strained in a vise grip of proximity and exploitation, the people there would soon come to feel in their own skins the second meaning of the word bight: a loop in a taut rope.
In 1710, Cadillac was appointed governor of Louisiana, which would become the site, in 1718, of another famed French colonial settlement: New Orleans. The commandant had made a timely exit. After Cadillac’s departure, his town on the Coast of the Strait remained, made up of diverse inhabitants who dwelled together in unsettling intimacy: indigenous people of the Huron, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Miami societies, French people from New France and old France, the children of Indian and French unions, and enslaved people of indigenous descent. The forced diversity and social hierarchy of Detroit made it a tinderbox. In 1712–13, a conflict called the Fox War broke out between Native villages near the fort. Cadillac had asked more than one thousand members of the Fox, Kickapoo, and Mascouten tribes from the west to move to Detroit in 1710, just before he relocated to New Orleans. A rivalry developed between hunters from these new groups and previous Native residents already established near Detroit. Indigenous men vying for the primacy of their own bands began killing each other in the woods of their hunting grounds. The tension escalated into group attacks that the French authorities did little to settle, leading to the death or captivity of hundreds of Fox and Mascouten people, many of whom would remain in Detroit as slaves.28
La Riviere du Detroit, 1701. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.
The racial, cultural, and national multiplicity of Detroit would only increase over the following hundred years to include British residents of English, Scottish, and Irish heritage, African Americans held in bondage, and white Americans from various points east and south. The Coast of the Strait was a place of overlapping borders—natural, cultural, and political—where peoples of various backgrounds struggled to make their lives in a context of growing economic disparity and political volatility. The most vulnerable of those people are also the most invisible in traditional historical treatments of Detroit and the greater Midwest. They are those whose presence was compelled rather than freely chosen, the enslaved who were integral to the town that would one day become the Motor City.
Remnants of Slavery
At the post of early Detroit, free white residents were fiercely resourceful. They invented effective ways to live in an isolated riverine environment, and they plundered natural resources in order to profit beyond their needs. Unfree people were just as creative, as subjects of their own lives and as objects of chattel slavery. Participants in the innovative process of supporting life in a difficult place out of the raw materials around them, they were at the same time viewed as a kind of natural resource themselves. Like the hunted beaver, enslaved people could be trapped and traded, their best parts—intellect, feeling, strength, and versatility—extracted to further what was then a model mercantile experiment. Straining to live worthwhile lives and contributing to the cultural mosaic that characterized this rough-hewn trading post town, enslaved residents of Detroit shared close quarters with those who exploited them like animals. Their owners ran the gamut of society: merchants, traders, gentleman farmers, political leaders, belles of the balls, and even priests.29
Piecing together a composite picture of enslaved people’s experience in Detroit has depended on scant documentation. Unlike many locales in the American South (and even some places in the Midwest, such as Indiana), Michigan has yielded no full-length slave narratives or WPA slave interviews recorded by employees of the Federal Writers’ Project. Even narratives of African Americans who escaped to Ontario in the 1850s do not include fugitives who had been enslaved in Detroit.30 In a few rare instances, the cloaked thoughts of unfree people filter through formulaic documents like criminal proceedings and dictated wills. But for the most part, we must read the minds of those who were enslaved by identifying and interpreting their actions—by closely examining the things they did—in the light of their circumstances. Although there is a nearly nonexistent record of Detroit bondspeople’s direct words, several Detroit slaveholders wrote about their human possessions in matter-of-fact language captured in letters and financial account books. Due to Detroit’s character as a swashbuckling fur trade settlement that tolerated a loose legal and political infrastructure for close to a century, and due to a devastating fire in 1805 that destroyed businesses and private homes, even slaveholder records from the town are limited. Perhaps because of the slim nature of the Detroit slavery archive, very few scholarly works, and no full-length books, had yet been written about this subject. (For a discussion of the related historical literature, please see the essay at the end of this book.) But not having at our disposal the sources that make for a fuller history does not mean we should ignore the enslaved in Detroit. Their lives had meaning to them, to their families, and to the region, and can, when illuminated even by the refracted light of limited sources, have meaning for caretakers of the city today. The odds have been against some Detroiters from the dawn of the city’s founding, and yet they still fought and fled, created alliances and evaluated circumstances, crashed across international borders and challenged entrenched racial biases. We owe it to them, and ourselves, to bear close witness to their triumphs as well as their trials.
Primary sources for this book consist, in the main, of the wills, letters, and account ledgers of Detroit slaveholder-merchants such as William Macomb, John Askin, and James May. Legal cases in the Michigan Territory Supreme Court involving slave freedom suits and attempts to recapture runaway slaves, together with the papers of prominent Detroit attorneys like Elijah Brush and Solomon Sibley, also provide crucial material. The registry of Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church, the only religious institution in Detroit for decades, as well as diaries of Protestant Moravian missionaries who settled in the area, contribute ritual and observational details about enslaved people’s daily and religious lives. Census lists, receipts, and bills of sale partially fill the many gaps inherent in this historical reconstruction.
The scattered nature of the archival record on slavery in Detroit resists the wish that we might have for a comprehensive story that includes beginnings, middles, and endings for each individual and family that will emerge on these pages. Rather, the fragmentary state of the Detroit slavery archive reflects the rough, unpredictable nature of enslaved people’s experiences. So instead of pushing for story in some coherent and seamless sense, I have striven to offer what I see as a quilted chronicle: a chronological but oftentimes broken account of important events that stitches together historical interpretation, context, and causes, while patching in intuitive descriptions of people moving through a fraught place. What we can come to understand through this patchwork project is that Detroit was both common and uncommon as a site of American slavery. Detroit was a place built not on tobacco, sugar, or cotton but on the skins of animals often prepared and transported by slaves. Its geographical centrality in the fur trade circuit during the heyday of the industry made Detroit unusual even in a broader context of slavery as it was practiced in the Midwest. Most slaveholding settlements in the areas of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota applied stolen labor to military officers’ personal services at various forts, domestic duties, wheat production (Indiana and Illinois), mining (Illinois and Wisconsin), and resort hotels for vacationing southerners (Minnesota).31 In contrast, Detroit’s enslaved, while certainly employed to cushion daily life for others through domestic pursuits and in small-scale agriculture, were critical among the labor force that greased the wheels of trade. A close look at life in Detroit therefore draws together two aspects of the U.S. past that are often narrated separately: the fur trade of the great West (often imagined as involving whites and Indians) and chattel slavery (often imagined as involving whites and blacks). Trading in the pelts of beavers and trading in the bodies of persons became contiguous endeavors in Detroit, forming an intersecting market in skins that takes on the cast of the macabre. While black men’s backs and legs served as the locomotives that moved these furs across vast distances, indigenous women’s bodies were plundered for sexual riches, much like the land was stripped of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals. The theft of unfree people in Detroit, of their knowledge, skills, and corpuses, made the city we know today possible. But out of the shadows of exploitation, enslaved people rose to accomplish a set of rare, phenomenal feats: they ran away consistently, testing new laws of the territory; they contributed to the growth of a subversive Afro-Native community that came to be known as “Negrotown”; they formed an armed fighting force that paraded the streets of Detroit while conflicted officials looked on with worry. In spirit, and surely in flesh for some, they were the ancestors of modern-day Detroit.
Inspired by passionate public discussions about Detroit’s past spurred by commemorations of the Underground Railroad, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and the bicentennial of the War of 1812, I took up this research project in the summer of 2011 with the aid of a small team of student researchers. I had the privilege of following these public conversations and sometimes contributing to them in spaces such as the Detroit Historical Museum, Wayne State University, the University of Detroit Mercy, the University of Michigan, the Michigan Local History Conference, Underground Railroad tours in the city, and the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. No doubt, the intensity of dialogue among residents and scholars from Detroit and beyond took some sense of urgency from media accounts that repeatedly described Detroit as a symbol of ruin and collapse.32 But History may have a constructive rebuttal for this demoralizing rhetoric. One of Detroit’s prominent slaveholders once called the city “ruined,” and yet, from the vantage point of Detroit’s most vulnerable residents in his time—enslaved men and women—disarray meant the opportunity for reinvention.
Contradictions of the Coast
A “strait” is a channel of water and also a state of difficulty. Native American and African American slaves in Detroit experienced dual and dire straits. The life they knew along the Detroit River was hard and rife with risk. Most of them had been snatched away from their families of origin in indigenous lake country and the plains, French Canada, New York, Kentucky, or Virginia, and were then sold and shared among members of the area merchant class. Tasked with the essential work of making a distant settlement habitable and even comfortable for their needy owners, slaves cleared land and built dwellings, chopped wood and tended livestock, grew food and prepared meals, and did the onerous heavy cleaning required in a location seasonally soggy with river mud and marshlands.33 Many of them were compelled to perform intense and dangerous labor as sexual servants or as crewmembers on boats that plied the rough, local waterways. Some slaves in the Detroit area, forced to do work out of doors without proper protection, succumbed to the harsh winter weather of the blustery lakes. An unknown number dwelled in an emotional cloud of anxiety, fearing physical restraint, injury on the waters, separation from loved ones, and violent punishment.
But at the same time that enslaved people in Detroit confronted certain hardship, they lived in a place that afforded them a degree of constructive mobility that was not without significance. Detroit was on the far periphery of European settlement. In some senses the town was like an island in an archipelago, separated from other colonial cities by long stretches of water but connected to imperial networks through trade. Surrounded by indigenous villages and hunting grounds, Detroit had no immediate support from either European colonial or American territorial infrastructures. It possessed what legal historian Lea VanderVelde has described as “frontier characteristics,” which meant the town was perpetually engaged in “building itself up, inventing first generation solutions in the absence of long-standing institutional foundations.” Far from being strong enough to comprehensively enforce the subjugation of enslaved people, Detroit depended on the cooperation of captives in the city. The tiny free white population of this borderland town always felt itself vulnerable to Indian, British, or American attacks, which meant the settlement needed combined efforts for defense from residents across the class hierarchy. Members of the Detroit elite marginalized, exploited, and punished their slaves, but only to a point. References to whippings and beatings are few in local slaveholders’ records. The callous separation of family members, emotional coercion, physical restraint, and imprisonment appear more frequently as mechanisms of control. On an inland coast in a frontier town that stood at the far reaches of European, and later American, centers of finance and government, enslaved people could, to a certain extent, negotiate their immediate circumstances.34 They seized the opportunity to broaden the scope of their personal actions, to push out the walls of their containment, to adjust relations of power, and, sometimes, to escape. In a lightly populated northern area bordered by Native towns and a navigable river, enslaved men and women found leverage that they applied to the goal of gaining freedom.
Detroit, the experience of enslaved people shows, was a compelling and confounding place in the history of American slavery. Besides being sited near multiple indigenous villages and at a great distance from established white towns, Detroit was shaped by diverse cultural influences, including indigenous practices and the religious mores of the Catholic Church. And just as significantly, Detroit was positioned on a pivotal waterway that, after the Revolutionary War, comprised an international border between the United States and British Canada, guaranteeing freedom for slaves who managed to cross in either direction. In this culturally heterogeneous frontier-borderland environment, slavery evolved as a palimpsest, with subsets of the population enacting and challenging slavery in different ways, and with new cultural practices of human bondage inscribed on top of old. The history of Detroit reveals long-term Indian bondage originating in Native American captive-taking practices that the French adopted and elaborated, as well as African bondage derived from French, British, and American norms. Three categories of enslaved people therefore lived in Detroit: those possessed by the French and their Indian allies, those owned by British officers and businessmen, and those held during the period of American occupation and settlement prior to Michigan statehood. Beyond demonstrating that Detroit was a distinctive site of American slavery due to its geographical, multiracial, and international makeup, this book illustrates the way in which early America was nowhere a place that guaranteed the enjoyment of freedom for peoples of color. Even in the Old Northwest, on the border with Canada, America was a land where freedom necessitated a hammering out blow by blow, and moment by moment, like molten iron in the blacksmith’s forge. In this way—in the torpid forging of freedom and long denial of corporeal security and meaningful citizenship for former slaves—the fort town of Detroit was all too common.
The five chapters in this book unfold chronologically. Chapter 1 describes the practice and experience of slavery in the era of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit in the 1760s, detailing how slavery came to the settlement with the French and their Native allies and how the practice persisted and changed under British jurisdiction following the French and Indian War. Chapter 2 traces the activities of a circle of British slaveholders in the period of the American Revolution in order to offer glimpses into the world of their slaves, whose numbers reached a high point and shifted demographically during and following the War for Independence. Chapter 3 uncovers the fiction of a free Northwest Territory by detailing the ways that slaveholders evaded the ambivalent antislavery clause of the Northwest Ordinance as well as the ways that enslaved people used the new federal legislation to their advantage. Chapter 4 explores the initial period of American authority in Detroit’s history, after the British finally relinquished key military posts in the Great Lakes. It traces the pace and scope of Americanization in the town and evaluates the effect of this political shift, as well as the impact of the great fire of 1805, on the enslaved. It also details a series of cases in the Michigan Territorial Court in 1807, a year that saw a surge in slave freedom suits and formal attempts by owners to recapture runaways. Peter and Hannah Denison, a black couple suing for their children’s freedom, launched the first such case that year, setting a precedent for the limits of slavery in Michigan law and establishing a route of escape to Canada that others would follow as an Underground Railroad network developed decades later. Chapter 5 traces the formation of a unique fighting band of runaway slaves known as the “Negro Militia.” After an international maritime incident, the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, raised American fears of an Indian attack backed by the British, Michigan Territorial Governor William Hull authorized the formation of a defensive force made up of Canadian ex-slaves led by Peter Denison. This chapter concludes with an overview of the War of 1812 and speculates on the role of Detroit’s black militiamen in the conflict. The conclusion of the book follows the surprising adult life of the eldest daughter of Peter and Hannah Denison, Elizabeth Denison Forth, and reflects on the history of slavery in Detroit in relation to public memory. A final essay briefly positions the book and its arguments within various streams of historical and academic conversation.
The City of the Straits, yet another name for the venerable Detroit, brims with untold stories of crisis and courage, of bold bids and daunting defeats. Although the people once held as slaves have disappeared from public consciousness and have no marker to their memory on the streets of that metropolis, their stories lend meaning and urgency to our understanding of the city’s past. By bringing hundreds of captive people into the light of our awareness, people who were expected to fade into the dim recesses of history, I hope to show the struggles, the strivings, and maybe even the soul of Detroit, a place like no other.
Slavery has a deep history on the Coast of the Strait, and echoes of that era sound beneath the surface even now. In 2012, a man named Sedrick Mitchell was convicted and sentenced for holding women captive in the city of Detroit. For months he had secreted away two African American girls in a nondescript house on the east side of town. Mitchell demeaned and physically assaulted the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls, forcing them to perform certain acts against their will. His case and others have been investigated by the Michigan attorney general’s Human Trafficking Unit. Still, sufferers of modern-day slavery in Detroit, and hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women in neighboring Canada, continue to await liberation and justice. It seems that the old streets of Detroit are still drawing traffickers, who rely on the unwieldy size of the 139-square-mile city, its decreasing population, its proximity to major highways and bridges, and its status as America’s most active border for international trade to ensure ease of passage and anonymity for dreadful deeds.35 Centuries ago, slaveholders used the same waters of this river to hike their profit margins, forcing enslaved people to ply the vessels carrying goods processed by still more slaves. But bondsmen and women turned this waterway to their advantage and hijacked the river as a route to liberation. Emancipatory action in our time, too, might be waterborne—ferried by the physical waters that embed social power, fed by the underground stream that is history. On the borderlands of bottom-line globalization, capitalistic expansion, and postindustrial flux, recognizing the historical links between land-seizers and body-snatchers, and exposing the tools and techniques of bondage as well as liberation, are incremental but purposeful ways to make room for visions that see the earth and all of its creatures free.