Notes

Introduction: The Coast of the Strait

1. For a history of the use of the racial term “red” by Native Americans as well as Europeans, see Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 624–44.

2. Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Modern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 11.

3. Bkejwanong as an Anishinaabe settlement: Michael A. McDonnell, Masters of Empire: Great Lakes Indians and the Making of America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2015), 47–48. The persistence of French culture: Jay Gitlin, The Bourgeois Frontier: French Towns, French Traders, and American Expansion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 1, 11, 155. Detroit as a Canadian dependency: William Renwick Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule: Law and Law Courts, 1760–1796 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Society, 1926), 15. Wild-garlic place: William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 23.

4. National Audubon Society, “Detroit River—Facts and Figures,” http://web4.audubon.org/bird/iba/michigan/Press/DetroitRiverFactSheet.pdf. Accessed August 9, 2012. “Junction” quote: Jean-Claude Robert, “The St. Lawrence and Montreal’s Spatial Development in the Seventeenth Through the Twentieth Century,” in Stéphane Castonguay and Matthew Evenden, eds., Urban Rivers: Remaking Rivers, Cities and Space in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 147.

5. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011). For illuminating analyses of indigenous Americans in the Atlantic world and parallels as well as differences between a “black” and “red” Atlantic, see Jace Weaver, The Red Atlantic: American Indigenes and the Making of the Modern World, 1000–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). For an astute articulation of the intimate and damaging ties between Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, see Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015). Lowe defines intimacies in this book as the “braided” nature of slavery, colonialism, empire, and the rise of liberal ideology across these geographical spaces as well as the close contacts between people originating from the various continents, 38, 34.

6. Quoted in Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 13. René-Robert Cavalier La Salle was the first European explorer to sail the Great Lakes. Father Hennepin accompanied La Salle on the 1679 voyage and recorded the earliest detailed description of Detroit. The ship was later lost and has yet to be uncovered. Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis, 13. greatlakesexploration.org/expedition.htm. Accessed December 15, 2014.

7. Michelle Cassidy, Emily Macgillivray, and Tiya Miles, “Placing Indigenous Peoples in Early Detroit,” in Linda Campbell, Andrew Newman, Sara Safranksy, and Timothy Stallmann, eds., Detroit: A People’s Atlas (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, forthcoming). Ottawa presence: Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 28. Location of Huron villages: Andrew Keith Sturtevant, “Jealous Neighbors: Rivalry and Alliance Among the Native Communities of Detroit, 1701–1766” (Ph.D. diss., William and Mary, 2011), 24. Detroit as native hunting ground: Karen L. Marrero, “Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages in Eighteenth Century Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., Yale, 2011), 134–37. Hurons and Wyandots: The development of the Wyandots as a western configuration of Huron people was an involved social and political process resulting from migration. Some Hurons (Hurons being one of the three branches of the Iroquoian Wendat people of the upper Great Lakes, including Hurons, Petuns, and Neutrals) migrated southwest in the mid-1600s in the aftermath of war with the Iroquois Confederacy. The Hurons who settled in northern Michigan near the straits of Mackinac in the 1670s and along the Detroit River in the early 1700s came to be called Wyandots in early U.S. treaties. These Wyandots also included some members of the Petun nation. John L. Steckley, The Eighteenth-Century Wyandot: A Clan-Based Study (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014), 22–25. “Coast of the Strait” as a translated Huron name for Detroit appears in Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969), 3. According to the Huron and Wyandot linguist John Steckley, the Huron word Taochiarontkion does translate into French as “La côte du détroit,” and in English as “the coast of the strait.” Another Huron word for Detroit, Karontaen, translates into English as “where a log lies.” John Steckley, email exchange with Tiya Miles, November 17, 2016. Steckley cited the following reference for these early terms as recorded by the French: Pierre Potier, Fifteenth Report of the Bureau of Archives for the Province of Ontario (Toronto: C. W. James, 1920).

8. Richard Quinney, Borderland: A Midwest Journal (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), xiii–xiv.

9. Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987), 3.

10. Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (June 1972): 5–29; Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1975).

11. I have borrowed this phrasing from the African American history scholar Robin Kelley. See Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002).

12. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit, 1701–1838,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 18.

13. Cadillac’s dream quote: McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 70.

14. P. Nick Kardulias, “Negotiation and Incorporation on the Margins of World-Systems: Examples from Cyprus and North America,” Journal of World-Systems Research 13:1 (2007): 55–82, 68, 70.

15. Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 19.

16. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 116; Claudio Saunt, West of the Revolution: An Uncommon History of 1776 (New York: W. W. Norton, 2014), 145.

17. Meaghan O’Neill, “50 Surprising Fashion and Beauty Products Made From Oil That You Probably Use Everyday (Even If You’re Green),” www.treehugger.com/style/50-surprising-fashion-and-beauty-products-made-from-oil-that-you-probably-use-everyday-even-if-youre-green.html. Accessed July 26, 2016. Petroleum Services Association of Canada, “Clothing,” www.oilandgasinfo.ca/oil-gas-you/products/clothing. Accessed July 26, 2016.

18. Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 215–16, 267, 270.

19. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families, 19.

20. Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, “Rivers in History and Historiography: An Introduction,” in Christof Mauch and Thomas Zeller, eds., Rivers in History: Perspectives on Waterways in Europe and North America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), 5. “Inland navigation”: J. Disturnell, ed., Sailing on the Great Lakes and Rivers of America (Philadelphia: J. Disturnell, 1874), iii.

21. Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit,” 21. The stream behind the settlement, called Savoy Creek, lies beneath the city streets now.

22. White, Middle Ground, 117.

23. To my knowledge, it has not been demonstrated through documentary evidence that slaves came to Detroit with Cadillac. Historian of Afro-Canada Afua Cooper asserts that they did without offering a primary source in Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 74. The presence of slaves in Detroit in 1701 is certainly possible and even likely, since they were already in New France at the time and had been since 1628; Cooper 70, 72, 75. In addition, as Cadillac sought to bring representatives of various subsets of a varied labor force along with him, it would have made sense for him to include slaves. Cadillac’s contingent: Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 18–19.

24. Guillaume Teasdale, “The French of Orchard Country: Territory, Landscape, and Ethnicity in the Detroit River Region, 1680s–1810s” (Ph.D. diss., York University, 2010), 214–15.

25. French “northern style” architecture: Teasdale, “Orchard Country,” 16–17.

26. F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade: 1796 to 1805 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948), 17, 25; Farmer, History of Detroit, 489.

27. Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit,” 22.

28. White, Middle Ground, 154–58.

29. The stories of enslaved people surface sporadically in merchant, church, and legal records. A primary figure is Peter Denison, a black man who, together with his wife, Hannah Denison, sued in a court of law for their children’s freedom. While the Denison family is described in a number of sources, many other slaves in Detroit can only be traced through the scattered fragments of truncated lists and notations. This is especially and poignantly true for the scores of unfree Native American women labeled “Panis” in the records, a term derived in part from the name Pawnee, the horticultural and non-equestrian Missouri River Indians frequently taken in slave raids by Great Lakes indigenous peoples.

30. Benjamin Drew, A North-Side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive Slaves in Canada, Related by Themselves (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1856).

31. Christopher P. Lehman, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787–1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2011), 1–4, 26, 43, 45. Perhaps because slavery in Detroit and Michigan differed from slavery in other Northwest Territory states in focus, Michigan is often neglected in studies that address slavery in the Midwest. These studies tend to look most closely at the southern-leaning states of Indiana and Illinois as well as at Minnesota, perhaps because of the famous Supreme Court Dred Scott decision rendered about a man held in slavery at Ft. Snelling, Minnesota. For more on slavery in the Midwest, see Leslie Schwalm, Emancipation’s Diaspora: Race and Reconstruction in the Upper Midwest (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009).

32. For cultural analyses of ideas, rhetoric, and imagery of ruin in Detroit, see Colin Dickey, Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places (New York: Viking, 2016), 256–59; Dora Apel, Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2015); Kavita Ilona Nayar, “Reclaiming a Fallen Empire: Myth and Memory in the Battle Over Detroit’s Ruins,” (M.A. thesis, Temple University, 2012).

33. Lea VanderVelde’s specific description of slave labor on the fringes of westward expansion in St. Louis contributed to my development of a summary of slave labor in the different western location of Detroit; Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16. Likewise, Jennifer Stinson’s emphasis on the dirty work done by slaves near the Mississippi River contributed to my sense of what a wet and muddy location meant for the workloads of black women. Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, “Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Lead District,” Journal of Global Slavery 1:2 (October 2016) (unpublished version, cited by permission).

34. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 12. For a discussion of the use of the term “frontier” in this book that situates the word within Native American historical studies and African American slavery studies, please see the historiographical essay following the conclusion.

35. In thinking about the unexpected nature of slavery in Detroit then and now, I have been influenced by my colleague Phil Deloria, whose book popularized the notion of “Indians in unexpected places” in Native American studies as well as American studies circles. See Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006). The Michigan Human Trafficking Unit was formed in 2011. AG Human Trafficking Cases, State of Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, www.michigan.gov. Accessed December 10, 2014. For more on the approximately 1,200-plus cases of murdered and missing indigenous women in Canada that have taken place over a period of more than thirty years, see Jessica Murphy, “Canada Launches Inquiry into Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women,” The Guardian, December 9, 2015. Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event (forthcoming: Spring 2017). Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spacialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (2000): 91–130. Lisa J. Ellwood, “MMIW: A Comprehensive Report,” IndianCountryTodayMediaNetwork.com, February 2016. Accessed April 30, 2016. Toni L. Griffin and June Manning Thomas, “Epilogue: Detroit Future City,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 211, 213.

1: The Straits of Slavery (1760–1770)

1. Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969), 221; Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 24. David A. Armour and Keith R. Widder, At the Crossroads: Michilimackinac During the American Revolution (Mackinac Island, MI: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1978), 3. While Farmer measures the stockade at ten feet high, and Dunnigan says it was made of oak, Armour and Widder describe it as fifteen feet high and cedar. The fort and pickets were reconfigured after Pontiac’s siege, which likely accounts for this difference; Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 48; Donald Lee, “Clark and Lernoult: Reduction by Expansion,” in Denver Brunsman and Joel Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit: Portraits in Political and Cultural Change, 1760–1805 (Detroit: Detroit Historical Society, 2009), 73–77, 74.

2. Farmer, History, 367; David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 39.

3. Poremba, Detroit, 37. Jean Dilhet, Beginnings of the Catholic Church in the United States, translated and annotated by Patrick W. Browne (Washington, D.C.: The Salve Regina Press, 1922), 114. Dunnigan, Frontier, 38, 19. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “Charting the Shape of Early Detroit, 1701–1838,” in June Manning Thomas and Henco Bekkering, eds., Mapping Detroit: Land, Community, and Shaping a City (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2015), 22.

4. Quoted in Farmer, History, 11. For a full description of Detroit by Cadillac, see “Report of Detroit,” Letter of Cadillac to M. de Pontchartrain, September 25, 1802, MS/Cadillac A. deLam, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.

5. Farmer, History, 4.

6. Poremba, Detroit, 40; Dunnigan, Frontier, 46, 52, 53.

7. Dilhet, Beginnings, 114.

8. Quoted in Marcel Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten Slaves: Two Hundred Years of Bondage, George Tombs, trans. (1960; reprint, Montréal: Véhicule Press, 2013), 30–31. Beavers have two layers of fur: a coarse, insulating outer layer of long strands and a soft inner layer of shorter strands. The strands of this inner layer readily twine together into a matted or felted texture when processed. Because furs worn by Native people as robes were partially pre-processed by human skin as well as the smoke-filled atmospheres of Native homes, worn furs commanded higher prices in the trade; Kardulias, “Negotiation and Incorporation on the Margins of World-Systems,” 69, 70, 71. “Fat beaver” could be used to refer to a grade of fur more commonly called “coat beaver” (castor gras), meaning: “that which has contracted a certain gross and oily humour, from the sweat exhaled by the bodies of the Savages by whom it has been worn . . . used only in the making of hats”; Encyclopedia Britannica or Dictionary of Arts, Sciences and General Literature, Seventh Edition (Adam and Charles Black, 1842), 478; “The Beaver and Other Pelts,” Digital Collections, McGill Library; http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/nwc/history/01.htm. “Beaver Pelts,” Historical Encyclopedia of Canada (2013), http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/beaver-pelts. The term “fat beaver” was also used to refer to beaver harvested in winter when the pelts were thickest. For an engrossing analysis of the use of dress to signal identity in the context of colonization and racialization, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).

9. Jay Gitlin describes the swath of French territory in colonial North America as a corridor running from north to south; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 2. Clarence M. Burton, ed., The City of Detroit Michigan: 1701–1922 (Detroit-Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922), 719.

10. Quoted in Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 57; Therese Agnes Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., University of Detroit, 1938), 3.

11. Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, Inc., 1982), 1762 Census, 19. Karen Marrero, “On the Edge of the West: The Roots and Routes of Detroit’s Urban Eighteenth Century,” in Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson, eds., Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 66–86, 76. Early Detroit population numbers are difficult to pin down for several reasons. The size of the settlement was ambiguous because people lived on both sides of the river running for several miles; a ten-mile stretch on either side of the fort and across the river from the fort is assumed in the 1762 French census cited here. Many families had two residences: a home in the fort and a farm in the “country,” which meant that people could be counted twice depending on where they were at the time of the name collection. Many individuals were transient, especially hunters and voyageurs, which meant they might not be counted at all. Importantly, the 1762 French census does not include women; an estimated number of women was added in the 1982 publication of Detroit censuses resulting in the number 1,100. Poremba gives the numbers 2,000 for the size of Detroit’s population in 1760 and 300 for farms/homes, Detroit, 39.

12. Dunnigan, Frontier, 50.

13. David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” American Studies 11:2 (Fall 1970) 56–66, 60.

14. James Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, finding aid, biography, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

15. James Sterling to [?], November 22, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, finding aid, biography.

16. To James Stirling, Detroit, August 23, 1760, Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 344.

17. Isabella Graham to John Marshal, 1769, Divie Duffield Papers, MS/Duffield (D. B.) Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI. Joanna Bethune, The Life of Mrs. Isabella Graham (New York: John F. Taylor, 1839), 11–13. Graham is viewed as a philanthropist for her organizing on behalf of poor widows and orphans in New York.

18. James Sterling to Captain Walter Rutherford, October 27, 1761, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to Mr. Collbeck, October 27, 1761, Sterling Letter Book, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

19. James Sterling to Robert Holmes, April 20, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to John Sterling, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book; James Sterling to Ensign J. Schlosser, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book. Historian Christian Crouch expertly analyzes this escape in her paper: “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, 20–21.

20. The insight that Sterling might have predicted Pontiac’s War comes from Jon William Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain, 1758–1766,” Ethnohistory 44:4 (Autumn 1997): 617–54, 626; quoted in Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 626.

21. Sterling Letter Book, finding aid, biography.

22. The classic treatment of this event is Francis Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian Uprising of 1763 (1851; Boston, 1898). On pageantry in the memory of Pontiac’s rebellion, see Kyle Mays, “Pontiac’s Ghost in Detroit: Constructing Race and Gender through Indigenous Masculinity at the Turn of the 20th Century Detroit,” conference paper, American Society for Ethnohistory Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, September 14, 2013.

23. Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2012), 66; Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 36; Andrew Keith Sturtevant, “Jealous Neighbors: Rivalry and Alliance Among the Native Communities of Detroit, 1701–1766” (Ph.D. diss., The College of William and Mary, 2001), 246, 258, 266.

24. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 618.

25. Alan Taylor, American Colonies: The Settling of North America (New York: Penguin, 2001), 92. McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 26. For a clear and succinct breakdown of colonial systems, see Nancy Shoemaker, “A Typology of Colonialism,” Perspectives on History (October 2015), 29.

26. John Mack Faragher, “‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833,” in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304–326, 305.

27. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 65, 68; Dowd, Spirited, 35.

28. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 65; Sturtevant, Jealous, 254.

29. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 83.

30. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 70.

31. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 70, 72.

32. John Porteous Diary, Volume 2: Journal Pontiac’s Siege of Detroit, May 7–13, 1763, 17 (Wednesday, May 11, 1763), Burton Historical Collection, DPL. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 72.

33. Carl J. Eckberg, Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in Illinois Country (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 14; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 97.

34. Milo Milton Quaife, ed. The Siege of Detroit in 1763: The Journal of Pontiac’s Conspiracy, and John Rutherford’s Narrative of Captivity (Chicago: R. R. Donnelley, 1958), 43–44, 139.

35. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 77.

36. Middleton, Pontiac’s War, 71; Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 630.

37. James Sterling to Duncan & Co., July 24, 1763, Sterling Letter Book.

38. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 628.

39. James Sterling to John Sterling, October 6, 1763, Sterling Letter Book.

40. Quoted from Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 628.

41. Dowd, Spirited, 35.

42. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War, 630, 631.

43. Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa of Michigan; A Grammar of Their Language, And Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887), 7.

44. Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 636–37; Quoted in Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War,” 635. After hearing a report about the peace conference that took place at Johnson Hall, the headquarters of Sir William Johnson in New York, Pontiac promised George Croghan, chief deputy to William Johnson, that he would not wage war again. Jon Parmenter argues that even as Pontiac agreed to peace, he did not admit guilt and used the opportunity to skillfully request gunpowder on credit from the British. Decades later, in 1769, Pontiac was killed by an Indian man near Cahokia, Illinois, in an incident unrelated to the war.

45. Katz, “Black Slavery,” 60.

46. Emily Macgillivray and Tiya Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion’: A Native Woman Trader’s Household in the Detroit River Region,” accepted for Karen Marrero and Andrew Sturtevant, eds., A Place in Common: Telling Histories of Early Detroit (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, in progress).

47. Afua Cooper, The Hanging of Angélique: The Untold Story of Canadian Slavery and the Burning of Old Montréal (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 81.

48. The foundational work of carefully recovering the history of slavery in New France was done by French Canadian historian Marcel Trudel in the 1960s, and by Afro-Canadian historian Afua Cooper (focusing on black slavery) and American historian Brett Rushforth (focusing on Indian slavery) in the early 2000s.

49. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 15; Cooper, Hanging, 70.

50. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 65–70; Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 169.

51. White, Wild Frenchmen, 7, 12.

52. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 48.

53. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 37; Cooper, Hanging, 72; Quoted in Cooper, Hanging, 75.

54. Marcel Trudel and his co-investigator, Micheline D’Allaire, conducted this count as part of a survey of French records. See Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 31, 34, 36, 41, 73, 61, 76, 83; for the research methods that resulted in these numbers, see 58–59.

55. Spear, Race, 59–63; While the Code Noir served as a guide for New France residents, it was not legally binding there according to Marcel Trudel, who argues that a new code would have had to be enacted to be legal, as in the case of Louisiana, Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 122; see 119–22 for a full summary of the provisions of the Code Noir.

56. For detailed summaries of the provisions of the two Codes Noir, see Spear, Race, 59–68; Rushforth, Bonds, 123–31.

57. Spear, Race, 72; Ekberg, Stealing, 89.

58. Ekberg, Stealing, 46.

59. Ekberg, Stealing, 13, 21. I am grateful to John Petoskey, the student who introduced me to Blackbird’s diary as part of our work on his honors thesis. Petoskey’s interpretation of the “Underground” people as Pawnees and as Ottawa captives spurred my use of this example; John Minode’e Petoskey, “Blood Quantum and Twenty-First Century Sovereignty in the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians,” undergraduate honors thesis, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2016, 47–48; Andrew J. Blackbird, History of the Ottawa and Chippewa of Michigan; A Grammar of Their Language, And Personal and Family History of the Author (Ypsilanti, MI: Ypsilantian Job Printing House, 1887), 25–26; Martha Royce Blaine, “Pawnee,” Encyclopedia of North American Indians, Frederick E. Hoxie, ed. (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1996), 472. Rushforth, Bonds, 397.

60. This confusion held sway in the colonial period and in modern-day scholarship until Brett Rushforth offered a close examination and detailed explanation in Bonds, 169–73. For example, Marcel Trudel wrote in the first history of slavery in New France: “The Panis are the only Amerindian nation to appear each year in slave documents with such astounding regularity. There was a true Panis slave market, just as there was an ebony slave market.” Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 65. For another example of “Panis” interpreted as the single nation “Pawnee,” see Jorge Castellanos, “Black Slavery in Detroit,” in Wilma Wood Henrickson, ed., Detroit Perspectives: Crossroads and Turning Points (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), 85–93, 86.

61. New France records in Canada that mention slaves do sometimes list the captive person’s tribe of origin. This difference raises the question of whether French record keepers in the satellite post at Detroit, mainly priests, felt there was a greater need to suppress this information. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 63–64.

62. Quoted in Rushforth, Bonds, 136, 393–95; Cooper, Hanging, 76; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 45–54).

63. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 46; Rushforth, Bonds, 137.

64. Cooper, Hanging, 76, 137.

65. Women dressing skins for trade: Karen L. Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot: The Subjugation of Women in Seventeenth-Century New France (London: Routledge, 1991), 159. Moccasins: Catherine Cangany, “Fashioning Moccasins: Detroit, the Manufacturing Frontier, and the Empire of Consumption, 1701–1835,” The William and Mary Quarterly 69:2 (April 2012): 265–302, 266, 268, 286.

66. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 121; Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Sexual Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 67.

67. Dowd, Spirited, 12; Brett Rushforth, “‘A Little Flesh We Offer You’: The Origins of Indian Slavery in New France,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009), 353–89, 366.

68. Rushforth, Bonds, 68.

69. Rushforth, Bonds, 66.

70. For detailed histories and analyses of French-Indian marriages, European-Indian marriages, and metís families, see: Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001); Kathleen DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage and Métissage in Colonial Louisiana,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 65:2 (April 2008): 267–304; Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and Families: A New History of the North American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011); Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, Great Lakes Creoles: A French-Indian Community on the Northern Borderlands, Prairie Du Chien, 1750–1860 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Karen Marrero, “Founding Families: Power and Authority of Mixed French and Native Lineages in Eighteenth Century Detroit” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 2011).

71. The French phrase à la façon du pays meant “in the custom of the country”; Duval, “Indian Intermarriage,” 267. Although many of these relationships are viewed by historians to have been consensual, there were risks involved for indigenous women who entered these cross-cultural marriages. They might gain access to trade goods and improve the status of their families through the creation of ties with influential traders, but they also became subject over time to French-Catholic understandings of hierarchical gender roles that emphasized men’s dominance over women and the expectation that a proper woman should serve and obey her husband; Anderson, Chain Her by One Foot, 55, 57, 226–27.

72. Catherine J. Denial, Making Marriage: Husbands, Wives, and the American State in Dakota & Dakota and Ojibwe Country (St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2013), 99–100; Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur-Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1980) 37–38.

73. Spear, Race, 18, 26, 37.

74. For the association of Native women and land, as well as the notion of Native women’s “rapeability,” see Audra Simpson, “The State Is a Man: Theresa Spence, Loretta Saunders and the Gendered Costs of Settler Sovereignty,” Theory & Event (forthcoming: spring 2017). Also see Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spacialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (2000): 91–130. The historian Margaret Newell has shown through her reading of indirect sources that in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England, indigenous women (and girl) captives were also victims of sexual assault. She notes that women from high-status Native families sometimes received better treatment from their New England owners. Margaret Ellen Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 82, 83, 126, 230, 63.

75. French New Orleans colonist Tivas de Gourville quoted in Spear, Race, 29; La Vente quoted in Spear, Race 24; Cadillac and La Vente’s views described in Spear, Race, 23–4.

76. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 269, 271.

77. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 153; Rushforth, Bonds, 265; E. A. S. Demers, “John Askin and Indian Slaves at Michilimackinac,” in Alan Gallay, ed., Indian Slavery in Colonial America (Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2009), 392–416, 401. An examination of Ste. Anne’s Church records from Detroit between 1760–1815 indicate that one slaveholder, Jean Baptiste, served as godparent to the infant of his Panis slave, Madelaine, and “an unknown father” in 1798. While this fact is not evidence of paternity, it does raise the question of whether a French father might use this religious kinship system to informally claim or create a link with an enslaved child. Ste. Anne Church Records, Bentley Historical Library, 86966mf 534c, 535c, 536c, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Used by permission of the Detroit Catholic Diocese.

78. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 279.

79. DuVal, “Indian Intermarriage,” 279.

80. Rev. David Bacon, a Protestant missionary from the Congregational Church Association of Connecticut, came to Detroit in 1800. Methodist minister Rev. Nathaniel Bangs came to Detroit in 1804. Poremba, Detroit, 71, 89.

81. Burton, City, 704; Edward J. Hickey, Ste. Anne’s Parish: One Hundred Years of Detroit History, ed., Joe L. Norris (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1951), 18; Detroit Places Ste. Anne’s Church, History, http://historydetroit.com/places/ste_annes.php. Accessed December 9, 2013.

82. This list of tribes comes from a review of the Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL, through 1819.

83. The term “Sauteuse” here indicates Ojibwe. For more on the various names and subgroups of Anishinaabe people in the Great Lakes, see Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 13.

84. Trudel states that the Campeaus (sometimes spelled Campaus) in Montreal were a tight-knit family with fifty-seven slaves among them although they were only “small-scale fur traders” and not among the ultra-rich; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 259.

85. Judy Jacobson, Detroit River Connections: Historiographical and Biographical Sketches of the Eastern Great Lakes Border Region (Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1994); Russell, Michigan Censuses, 1762 Census, 20. Campau family wealth in the 1800s: Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 141–143. The Campau family papers in Detroit do not reveal many details of their slave transactions. Only one document describes the transfer of an enslaved “Negro” woman named Nancy from Jean B. Romain to his daughters on September 4, 1790. A transnational study of this slaveholding family that closely examined records on both sides of the border would be a revealing approach for further research. Campau Family Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI.

86. Russell, Michigan Censuses, 1762 Census, 21–25. There are nine head-of-household Campaus listed in the 1762 census. Louis Campau had no accompanying details beside his name in the census and is therefore not listed in my summary. Michel or Alex Campau (first name is uncertain in the record) had no notations for the latter part of the census categories by his name, suggesting either that the information was incomplete or that he had no girls, boys, slaves, or paid workers in his household; he is not listed in my summary.

87. Ste. Anne’s Church Records, Reel 1, VII, 1744–1780.

88. James Sterling to Ensign J. S. Schlosser, June 12, 1762, Sterling Letter Book. I am grateful to Jonathan Quint for pointing out the reference to Native women in this letter.

89. Dowry: Crouch, “Black City,” 25; James Sterling to [?], February 26, 1765, Sterling Letter Book; quoted in Marrero, “Founding Families,” 281; Marrero, “Founding,” 282–83.

90. Independent trade routes: Crouch, “Black City,” 25.

91. Crouch, “Black City,” 1, 4; James Sterling to [?], Sept 29, 1765, Sterling Letter Book. Christian Crouch was the first to analyze Sterling’s preference for black male laborers. In her paper, “The Black City,” she carefully considers and leaves open the question of why Sterling preferred black male laborers, speculating that black men had a greater facility in travel because of a learned ability to get along with native people lacking in white men like Morrison.

92. Marrero, “Founding Families,” 276; quoted in Marrero, 282; quoted in Crouch, “Black City,” 25. Karen Marrero first makes this argument that a black slave was a status symbol for Angelique Sterling in “Founding Families,” 282.

93. James Sterling to [?], November 12, 1764, Sterling Letter Book.

94. To John Porteous, June 6, 1771, Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, merchants, at Schenectady, New York, 1767–1776 (Buffalo Historical Society-BHS Microfilm Publication No. 1), Vol. 1. For several other letters involving slave orders for Detroit, see Farmer, History of Detroit, 344.

95. For examples of freedom suits won on the basis of Native American ancestry (especially maternity), see: Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 7, 39–56; Ariela Julie Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 22–27; Ariela Gross and Alejandro De La Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison,” North Carolina Law Review 91:5 (June 2013): 1699–1756, 1733; Tiya Miles, “The Narrative of Nancy, A Cherokee Woman,” Frontiers, A Journal of Women Studies, Special Issue: Intermarriage and North American Indians 29:2, 3 (Spring 2008): 59–80; Ekberg, Stealing, 91, 93. In Spanish-influenced areas of the Caribbean, Florida, and Southwest, indigenous slavery persisted into the nineteenth century; see Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2016).

96. Marrero, “Founding Families,” 272.

97. Marrero, “Founding Families,” 272, 287, 310; Quaife, Siege, 187.

98. Ekberg, Stealing, 68; Ste. Anne’s Records, May 30, 1764.

99. In his historical study of colonial French Illinois, Carl Ekberg describes this tendency by saying that Indian women were “reserved for white men”; Stealing, 76.

  100. James Sterling to [?], January 10, 1762, Sterling Letter Book.

  101. Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL. Our figure does not include enslaved babies listed as “mulatto” or with undesignated racial information, although some of these infants might well have been of indigenous descent. Carl Ekberg gives the number 167 for babies born to enslaved Indian mothers and white fathers in Detroit, citing Marcel Trudel; Ekberg, Stealing, 28. Trudel states that 177 “illegitimate children” were born to Indian slaves in Detroit; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 204. Trudel notes here, too, that Native enslaved women outnumbered men, and he implies that white men’s attraction influenced this demographic imbalance.

  102. Ekberg, Stealing, 75.

  103. Jacobson, Detroit, 29. Cangany, “Fashioning Moccasins,” 285–86.

  104. Demers, “John Askin,” 397–98. Re: Mannette, Detroit Notorial Register, Vol. A, June 11, 1768, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, pp. 68–69.

  105. Detroit Notorial Register, Vol. A, June 11, 1768, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, pp. 68–69.

  106. Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 36, 71. Jacobson, Detroit River, 36.

  107. Detroit can be characterized as a “society with slaves” rather than as a “slave society” because the core feature of the economy (the fur trade) was not produced solely or mainly by slave labor, and other labor systems persisted alongside slavery here. Nevertheless, slavery was important to the stability and economy of the settlement. For a description of this distinction in places where slavery was practiced, see Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 8–9.

  108. Ekberg discusses this blurred status of Indian slaves in French households; see Stealing, 45.

  109. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 140.

2: The War for Liberty (1774–1783)

1. The name of Ann Wyley has been recorded a number of ways in primary and secondary sources. She has been called Ann and Anne, as well as Nancy. Her last name has been spelled Wyley or Wiley. Jean Contencineau’s name has likewise been recorded with numerous spellings: Contancinau, Coutencineau. I am using the spelling from the Detroit trial record, March 1776. “Record of criminal trial in 1776, Detroit, ss,” reprinted in Charles H. Lanman, History of Michigan, Civil and Topographical in a Compendious Form: with a View of Surrounding Lakes (New York: E. French, 1839), 133–35. (Lanman offers as citation: “This record was found in the possession of Judge May. He knew the jury who tried the case.”) This trial record is also reprinted in Detroit in the Revolution, File: 2, Box: Works Detroit History 1760, Burton Papers (MS/Burton C.M.), Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, 61–62.

2. The Detroit River is often described as a “highway” of commerce in the region. See, for instance, Denver Brunsman, “Introduction,” in Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit, 3–22, 5.

3. This by-decade breakdown of the enslaved population is the result of our (Tiya Miles and Michelle Cassidy’s) analysis of the Ste. Anne’s Church records in which notations about “Panis,” “Negro,” and “Mulatto” slaves consistently appear. Our numbers are approximate because the Ste. Anne records do not offer a comprehensive count of all slaves in Detroit, some of whom were not involved in the church. In addition, these records include a number of entries about slaves for whom no racial designation is given. We have noted these people in a category labeled “unknown” in our count. The racial “unknowns” for the 1760s totaled thirteen people; the “unknowns” in the 1700s totaled four people. More than likely, the majority of these individuals were “Panis.” In the ratio for the 1760s to which this note corresponds, I have combined the number of blacks (three) with the number of “Mulattos” (two) to arrive at the total of five reported, even though the term “mulatto” could be used to designate persons of black and Indian ancestry as well as of black and white ancestry. Michelle Cassidy, a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Michigan, counted the number of entries in the Ste. Anne records and broke them down by decade, race, and gender. St. Anne Records, Bentley Historical Library, 86966mf 534c, 535c, 536c, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI. Used by permission of the Detroit Catholic Diocese.

4. “The Story of Jean Contancinau: Testimony,” translated in Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 57–58, Burton Papers, DPL. (Clarence Burton includes as citation: “The papers here collected are from the Haldimand collection, and Lanman’s History of Michigan. The testimony, such as it is, is in French in the old Detroit registry,” 56.

5. Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution” (booklet), 25.

6. Lanman, 134. “The Story of Jean Contancinau: Testimony,” translated in Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 58, Burton Papers, DPL. After the French and Indian War, Detroit operated under British martial law. The Quebec Act, passed in October 7, 1774 (the same year these thefts took place), brought civil rule to Michigan through a hybrid approach of French civil law and British criminal law. William Renwick Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule: Law and Law Courts, 1760–1796 (Lansing: Michigan Historical Society, 1926), 19–20. The stolen purse was green: “The Story of Jean Contancinau: Testimony,” translated in Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 59, Burton Papers, DPL.

7. For an analysis of the role of clothing in colonial transculturation processes, see Sophie White, Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012). For a discussion of the use of clothing to challenge caste and assert creativity and adornment in slave communities, see Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). Barbara Heath describes enslaved people’s use of material objects such as buttons and buckles to change the appearance of substandard clothing distributed by owners: Barbara Heath, “Materiality, Race, and Slavery: How Archaeology Contributes to Dialogues at Historic Sites,” unpublished paper, National Council on Public History, Nashville, TN, April 2015.

8. “Record of criminal trial in 1776, Detroit, ss,” reprinted in Charles H. Lanman, History of Michigan, 133.

9. Besides establishing the boundaries of Canada and declaring the application of British law to the former French territory, the Quebec Act of 1774 protected the right of French settlers to maintain their property and the right of Catholics to practice their faith. Lanman, History of Michigan, 132–33. The Quebec Act provided for the first civil government in Detroit, with the king slated to appoint “a governor, lieutenant-governor, or commander-in-chief, and a council.” Farmer, History of Detroit, 84. Of these possibilities, Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton, was the only official assigned. He became the supervisor of Philip Dejean, who was already serving as notary and justice of the peace in the town. Dejean had been appointed by military officers Captain Turnbull and Major Bayard, in 1767. In 1768 a public election (the structure of which is unclear) confirmed his role as “judge and justice of the district of Detroit.” Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution” (booklet), 20.

10. Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 108, 48, Burton Papers, DPL; Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution” (booklet), 20.

11. Lanman, History of Michigan, 132.

12. Ann is first called “Anne” in this testimony and then “Nancy.”

13. Second declaration of Prisoners, Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 294, Burton Papers, DPL.

14. Cenette, Chatelain and C Enfant did not appear in the 1768 or 1779 Detroit censuses; however, a Mrs. Chatlain is listed for 1779. A Joseph L’Enfant appears in the 1779 Detroit census as the owner of two slaves. Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, Inc., 1982), 42.

15. “Record of criminal trial in 1776, Detroit, ss,” reprinted in Charles H. Lanman, History of Michigan, 133. “The Story of Jean Contancinau: The Verdict,” Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 60, 61, Burton Papers, DPL.

16. “The Story of Jean Contancinau: The Judgment,” Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, 62, Burton Papers, DPL.

17. Presentment against Philip Dejean, Canadian Archives, Series B. Vol. 225, p. 501, reprinted in “Detroit in the Revolution,” File 2, 69, Burton Papers, DPL. William Renwick Riddell, The First Judge of Detroit and His Court (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1915), 9.

18. Secondary sources disagree about Wyley’s ultimate fate, and primary sources exist only in piecemeal fashion. The Detroit legal historian and judge William Riddell states that she was not put to death; Riddell, The First Judge of Detroit, 9. Detroit historian Clarence Burton also states that she was not executed in a description of the case that includes transcripts of the court record; see Clarence Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution” (booklet), File 2, 69, Burton Papers, DPL. Burton discusses the case similarly in: Clarence Burton “Building of Detroit-People,” Works Detroit History 1701, MS/Burton, C.M., Burton Historical Collection, DPL, 10; also see Clarence Burton, “Detroit Under British Rule,” Works Detroit History 1760, MS/Burton, C.M. Burton, Historical Collection, DPL, 26. In contrast, Detroit historian Silas Farmer states that Wyley was executed, see: Farmer, History of Detroit, 173–174, 957. For other accounts of this case, see: Poremba, Detroit, 50 (who calls this the first burglary in Detroit); Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit,” 27–28; Errin T. Stegich, “Liberty Hangs at Detroit: The Trial and Execution of Jean Contencineau,” in Denver Brunsman and Joel Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit: 67–72.

19. Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 147.

20. Mr. Thomas William to P. Dejean, August 5, 1778, Detroit, William Papers, Burton Historical Collection, DPL.

21. Tiya Miles, “Taking Leave, Making Lives: Creative Quests for Freedom in Early Black and Native America,” in Gabrielle Tayac, ed., IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2009), 146–49. Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 37.

22. John Bell Moran, The Moran Family: 200 Years in Detroit (Detroit: Alved of Detroit, 1949), 28.

23. The Royal Proclamation (October 7, 1763): “established the Allegheny Mountains as a formal boundary line between American colonial settlements and the western Indians’ hunting grounds and forbade all future private purchases of land from the Indians, reserving that privilege to the Crown.” However, many settlers ultimately ignored the act, which was difficult to enforce from afar. Quoted from Jon William Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain, 1758–1766,” Ethnohistory 44:4 (Autumn 1997): 617–54, 629. Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country: Crisis and Diversity in Native American Communities (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 21.

24. George L. Cornell, “American Indians at Wawiiatanong: An Early American History of Indigenous Peoples at Detroit,” in John H. Hartig, Honoring Our Detroit River: Caring for Our Home (Bloomfield Hills, MI: Cranbrook Institute of Science, 2003), 20.

25. Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL.

26. Quoted in Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 120; Farmer, History of Detroit, 472–73.

27. Farmer, History of Detroit, 837.

28. Quoted in David McCullough, 1776 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005), 135; McCullough, 135–37.

29. To Alex and William Macomb, June 22, 1775, Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, merchants, at Schenectady, New York, 1767–76 (Buffalo Historical Society-BHS Microfilm Publication No. 1), Vol. 3. David A. Armour and Keith R. Widder, At the Crossroads: Michilimackinac During the American Revolution (Mackinac Island, MI: Mackinac Island State Park Commission, 1978), 1; Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2008), 229.

30. John H. Hartig, “Introduction,” in Hartig, ed., Honoring Our Detroit River, 1–8, 6.

31. Quoted in Isabelle E. Swan, The Deep Roots: A History of Gross Ile, Michigan to July 6, 1876 (Grosse Ile, MI: Grosse Ile Historical Society, 1977), 20, 21.

32. Swan, Deep Roots, 14, 23.

33. Harris, Shadow of Slavery, 11.

34. Phrasing by Karen Marrero, “On the Edge of the West: The Roots and Routes of Detroit’s Urban Eighteenth Century,” in Jay Gitlin and Adam Arenson, eds., Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 66–86.

35. Catherine Cangany, Frontier Seaport: Detroit’s Transformation into an Atlantic Entrepot (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014), 3.

36. Swan, Deep Roots, 13–15, 23; Old Deed “Grosse Ile,” LMS / Macomb Family Papers, July 6 1776, Detroit Public Library, Detroit, MI; A. Macomb quoted in Swan, Deep Roots, 21; Macomb military account: Milo M. Quaife, “When Detroit Invaded Kentucky,” Filson Club History Quarterly 1:2 (January 1927): 53–67, 55.

37. Swan, Deep Roots, 14, 24–26. Size of farm: Record Book of Macomb Estate, Macomb Family Papers, R2:1796, BHC, DPL.

38. Ste. Anne’s Records, BHL. James May to Wm Macomb, Jan 12 1790, Alexander Fraser Papers, Detroit Public Library.

39. David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” American Studies 11:2 (Fall 1970), 60.

40. Quoted in Swan, Deep Roots, 17.

41. Quoted in Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 51. De Peyster kinship link: Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 51.

42. Calloway, American Revolution, 29–32, 36, 39, 43–44, 46; Armour & Widder, Crossroads, 51.

43. Donald Lee, “Clark and Lernoult: Reduction by Expansion,” in Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit, 73–77, 75; Quaife, “When Detroit Invaded Kentucky,” 1927.

44. Lee, “Clark and Lernoult,” in Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit, 75; Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark, Dec. 25, 1780, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, Julian P. Boyd. ed., Vol. 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1951), 234–37.

45. Proclamation by George R. Clark, December 24, 1778, translated in Jerry Lewis, “Red and Black Slaves in the Illinois Territory,” in Terry Straus and Grant P. Arndt, eds., Native Chicago (Chicago: Albatross Publishers, 1998), 82–86.

46. Americans were not the first to racialize Indians as Clark does in this example. British officers in Pontiac’s war also used racial terms, such as “copperheaded” and “black,” to indicate Native people.

47. In her illuminating study of the racial term “red,” Nancy Shoemaker shows how Native people in the East had their own meanings for color terms (such as red being associated with war) long before “red” came to be associated with Indianness. Both Europeans and American Indians began to adopt the racial term “red,” in different ways and for different reasons, in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Clark’s negative use of the term in the Illinois document, meant to emphasize slave caste, is not a usage that Native Americans would have willingly adopted. Nancy Shoemaker, “How Indians Got to Be Red,” The American Historical Review 102 (June 1997): 624–44. Frederick E. Hoxie, “Introduction,” in Frederick E. Hoxie, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Native Americans and the Early Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999), ix. James Sterling to John Sterling, October 6, 1763, Sterling Letter Book.

48. Clark, Proclamation, in Lewis, trans., “Red and Black Slaves.” Slave resistance during the war: Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 283, 290, 291; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 51–52.

49. Calloway, American Revolution, 22.

50. Quaife, “When Detroit Invaded Kentucky,” 55.

51. Captain Bird to Major Arent S. De Peyster, June 11, 1780, transcribed in Quaife, “When Detroit Invaded Kentucky,” 62–63.

52. Captain Bird to Wm Lee, a Negroe free, 1784, MS Bird Papers, Detroit Public Library.

53. Silver, Savage Neighbors, 250–51; Armour & Widder, Crossroads, 94; Brunsman, “Introduction,” in Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit, 12. Brett Rushforth notes the importance of slaves as “tokens” of alliance between indigenous groups and the French; Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance, 220–21.

54. Judy Jacobson, Detroit River Connections: Historiographical and Biographical Sketches of the Eastern Great Lakes Border Region (Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1994), 17.

55. Statement by Captain John Dunkin, quoted in Maude Ward Lafferty, “Destruction of Ruddle’s and Martin’s Forts in the Revolutionary War,” Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 54:189 (October 1956): 15; Lafferty, “Destruction,” 26.

56. “Petition of Agnes La Force,” Haldimand Papers, MPHC, XIX, 494. Also quoted in Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit,” 32–33.

57. Quaife, “When Detroit Invaded Kentucky,” 3, 4; Lafferty, “Destruction,” 26; Kneip, “Slavery in Detroit,” 32; “List of Slaves formerly the property of Mrs. Agnes Le Force now in possession of,” transcribed in Quaife, 66–67. “Slave Captives at Ruddell’s and Martin’s Forts,” www.frontierfolk.net/ramsha_research/captives3html; Accessed July 28, 2016. Jacques Duperon Baby: Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule, 52–53.

58. Calloway, American Revolution, 54.

59. Quoted in Clarence Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution” (Booklet—1906 Address to the Sons of the American Revolution) Works Printed Treaty of 1782 Miscellaneous Printed Material, Burton Papers, MS/Burton C. M., Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, 26; Clarence Burton, Detroit in the Revolution, File: 2, Box: Works Detroit History 1760, Burton Papers, MS/Burton, C. M., Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library, p. 2 typescript/137 handwritten. Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule, 50.

60. Burton, Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, p. 3 typescript/110 handwritten.

61. “Advertisement,” transcribed in Burton, “Detroit in the Revolution,” Booklet 22, BHC, DPL.

62. To Sir from Most Humble Servant, Sept. 21, 1777, Quebec, transcribed in John Almon and Thomas Pownall, The Remembrance of Impartial Repository of Public Events, Vol. 6 (London: J Almon, 1778), 188–89; also transcribed in Burton, Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, pp. 11–12 handwritten.

63. Stegich, “Liberty Hangs,” 68; Burton, Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, p. 1 typescript / 108 handwritten; Clarence Burton, “Building of Detroit-People,” Works Detroit History 1701, MS/Burton, C. M., BHC, DPL, 10, 11; Clarence Burton, “Detroit Under British Rule,” Works Detroit History 1760, MS/Burton, C. M., BHC, DPL, 26; Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 94; William Renwick Riddell, The First Judge at Detroit and His Court (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1915), 30. Hair buying: Silver, Savage Neighbors, 250–51; Burton, Detroit in the Revolution, File 2, p. 1 typescript / 108 handwritten.

64. Gifts: Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2006), 102.

65. Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses, 1782 Census, 49–56; Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” 60; Calloway, American Revolution, 54, 61.

66. Quoted in Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 135, 136, 117, 135.

67. The John Askin Papers Volume I: 1747–1795, Milo M. Quaife., ed. (Detroit: Detroit Library Commission, 1928), 68.

68. Askin Papers Vol. I, 94.

69. Detroit move: Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 31; Jacobson, Detroit River, 32. Barthe lot: “Actual Survey of the Narrows betwixt the Lake Erie and Sinclair,” by P. McNiff, reproduced in Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis, 62; Jacobson, Detroit River, 34. Sterling as representative: Armour and Widder, Crossroads, 75. Askin’s setbacks: Jacobson, Detroit River, 32.

70. Charlotte: Armour & Widder, Crossroads, 37. Pompey and Jupiter: “Sale of Negro Slaves,” Askin Papers, Vol. I, 58–59. Toon: Askin Papers, Vol I, 55.

71. John Askin to Jean Baptiste Barthe, June 8, 1778, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 118. Pomp and crew: John Askin to Jean Baptiste Barthe, May 18, 1778, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 91–94. Askin says about this crew, “I have given all three their provisions, and rum, up to June 1, and have paid them their wages for the same time.” This line may indicate that Pomp received some pay for his work, although Askin owned him and any pay would have been less than what the others received. More likely, as the sentence syntactically separates “provisions, and rum” from “wages,” it can be read as differentiating these categories in a way that would not include Pompey as a recipient of wages.

72. Sale of Indian: John Askin to Jean Baptiste Barthe, June 8, 1778, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 119. Pretty Panis: John Askin to Mr. Beausoleil, May 18, 1778, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 97–98. Shoes and gown: John Askin to Todd and McGill at Montreal, May 28, 1778, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 101–102; Jacobson, Detroit River, 31–32. Fancy girls: Edward E. Baptist, “‘Cuffy,’ ‘Fancy Maids,’ and ‘One-Eyed Men’: Rape, Commodification, and the Domestic Slave Trade in the United States,” American Historical Review 106:5 (December 2001): 1619–50. For more on fancy girls, see also Sharony Green, Remember Me to Miss Louisa: Hidden Black-White Intimacies in Antebellum America (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2015); Sharony Green, “‘Mr. Ballard, I Am Compelled to Write Again’: Beyond Bedrooms and Brothels, a Fancy Girl Speaks,” Black Women, Gender & Families 5:1 (Spring 2011): 17–40.

73. Askin Papers, Vol. I, 135. Sherene H. Razack, “Gendered Racial Violence and Spatialized Justice: The Murder of Pamela George,” Canadian Journal of Law and Society 15:2 (2000): 91–130, 93.

74. Melissa R. Luberti, “Caught in the Revolution: The Moravians in Detroit,” in Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit, 102–105, 102. Sympathy and complicity: Henry A. Ford, “History of the Moravian Settlement,” also titled “The Old Moravian Mission at Mt. Clemens,” Michigan Historical Collections, Vol. 10, 107–115, 110. Spies: Greg Dowd writes that the Moravians passed along information about an intended attack on Fort Laurens, Dowd, Spirited, 84–85. Taciturn: quoted in Ford, “Moravian Settlement,” 1. Flames: quoted in Dowd, Spirited, 84. This insight about Zeisberger’s reasoning comes from Greg Dowd’s analysis. For more on the Moravians in the Midwest, see John Heckewelder, A Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren among the Delaware and Mohegan Indians (Philadelphia, PA: McCarty & Davis, 1820).

75. Luberti, “Caught,” 102–103. Mulatto: Moravian Diary, Oct 18, 1776, translation by Del Moyer.

76. Rev. David Zeisberger quoted in Ford, Moravian Settlement,” 110.

77. The attack took place in March of 1782: Luberti, “Caught,” 103; Calloway, American Revolution, 39; Dowd, Spirited, 86; Silver, Savage Neighbors, 265–67. Treatment at Detroit: David Zeisberger, Diary of David Zeisberger: A Moravian Missionary among the Indians of Ohio, Vol. I, Eugene F. Bliss, ed. (Cincinnati: Robert Clark & Co., 1885), 111–12.

78. Diary of Zeisberger, Vol. 1, May, June 1783, 146, 154.

3: The Wild Northwest (1783–1803)

1. Benjamin Quarles, “The Revolutionary War as a Black Declaration of Independence,” in Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), 283. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 42–44, 51.

2. Edward Countryman, The American Revolution (1985; Revised Edition, New York: Hill and Wang, 2003), 228.

3. Report, Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Chafe, Mr. Howell, Temporary Government of Western Country Delivered March [ ]1784, MS/Jefferson Papers, BHC, DPL. The ordinance of 1784, drafted by a committee led by Jefferson, was viewed to be inadequate in part because it gave too much political authority to settlers in the territorial period. Jefferson was out of the country in 1787 when the new ordinance was written. Denis Duffey, “The Northwest Ordinance as a Constitutional Document,” Columbia Law Review 95:4 (May 1995): 929–68, 935–37. Other members of Jefferson’s 1784 committee included Samuel Chase and David Howell. In 1787, Peter Dane, a delegate from Massachusetts, introduced the slavery article for inclusion in the final text. Peter Onuf has argued that southerners could accept the slavery exception in the Northwest because they expected to benefit economically through commercial exchange with the region as it grew. Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 46–49, 110–11.

4. Northwest Ordinance (1787), www.ourdocuments.gov. Accessed May 5, 2015.

5. Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History (December 2010): 703–734, on prison labor see 717–23.

6. David G. Chardavoyne, “The Northwest Ordinance and Michigan’s Territorial Heritage,” in Paul Finkelman and Martin J. Hershock, eds., The History of Michigan Law (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 20.

7. Allison Mileo Gorsuch, “Midwest Territorial Courts and the Development of American Citizenship, 1810–1840” (Ph.D. diss., 2013), 40. Duffey, “Northwest Ordinance,” 933–34.

8. “Foundational document”: Duffey, “Northwest Ordinance,” 949. I am borrowing language from Lisa Lowe when I describe slavery and colonialism as “braided.” Lowe points to “settler colonialism as the condition for African slavery in the Americas.” Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 37–38.

9. Paul Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance: The Persistence of Bondage in Indiana and Illinois,” Journal of the Early Republic 9:1 (Spring 1989): 21–51, 22.

10. Jefferson to Clark, Dec. 25, 1780, Jefferson Papers, Vol. 4, 237.

11. Proclamation by George R. Clark, December 24, 1778, translated in Jerry Lewis, “Red and Black Slaves in the Illinois Territory,” in Terry Straus and Grant P. Arndt, eds., Native Chicago (Chicago: Albatross Publishers, 1998), 82–86. The Paris Peace Treaty of September 30, 1783, The Avalon Project, Yale Law School, avalon.law.yale.edu. Accessed May 5, 2015. William Renwick Riddell, “Notes on Great Britain and Canada with Respect to the Negro,” Journal of Negro History 13:2 (April 1928): 185–98, 186.

12. Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses, 1782 Census, 49–56; Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” 60. William Macomb re Sale of Two Negro Slaves, Macomb Family Papers, BHC, DPL.

13. Heidi Bohaker, “Reading Anishinaabe Identities: Meaning and Metaphor in Nindoodem Pictographs,” Ethnohistory 57:1 (Winter 2010): 11–33, 18.

14. Sale of Negro Man Pompey, Copy of Deed Furnished by W.W. Backus of Detroit, “Reports of Counties, Etc.,” MPHC, Vol. VI, 417.

15. James Mackelm to John Askin, September 4, 1801, Askin Correspondence, John Askin Papers, Folder 1800, BHC, DPL; James Mackelm to John Askin, September 20, 1801, Askin Correspondence, John Askin Papers, Folder 1800, BHC, DPL. Campau Family Papers, MS/Campau, 1715–1928 (delivery orders: Oct. 1791, Sept. 1792, Jan. 1796, Dec. 1797, Jan. 1804) BHC, DPL.

16. Calloway, American Revolution, 23.

17. It can be convincingly argued that these lands were not Great Britain’s to cede. For a critical discussion of British claims to possessing Native lands in the Canadian borderland region dating back to 1668, see Adam Gaudry, “Fantasies of Sovereignty: Deconstructing British and Canadian Claims to Ownership of the Historic-Northwest,” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 3:1 (2016): 46–74. Gov. Arthur St. Clair as slaveholder: Lehman, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 12.

18. David R. Farrell, “Askin (Erskine), John,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online, 2, http://www.biographi.ca/009004-11901-ephp?id_nbr=2242. Accessed Oct. 12, 2012. For more on Belle Isle see Janet Anderson, Island in the City: Belle Isle, Detroit’s Beautiful Island, Companion Book to an Exhibit at the Detroit Historical Museum, 2001, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Michael Rodriguez and Thomas Featherstone, Detroit’s Belle Isle: Island Park Gem (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing, 2003). Taylor, Divided Ground, 10.

19. Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule, 22, 26.

20. Farmer, History of Detroit, 84; David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001), 61, 62, 63, 346. D W Smith to John Askin, June 25, 1793, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 476–77.

21. Ste. Anne’s Records. This marriage also linked Grant to John Askin, as it was Askin’s sister-in-law who became Grant’s wife. Farrell, “Askin,” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 3.

22. Bill of Sale Josiah Cutten, Askin Papers, Vol. I, 284–87, 410–411.

23. Harrow Family File, “The King’s Vessels,” 29, 36 (1786), BHC, DPL.

24. Alexander Harrow Papers, Journal and Letter Book, typescript, D5 1791–1800, MS/Harrow, BHC, DPL. Stinson argues astutely that slave labor shored up white masculinity and class status in westward settlements where the idealized gentility of white life was difficult to reproduce and maintain. Stinson, “Black Bondspeople,” 17, 18 (unpublished version, cited by permission).

25. John Askin Estate Inventory - Detroit 1787, Jan. 1, 1787, John Askin Papers, BHC, DPL. Pompey does not appear in this inventory.

26. Ste. Anne’s Records, 1785, BHL, UM.

27. Alexander Coventry, Memoirs of an Emigrant The Journal of Alexander Coventry, M.D.; in Scotland, the United States and Canada during the period 1783–1831, Vol. I (Albany: The Albany Institute of Art and History, 1978), 1797, p. 859; quoted in Emily Macgillivray and Tiya Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion’: A Native Woman Trader’s Household in the Detroit River Region,” accepted for eds., Karen Marrero and Andrew Sturtevant, A Place in Common: Telling Histories of Early Detroit (Lansing: Michigan State University Press, in progress); Ainse’s household: Macgillivray and Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion.’” Ainse’s spouse Montour and relocation to Detroit: Taylor, Divided Ground, 397, 399. Emily Macgillivray, “Indigenous Trading Women of the Borderland Great Lakes, 1740–1845” (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2017).

28. Askin Papers, Vol. I, 193.

29. Margaret Paulee, captured by the Shawnee warrior White Bark, described Blue Jacket’s Detroit home and slaves in two accounts; quoted in John Sugden, Blue Jacket: Warrior of the Shawnees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003), 5; Blue Jacket’s father-in-law was Jacques Baby, p. 53. For more on Paulee, see John H. Moore, “A Captive of the Shawnees, 1779–1784,” West Virginia History 23:4 (July 1962): 287–96.

30. Excerpts from Fragments of an Account Book at the Fort Malden Museum Amherstburg, Ontario, May 27, 1784, cited in Macgillivray and Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion.’” Ainse’s business in Detroit: Taylor, Divided Ground, 399. Ainse’s male partner in Detroit: Macgillivray, “Indigenous Trading Women.”

31. Macgillivray, “Indigenous Trading Women.” Macgillivray and Miles, “‘She Has Lived in Fashion’”; Emily Macgillivray generously shared her findings about Ainse’s familial ties to Moravians in the Detroit area.

32. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, Sept. 1782, p. 111; Oct. 5, 1783, 166; Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 2, Sept. 27, 1796, p. 458; Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, June 14, 1784, pp. 194–95; 1782, p.106; 1784, p. 205; Nov. 16, 1785, p. 249.

33. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, 1782, p. 117; Feb. 26, 1784, p. 183; Ford “History of the Moravian Settlement” / “Old Moravian Mission,” 110, 113; Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, Feb. 22, 1784, p. 183; Feb. 12, 1784, p. 182.

34. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, Feb. 13, 1784, p. 182.

35. Taylor, Divided Ground, 136. Harrow Papers, Journal and Letterbook, March 15, 1799, BHC, DPL.

36. “Matthew Elliott Essex County,” (Toronto: York University, Harriet Tubman Institute, 2012), 1, 3, 4. For more on Elliott’s use of slave and indentured labor, see Reginald Horsman, Matthew Elliott, British Indian Agent (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 9, 29, 49.

37. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 2, 1791, p. 232. Diary of the Indian Congregation at Fairfield in Upper Canada, 1801, January 25, 1801, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, translated for Tiya Miles by Del-Louise Moyer. Diary of the Indian Congregation in Salem, Petquottink in Lake Erie, 1790–91, May 5, 1791, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, translated for Tiya Miles by Del-Louise Moyer, 2014.

38. Meldrum: Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 29. Land: “The Tucker Story,” Highlights from the Harrison Township Historical Commission’s First Educational Presentation: The Legacy of William Tucker,” April 27, 1994. Land and Virginia slaves as the Denisons: Robert F. Eldredge, Past and Present of Macomb County, Michigan (Chicago: S. J. Clarke Publishing Co., 1905), 626–27. Location on river: Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, Oct. 1, 1784, p. 203. Bride and slaves: “Tucker, William, House,” MI State Historic Preservation Objects, www.mcgi.state.mi.us/hso/sites/9541.htm. Accessed January 16, 2013.

39. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, Aug. 9, 1783, p. 160; vol. 2, Sun July 29, 1791, p. 186, Sun Aug. 7, 1791, p. 206.

40. Denison et al v. Catherine Tucker, in William Wirt Blume, ed., Transactions of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Michigan, 1805–1814, Vol. II (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1935), 133–136. Isabella E. Swan, Lisette (Grosse Ile, MI: Published by the Author, 1965), 4.

41. Swan, Lisette, 3.

42. No record that I was able to identify indicates Hannah Denison’s place of birth. Because she was moved through French and Indian circles, it seems likely that she was born in or obtained from Montreal or Quebec, where most slaves in northern New France were held. Within these two cities, Marcel Trudel found a fairly even number of black slaves, who made up 35.9 percent and 39.5 percent of the populations, respectively. Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 257.

43. Swan, Lisette, 4 note 6. Mark McPherson, “Lisette’s Legacy of Slavery” (second of a five part series), Michigan Chronicle, February 3, 1999. File B/Negroes—Forth, Elizabeth Denison, Reading Room, DPL. Elizabeth Denison Forth’s Elmwood Cemetery record gives her birth place as Virginia. This is likely an error dating back to county histories that said William Tucker brought a slave family with him from Virginia. This cemetery record also states that Forth died at age 114, another likely error. R. C. Simpson, To Whom It May Concern, Elmwood Cemetery, File B/Negroes—Forth, Elizabeth Denison, Reading Room, DPL.

44. “The Dennison DNA Project,” http://www.johnbrobb.com/JBR-DEN-1.htm. Accessed September 13, 2016. “Denniston/Dennison/Denison Homepage,” http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~vadennison. Accessed September 13, 2016.

45. Mark McPherson, “Lisette’s Legacy of Slavery,” (second of a five part series) Michigan Chronicle, February 3, 1999. File B/Negroes—Forth, Elizabeth Denison, Reading Room, DPL.

46. Harrow Papers, Journal and Letter Book, June 24, 1798, BHC, DPL.

47. Chippewa use and defense of land: Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, 1782, pp. 91, 122, 184; Nov. 1784, p. 207; Jan. 1785, p. 217; Jan. 1786, p. 256; Ford, “Moravian Settlement,” 6.

48. Winter and famine: Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, 1784, pp. 183, 203, 211; 1787, p. 353, 1788, p. 451; 1789, p. 47. Pestilence: Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 1, 1789, pp. 57–58.

49. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 2, 1791, p. 217; Nov. 1793, pp. 329–31.

50. Dowd, Spirited, 113.

51. New era and empire creation quotations: Calloway, American Revolution, xv.

52. Quoted from title of Karl S. Hele, ed., Lines Drawn upon the Water: First Nations and the Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008).

53. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 2, 1796, p. 461.

54. The Jay Treaty, November 19, 1794, The Avalon Project, Avalon.aw.yale.edu, Article 2.

55. The Jay Treaty, November 19, 1794, The Avalon Project, Avalon.aw.yale.edu, Article 2. Gorsuch, “Midwest Territorial Courts,” 15, 25, 34.

56. Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and History Review 29:4, Law, Slavery, and Justice: A Special Issue (November 2011): 1031–60, 1034.

57. Christopher Phillips, The Rivers Ran Backward: The Civil War and the Remaking of the American Middle Border (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 6, 10. Phillips locates his slaveholding ancestors in Kentucky.

58. 1773 Detroit Census, September 22, 1773, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collection, 1876–1886, Vol. 9 (Lansing: Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan), 649; Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses, 1782, 49–56, 1796, 59–67; Ste. Anne’s Records, BHC.

59. Christian Crouch establishes this point about the racial makeup of slaves changing in Detroit with the influx of Anglo settlers. Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revision of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” paper presented at The War Called Pontiac’s conference, Philadelphia, April 2013, cited by permission of the author, 2, 29. Marcel Trudel’s sums for the number of slaves held in Detroit are larger than mine overall. In a chart that breaks down the number of slaves in the province of Quebec (the borders of which changed over time) by city, he lists for Detroit 523 Indian slaves and 127 black slaves for a total of 650 slaves; Trudel, Canada’s Forgotten, 83, 75. Unfortunately, his incredibly instructive chart does not indicate exactly which sources he drew from to arrive at these totals for Detroit. My highest total for the enslaved population in Detroit is closer to 300. I attribute this variance to a number of factors. First, Trudel looks at a time span of 1629–1834, Second, he includes a wide range of French Canadian archival documents that I did not review. He counted each mention of a slave in these documents to arrive at a total number of 4,200 slaves in Quebec and the subsequent town breakdown. Third, Detroit’s general population numbers shift depending upon what boundaries are drawn (inside the fort walls, or inside as well as outside; on one side of the river, or on both sides), making stable and transparent enumeration a challenge. While I did keep a running count of the number of enslaved people who appeared in Detroit-based slaveholders’ manuscript records, I did not add these numbers to my totals. I relied on Ste. Anne’s Church records and census records as the main sources for my sums and used them to corroborate each other. The numbers on the Ste. Anne’s register ran very close to the census numbers. Adding the church, census, and manuscript record numbers together would have brought me to an overall figure closer to Trudel’s at 600, but I strove to avoid double counting in a situation in which many enslaved people went unnamed. Readers may therefore take my figures as conservative estimates. For additional sources that offer population figures for Detroit’s enslaved, see David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” Midcontinent American Studies Journal 11: 2 (fall 1970): 56–66, 62, 65. William Renwick Riddell, “The Slave in Upper Canada,” Journal of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology 14:2 (August 1923): 249–278, 251, note 10.

60. The outcome of Francois’s case is not recorded. Askin Papers, Vol. I, 399–401. Ford, “Moravian Settlement” / “Old Moravian Mission,” 114–15.

61. Zeisberger Diary, Vol. 2, 1794, p. 380.

62. Madelaine Askin to John Askin, March 4, 1798, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 132–33. Alexander Harrow Papers, Feb. 13, 1797, Feb. 14, 1797, Feb. 28, 1797, March 27, 1797, July 22, 1797, June 1, 1798, March 25, 1799, BHC, DPL.

63. Kenneth W. Porter, “Negroes and the Fur Trade,” Minnesota History 15:4 (Dec. 1934) 421–33, 424. John Askin Estate Inventory - Detroit 1787, Jan. 1, 1787, “Debts due Me taken from . . . Book No. 11,” John Askin Papers, Burton Historical Collection, DPL.

64. Record Book of Macomb Estate, Macomb Family Papers, R2:1796, BHC, DPL. Bet and her sons do not seem to have ended up with Captain Harrow, who tried to buy them in the same year. F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade, 1796 to 1805 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948), 31.

65. Robert B. Ross, The Early Bench and Bar of Detroit from 1805 to the End of 1850 (Detroit: Published by Richard P. Joy and Clarence M. Burton, 1907), 137.

66. As quoted in Ross, Early Bench, 139.

67. May ledger book, James May Papers, D3: 1792–98, BHC, DPL; May Daybook, D3: 1798–1804, BHC, DPL. This may have been a different Pompey than the man Askin bought in 1775.

68. As quoted in Ross, Early Bench, 139.

69. John Askin Papers, Vol. II, 358.

70. F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade, 1796 to 1805 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1948), 187, 134.

71. Askin Papers, Vol. II, 358–59.

72. Foot injury: Letterbooks of Phyn and Ellice, April 19, 1775, BHS. Toon’s death: Askin Papers, diary, v. 1, 50–58. Clinging to rock, frozen to death: Moravian Diary, Thames River, Ontario, June 3, 1807, December 1, 1800, translated by Del-Louise Moyer. These last two references are to enslaved men owned by Matthew Elliott.

73. Askin Papers, Vol. II, 563.

74. Bald, Detroit’s First, 75, 106, 151.

75. John Askin to Jam & McGill, May 15, 1800, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 293. Also quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 165–66.

76. John McCall was the printer in Detroit in 1796. According to Clever Bald, citing Silas Farmer, McCall was likely using a printing press formerly owned by William Macomb. Bald, Detroit’s First, 93, fn 6.

77. As quoted in Ross, Early Bench, 138.

78. Frederick A. Ogg, The Old Northwest: A Chronicle of the Ohio Valley and Beyond (Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.; Textbook Edition, Yale University Press, 1919), 99, 134–35. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, “The War of 1812 in The Old Northwest: An Introduction to the Bicentennial Edition, in Alec R. Gilpin, ed., The War of 1812 in The Old Northwest (1958; reprint, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2012), viii. Bald, Detroit’s First, 138, 132. R.W. Dick Phillips, Arthur St. Clair II: The Invisible Patriot (Bloomington, IN: iUniverse LLC), 39.

79. As quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 132; Bald, Detroit’s First, 139.

80. Ogg, The Old Northwest, 78.

81. Michigan Censuses, 1796 Wayne County, 74. This figure is an undercount. Hundreds more residents lived in settlements stretching along the river for miles, making a total of 2,053. In addition, one hundred absent men were estimated by the census takers to have been missed.

82. As quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 140.

83. As quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 140. For a detailed account of the tobacco spitting incident and Bates’s view of French women, see Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 147–148. For more on French elite adaptation to American expansion into former French territories, see Eberhard L. Faber, Building on the Land of Dreams: New Orleans and the Transformation of Early America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016).

84. As quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 141.

85. Bald, Detroit’s First, 161, 169. Clarence M. Burton, History of Detroit, 1780–1850, Financial and Commercial (Detroit, 1917), 43.

86. Notices in French & English: Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 1802–1805 (Detroit: Printed under the authority of the Common Council of Detroit with an Introduction by C.M. Burton, Historiographer, Burton Historical Collection, 1922), 44. Mail and news: Bald, Detroit’s First, 92–93. Mail: Observations relative to Wayne County by Sol. Sibley, for the perusal of Capt W. H. Harrison, 1800, Solomon Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL; Geo Wallace to James Henry, October 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. Sibley’s views: Observations relative to Wayne County by Sol. Sibley, for the perusal of Capt W. H. Harrison, 1800, Solomon Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

87. Bald, Detroit’s First, 189.

88. Burton, History of Detroit, 43.

89. John Askin to Robert Hamilton, April 8, 1802, Askin Papers, vol. II, 372–74.

90. Solomon Sibley to S. C. Vance, Aug. 20, 1803, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

91. Quoted in Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance,” 30. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 117.

92. Finkelman, “Evading the Ordinance,” 22, 23, 24, 36. M. Scott Heerman, “In a State of Slavery: Black Servitude in Illinois, 1800–1830,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14:1 (Winter 2016): 114–39, 117, 118. Allison Mileo Gorsuch, “To Indent Oneself: Ownership, Contracts, and Consent in Antebellum Illinois,” in Jean Allain, ed., The Legal Understanding of Slavery: From the Historical to the Contemporary (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 134, 137. Kinds of labor: Finkelman, 42; Heerman, 127, 129, 130.

93. Henry Hastings Sibley as slaveholder: Walt Bachman, Northern Slave, Black Dakota: The Life and Times of Joseph Godfrey (Bloomington, MN: Pond Dakota Press, Pond Dakota Heritage Society, 2013), 19, 20, 59, 198 n. 41. For more on slavery in Minnesota, see Christopher P. Lehman, Slavery in the Upper Mississippi Valley, 1787-1865 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company Inc., 2011), 114–141. “Governors of Minnesota,” Minnesota Historical Society, http://collections.mnhs.org/governors/index.php/10003986. “House Divided,” Dickinson College, http://hd.housedivided.dickinson.edu/node/39873. Both accessed July 29, 2016.

94. Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830, 1782 (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, Inc., 1982), 49–57.

95. The Declaration of Independence, The Charters of Freedom, www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/declaration_transcript.html. Accessed April 7, 2015.

96. Macomb County is formally named for Alexander Macomb, son of Alexander Macomb (William Macomb’s brother) and a War of 1812 veteran and Army commander in chief from 1828 to 1841. Macomb was born in 1782 in Detroit at the height of the city’s slaveholding period. Like his uncle William, Alexander’s father owned slaves and had seven enslaved people in his household the year the younger Alexander was born. Alexander Macomb likely inherited human property. Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses (Detroit Census of 1782), 54. Governor Lewis Cass established the name for Michigan’s third county in 1818. www.michmarkers.com/startup.asp?startpage=S0418.htm. Accessed May 30, 2016.

4: The Winds of Change (1802–1807)

1. Riddell, Michigan Under British Rule, 19–20. Northwest Ordinance, July 13, 1787; (National Archives Microfilm Publication M332, roll 9); Northwest Ordinance (1787), www.ourdocuments.gov. Accessed May 5, 2015. Miscellaneous Papers of the Continental Congress, 1774–89; Records of the Continental and Confederation Congresses and the Constitutional Convention, 1774–89, Record Group 360; National Archives; https://ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=8. Accessed June 2, 2016. Duffey, “Northwest Ordinance,” 956.

2. Adelaide’s elder sisters were Thérèse, Ellen, and Archange. Archange Askin’s husband was Captain David Meredith. Askin Papers, Vol. I, 13–16; Fashion: Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 49; Education: Jennifer Dionne, “Franco-Ontariens avant la lettre? La correspendence de la famille Askin” (PhD. Diss., University of Ottawa, 2007), 46–47.

3. Solomon Sibley to Samuel Vance October 1, 1802, Samuel C. Vance Papers, Manuscripts and Visual Collections Department, William Henry Smith Memorial Library, Indiana Historical Society, Indianapolis, IN.

4. Wedding: Bald, Detroit’s First, 19. China: Elijah Brush to Hugh Martin, February 25, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL; also quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 191. Silver: E Brush to Robinson and Martin, July 28, 1803; also quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 215. Elijah Brush to Martin & Robinson, July 11, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. Summer cloak, bonnet, shoes: E. Brush to Robinson & Martin, February 9, 1804, Sibley Papers, BHC, DBL, also quoted in Bald, Detroit’s First, 225. Men’s clothing: Brush to Martin & Robinson, July 11, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL; Beaver hat: Elijah Brush to Robinson & Martin, Sibley Papers Aug 7, 1802, BHC, DPL. Catherine Cangany first makes this point that the Brushes ordered items from New York while most Detroiters could not; Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 45–46.

5. Bald, Detroit’s First, 215, 225.

6. John Askin to Alexander Henry, February 27, 1802, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 371.

7. John Askin to Robert Hamilton, April 8, 1802, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 372–74.

8. Askin to Hamilton, April 8, 1802, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 372–74.

9. John Askin to Isaac Todd, April 8, 1802, Askin Papers, BHC, DPL.

10. John Askin to Robert Hamilton, April 8, 1802, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 372–74; Bald, Detroit’s First, 197.

11. Elijah Brush to John Askin, March 22, 1805, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 459–60.

12. Bald, Detroit’s First, 197. Askin to James and McGill, April 8, 1802; Taxes in 1802, Bald, Detroit’s First, 193–94. Brush obtained title to the Askin farm in 1806. Sale of Brush Farm, Askin Papers, Vol. II, pp. 530–32; Jacobson, Detroit River Connections, 60–61.

13. John Askin Jr. to John Askin, November 11, 1807, Askin Papers Vol. II, pp. 583–84; Bald, Detroit’s First, 233.

14. Afua Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier: Blacks and the Detroit River Region. A Focus on Henry Bibb,” Canadian Review of American Studies 30:2 (2000): 130, 133.

15. As quoted in Reginald Horsman, Matthew Elliott, British Indian Agent (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1964), 46; Shawnee wife: Horsman, 144; quoted in Horsman, 48.

16. Quoted in “Matthew Elliott Essex County” (Toronto: York University, Harriet Tubman Institute, 2012), 4, 5; whipping and shackles: “Matthew Elliott,” 5.

17. William Henry Smith, ed., The St. Clair Papers. The Life and Public Services of Arthur St. Clair, Vol. II (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co., 1882), 318–19. For a critique of the Northwest Ordinance’s effect on black and Native populations, see Sakina Mariam Hughes, “Under One Big Tent: American Indians, African Americans and the Circus World of Nineteenth-Century America” (Ph.D. diss., Michigan State University, 2012), 52–55.

18. Martha S. Jones, “Time, Space, and Jurisdiction ln Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York,” Law and History Review 29:4, Law, Slavery, and Justice: A Special Issue (November 2011): 1031–60, 1034.

19. Askin Papers, Vol. II, 357–58. Simon Campaue Complaint, Sibley Papers, March 25, 1802, BHC, DPL. Jas. Henry to any or either Constables of the County of Wayne, July 3, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. In the Case of Toby, a Panis Man, in William Wirt Blume, ed., Transactions of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Michigan, 1805–1814 Vol. II (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1935), 404, 405. Mary Abbott, Complaint, June 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

20. Elizabeth Audrain married to Robert Abbott: Burton, History of Detroit, 20. Abbot v. Jones, September 28, 1807, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan Vol. II, 23–28.

21. Abbot v. Jones, September 28, 1807, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan Vol. II, 23–28.

22. For unfree people’s negotiation of indenture contracts, see Heerman, “In a State of Slavery.” For enslaved people’s and free blacks’ use of law, see Laura F. Edwards, “Status without Rights: African Americans and the Tangled History of Law and Governance in the Nineteenth-Century U.S. South,” American Historical Review 112:2 (2007): 365–93; Ariela Gross and Alejandro De La Fuente, “Slaves, Free Blacks, and Race in the Legal Regimes of Cuba, Louisiana, and Virginia: A Comparison,” North Carolina Law Review 91:5 (June 2013): 1769–56; Ariela J. Gross, What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

23. A.J. Hull to Jaques Lassell, June 5, 1805, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. Antoine and Anna Smith are also referred to as Anthony and Anne Smith in the records.

24. A.J. Hull to Jaques Lassell, June 5, 1805, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

25. Ste. Anne Records, October 15, 1803, June 22, 1816. The record referencing Angelique’s birth says she was born to an “unknown father.” This may have been an oversight in the record, or Antoine may no longer have been with his family.

26. Alexander Harrow to Robert Taylor his servant, conditional manumission of said Rob, July 2, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

27. Ransom to Grant, August 7, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. John Reed: August 13, 1803, August 19, 1803, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. James May was appointed U.S. marshal from August to November 1806; Farmer History of Detroit, 176.

28. S. Sibley to Col. Grant, August 19, 1803, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

29. Christian Crouch makes a similar point, arguing that enslaved blacks may have learned the terrain and how to negotiate it politically from the example of native people. Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revision of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” paper presented at The War Called Pontiac’s conference, Philadelphia, April 2013, cited by permission of the author.

30. Charles St. Bernard, Indenture, October 4, 1799, Berthelet Papers, Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.

31. Heerman, “State of Slavery,” 117. “Bob’s Indenture,” 1802, William Woodbridge Papers, 1763–1919, BHC, DPL. Preserved servitude contracts are few and far between in Detroit and most often identify poor whites and free Native American workers, but some of these records might be further evidence of the experience of enslaved people. For another Detroit indentured servant record, see Matt Henry, Justice of the Peace, July 31, 1803, Solomon Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

32. David Maney to Eliabeth Burnett, September 17, 1802, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL. James May Papers, D3, 1792–98, Pomp: September 6, 1795, Black Betty: August 3, 1797, BHC, DPL. May Papers, D3: 1798–1804 Daybook, Burnett: August 27, 1800, La Leavre: December 3, 1800, Black Patty: April 10, 1801, BHC, DPL. Black Betty and Black Patty’s names are similar enough that they might have been the same person. May’s daybook also includes a payment reference for 1793: “cash lent him to pay Baby’s man,” Vincent Laframboise: June 1793, May Papers BHC, DPL. Macomb Papers, Ledger, August 27, Sept 3, September 10 1804, January 6, 1805, April 9, 1805.

33. Askin Papers, Vol. II, pp. 388–89.

34. Diary of the Reconnoitering Trip Made by Brothers Luckenbach and Haven, Accompanied by the Indian Brother Andreas, at St. Mary’s River, the Southern Arm of Miami, which Empties into Lake Erie, August 29, 1808 (B157F11 08-29-1808), Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, translated for Tiya Miles by Del-Louise Moyer, 2015. Tanner, Atlas of Great Lakes Indian History, Maps 17, 18 pp. 85–88. Joseph Badger, A Memoir of Rev. Joseph Badger (Hudson, OH: Sawyer, Ingersoll & Co., 1851; Niles, OH: Niles Historical Society, 1997, 100, 130–31. “The Journal of Benjamin Larkin, 1794–1820,” in William Warren Sweet, ed., Religion on the American Frontier, 1783–1840: The Methodists: A Collection of Source Materials, Vol. 4 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1946), 241. Historian William Hart places the contemporary location of Negrotown at: “the intersections of County Routes 37, 29, and 40 just west of Belle Vernon, Ohio, and north of Upper Sandusky. Bill Hart, “Sources to ‘Negrotown,’ Ohio, 1800–1843,” unpublished compilation, 2016.

35. Diary of Fairfield Mission, Thames River, Ontario, Canada, 1792–1813, July 4 1797, Moravian Archives, Bethlehem, PA, translated for Tiya Miles by Del-Louise Moyer.

36. Kenneth W. Porter, “Negroes and the Fur Trade,” Minnesota History 15:4 (Dec. 1934), 421–33, 424. Bill Hart, “Sources to ‘Negrotown,’ Ohio, 1800–1843,” unpublished compilation, 2016.

37. Bill Hart, “Sources to ‘Negrotown,’ Ohio, 1800–1843,” unpublished compilation, 2016.

38. Bill Hart, Conversation with Tiya Miles about Negro Town, June 7, 2016, Middlebury, VT. For more on black-Wyandot relations in Ohio, see Sakina M. Hughes, “The Community Became an Almost Civilized and Christian One: John Stewart’s Mission to the Wyandots and Religious Colonialism as African American Racial Uplift,” NAIS: Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 3:1 (2016): 24–45.

39. Askin Papers, Vol. II, 561–63. Nobbin was recaptured and held at the Askin estate on May’s behalf. May proclaimed that Nobbin was likely afraid of being whipped as punishment. In 1813, John Askin bemoaned the escape of his enslaved woman, Madelaine; Askin Papers, Vol. II, 772.

40. Escapes seem to increase after 1796; however, record keeping improves as well at this moment due to the activity of the court. It is therefore possible that the number of escapes remained nearly constant but that evidence becomes more plentiful because of court recording.

41. As quoted in Judy Jacobson, Detroit River Connections: Historiographical and Biographical Sketches of the Eastern Great Lakes Border Region (Baltimore: Clearfield Company, 1994), 6.1

42. Bald, Detroit’s First, 190; Bald, Great Fire, 4–5.

43. Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 1802–1805 (Detroit: Printed under the authority of the Common Council of Detroit with an Introduction by C.M. Burton, Historiographer, Burton Historical Collection, 1922), 41.

44. An Act for the Relief and Settlement of the Poor, in Laws of the Territory of Michigan: Laws Adopted by the Governor and Judges, Vol. 1 (Lansing: W. S. George & Co Printers to the State, 1871), 4 vols. University of Michigan Law Library, Source library: Yale Law Library, The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 602. An Act to Regulate Blacks and Mulattoes, and to Punish the Kidnapping of Such Persons, in Laws of the Territory of Michigan, 634. The earliest law addressing indentured servitude in American Detroit was a Michigan Territory law passed in 1809: An Act for Support of the Poor stipulated that servants who had completed their contracts could become lawful settlers but that bringing “paupers” into the territory would be penalized. In 1827, a later territorial law, An Act for the Relief and Settlement of the Poor, stipulated that each town had to maintain its own poor and that individuals who had completed their indentures in the territory were legal settlers. Also in 1827, a more detailed Act Concerning Apprentices and Servants was passed, which assumed voluntary servitude for all servants, required parental or guardian approval for minors, set an age limit at twenty-one years for length of childhood indenture and noted that indentures might have varying specific durations, provided for the jailing of servants who reneged on their duties, and allowed for complaints to be made about mistreatment by masters. Laws of the Territory of Michigan: Laws Adopted by the Governor and Judges. Vol. 2. (Lansing: W. S. George & Co Printers to the State, 1874), pp. 40, 507–508, 595. None of these laws make mention of race. For more on Thornton and Lucie (also Rutha) Blackburn, see: Karolyn Smardz Frost, “Forging Transnational Networks for Freedom: From the War of 1812 to the Blackburn Riots of 1833,” in Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 43–66; Norman McRae, “Crossing the Detroit River to Find Freedom,” Michigan History Vol. 67, No. 2 (March/April 1983): 35–39.

45. Bald, Great Fire, 10–11. By adopting a comprehensive fire prevention system, Detroit was borrowing from cities like Philadelphia, which began adopting similar codes in the early 1700s. Arwen P. Mohun, Risk: Negotiating Safety in American Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 12, 17, 24.

46. Bald, Detroit’s First, 197; Bald, Great Fire, 10.

47. Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 1802–1805 (Detroit: Printed under the authority of the Common Council of Detroit with an Introduction by C.M. Burton, Historiographer, Burton Historical Collection, 1922), 37–38, 59. Henry Berthelet applied for U.S. citizenship and took the oath in Detroit in 1807; In the Matter of the application of Henry Berthelet, in William Wirt Blume, ed., Transactions of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Michigan, 1805–1814, Vol. I (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1935), 404.

48. The United States vs. Margaret White, September 4, 1800, Woodbridge Papers, BHC, DPL. White pled not guilty. Rashauna Johnson, Slavery’s Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 115–26.

49. Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 43.

50. J. May meat and trash: Ross, Early Bench, 139. Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 44.

51. Corporation of the Town of Detroit: Act of Incorporation and Journal of the Board of Trustees, 37.

52. Ste. Anne Church Records, BHL, UM.

53. 1802 taxes: Bald, Detroit’s First, 194; the highest homes taxed in 1802 were owned by Richard Donovan and John Dodemead. 1805 taxes: Other high taxpayers included Solomon Sibley and father Gabriel Richard. R. N. Drake, “Sketch of Judge May: The Grandfather of Mrs. Seymour,” From Drake Scrapbook in Possession of R.N. Drake, R.N. Drake, Seattle, WA, from Scrapbook of Drake loaned to C.M.B., James May Papers, Wallet 1, BHC, DPL. The grandson of an original French Detroit settler and slaveholder, Joseph Campau likely inherited slaves. Certainly, he owned at least two Native slaves, Jacques and Thomas, who both died in 1805. Ste. Anne Church Records, BHL, UM.

54. Macomb Ledger, Macomb Estate Papers, BHC, DPL, 19–20.

55. Bald, Detroit’s First, 235. Bald notes that the western boundary of Michigan Territory differed slightly from the previous boundary of Wayne County. Instead of extending to the western edge of Lake Michigan, Michigan Territory’s border was drawn through the middle of the lake.

56. Elijah Brush and Thomas Jones were appointed fire inspectors by the town trustees in 1805; Bald, Detroit’s First, 237. Brush was appointed lieutenant colonel of Legionary Corps in the Militia of the Territory of Michigan; William Hull, to all to whom these presents shall come, William Woodbridge Papers, September 12, 1805, BHC, DPL.

57. E. Brush to Robison & Martin, October 6, 1803, Sibley Papers, BHC, DPL.

58. Bald, Detroit’s First, 240.

59. Robert Munro letter, June 14, 1805, as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 490.

60. Robert Munro letter, June 14, 1805, as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 490–91.

61. Bald, Great Fire, 12–14; Bald, Detroit’s First, 239–40; Jean Dilhet, Beginnings of the Catholic Church in the United States, translated and annotated by Patrick W. Browne (Washington, D.C.: The Salve Regina Press, 1922), 114; Robert Munro letter, June 14, 1805, as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 491.

62. Munro to Harrison, June 14, 1805, Logan Esarey, ed., Governors Messages and Letters: Messages and Letters of William Henry Harrison, Vol. 1, 1800–1811 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Commission, 1922), 136–37; also quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 490.

63. Bald, Great Fire, 13–14.

64. Munro to Harrison, June 14, 1805, Logan Esarey, ed., Governors Messages, 136–37; also quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 490.

65. As quoted in Bald, Great Fire, 14.

66. Bald, Detroit’s First, 242. While Jefferson attempted to appoint three judges as stipulated in the plan for Michigan Territory, two men turned down the third open post, resulting in only Woodward and Bates being present after the fire. Bald, Detroit’s First, 242, footnote 5.

67. Jefferson to John Woodward, Jefferson Papers, Series 1, Vol. 4, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

68. Notes on My Visit to Mr. Jefferson, 1796, Augustus Brevoot Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

69. Notes on My Visit to Mr. Jefferson, 1796, Augustus Brevoot Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

70. “Essay on Habit,” 1794, Box 1 Correspondence 1782–94, Augustus Brevoot Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL. Woodward’s notes cite at least two cases involving blacks during his Washington years. In one case he played a role in taking depositions from a free black woman named Milly Smith who was married to an enslaved man and attempting to free her children; Augustus Woodward Papers, Box 2: 1795–1805, April 8, 1803, BHC, DPL. The other case involved an indentured “mulatto woman” named Celeste about whom Woodward had information requested by her employer; Pollock to Woodward, April 23, 1804, Correspondence with Oliver Pollock Folder, 1780–1813, BHC, DPL. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Philadelphia: Prichard and Hall, 1788).

71. A.B. Woodward to Thomas Jefferson, October 20, 1803, Jefferson Papers, Series 2, vol. 88, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

72. Bald, Detroit’s First, 242. Woodward oath of fidelity, September 12, 1805, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

73. Woodward’s was the strongest voice on the Supreme Court by far. Justice Frederick Bates resigned in 1806, leaving his seat vacant until 1808 when he was replaced by Justice James Witherell. Justice John Griffin, the third initial appointee, has been described as a fairly passive supporter of Woodward’s leadership. Woodward served as chief justice from 1805 to 1823. Burton, “Augustus Brevoort Woodward,” 638, 640, 646. Edward J. Littlejohn, “Slaves, Judge Woodward, and the Supreme Court of the Michigan Territory,” Michigan Bar Journal (July 2015): 22–25, 22, 23. The Woodward Code of Laws, created in 1805, was republished in Laws of the Territory of Michigan: Laws Adopted by the Governor and Judges. Vol. 1. Lansing, 1871. 4 vols. The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources.

74. Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 22–25, 23.

75. Bald, Detroit’s First, 241–42.

76. Farmer, History of Detroit, 490; Girardin, baker, as slaveholder: Ste. Anne Church Records, January 1, 1786.

77. Bald, Great Fire, 15; Bald, Detroit’s First, 242.

78. William Hull to James Madison, August 3, 1805, as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 490.

79. David Braithwaite, “Brigadier General William Hull: His Military and Political Story,” Hull Family Association Journal 15:1 (Autumn 2004): 96–99, 97.

80. Mr. Gentle as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 491; Bald, Detroit’s First, 241.

81. Bald, Detroit’s First, 243.

82. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Picador, 2007).

83. Bald, Great Fire, 12. Elijah Brush, James May, and John Anderson to the President of the United States, 1806, LMS/Alexander D. Fraser Papers, 1800–1816, BHC, DPL.

84. Bald, Great Fire, 16. Kenneth R. Fletcher, “A Brief History of Pierre L’Enfant and Washington D.C.,” Smithsonian.com, April 30, 2008. Accessed May 13, 2016.

85. Topica, August 16 & 17, 1792, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

86. Notes: Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution, May 24, 1794, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL; To the President of the United States of America, July 4, 1798, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

87. Copy of Philip Freneau, “On the American and French Revolutions,” January 1, 1790, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

88. “Between a Patriot & a British,” July 29, 1796, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

89. May’s home, located on the corner of Jefferson Ave. and Cass St. May’s Creek, was later closed off and incorporated into the city’s sewer system. Ross, Early Bench, 140–42. Farmer, History of Detroit, 481.

90. Mr. Gentle, Statements, as quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 491.

91. William Tucker Probate, reel 1, Wayne County Probates, State Library of Michigan, Lansing, MI. In his decision of the Denison v. Tucker case, Judge Woodward says British buying and selling of slaves is to be determined case by case.

92. Tucker Probate, Wayne County Probates, State Library of Michigan.

93. Denison et al v. Catherine Tucker, Writ of Habeas Corpus ad Subjiciendum, in William Wirt Blume, ed., Transactions of the Supreme Court of the Territory of Michigan, 1805–1814, Vol. II (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1935), 133–36.

94. Denison v. Tucker, Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan Vol. II, 133–36.

95. “The Brush Homestead in 1850,” reproduced in Farmer, History of Detroit, 378.

96. Silas Farmer, History of Detroit, 367, 374.

97. Jacobson, Detroit River, 60.

98. Brush treasurer: Farmer, History of Detroit, 89.

99. Jacobson, Detroit River, 60.

  100. While seamstresses did “piece work” sewing, dressmakers possessed a higher level of skill, and in a free labor economy, earned more pay; Angela P. Robbins, “Bridging the Old South and the New: Women in the Economic Transformation of the North Carolina Piedmont, 1865–1920” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina Greensboro, 2010), p. 21. As quoted in Jacobson, Detroit River, 61.

  101. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 9. The records on this case do not include opinions or dissents by any other judge. The notes of Detroit archivist and historian Clarence Burton also indicate that Woodward was the sole decider in this case; Legal Notes, Clarence Burton Papers, DPL. Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. II, 216. Michigan’s Dred Scott case quote: Reginald R. Larrie, Makin’ Free: African Americans in the Northwest Territory (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981), 6; a like phrase also quoted in Charlie Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” in Denver Brunsman, Joel Stone, and Douglas D. Fisher, eds., Border Crossings: The Detroit River Region in the War of 1812 (Detroit: Detroit Historical Society, 2012), 89. For more on the Dred and Harriet Scott case and an analysis that includes gender and the family, see Lea VanderVelde, Mrs. Dred Scott: A Life on Slavery’s Frontier (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).

  102. As quoted in Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 23.

  103. Littlejohn, “Slaves, 23; Charles Moore, “Augustus Brevoort Woodward—A Citizen of Two Cities,” in The Committee on Publication and the Recording Secretary, Records of the Columbia Historical Society, vol. 4 (Washington D.C., 1901): 114–27, 126.

  104. Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 22, 23; Moore, “Slave Law,” 126; Burton, “Augustus Brevoort Woodward,” MPHC, Vol. 29, 638–39.

  105. Quotations and mottos, Woodward Papers April 10, 1789 BHC, DPL.

  106. Woodward Papers April 10, 1789 BHC, DPL; Composition of 1793, On the qualities requisite for greatness, May 2 1793, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

  107. Laws of the Territory of Michigan: Laws Adopted by the Governor and Judges, Vol. 1. Lansing, 1871. 4 vols. The Making of Modern Law: Primary Sources, 10.

  108. Paul D. Halliday, Habeas Corpus: From England to Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 1–2, 101, 120, 174. Anthony Gregory, The Power of Habeas Corpus in America: From the King’s Prerogative to the War on Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 78–80. As Lea VanderVelde has detailed, the first freedom suit decided in the Northwest Territory was brought by black Revolutionary War veteran, Peter McNelly. McNelly petitioned for the freedom of himself and his wife, Queen, in Vincennes, Indiana, in 1794; their suit also employed the writ of habeas corpus. Although the judge found in their favor, power plays among prominent white men led to Peter McNelly’s kidnapping and coerced indenture and to Queen’s disappearance. VanderVelde, Redemption Songs, 24–37.

  109. Wilbert E. Moore, “Slave Law and the Social Structure,” Journal of Negro History 26:2 (April 1941): 171–202, 188.

  110. Denison v. Tucker, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. II, 133–36.

  111. Journal, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of of Michigan, Vol. I, 381.

  112. Journal, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 381. Woodward decision: Journal, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 387.

  113. In the Matter of Elizabeth Denison, James Denison, Scipio Denison, and Peter Denison junior, detained by Catherine Tucker, August–October 14, 1807, Oct. 1, 1807, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

  114. Reading List, Sept 6, 1792, Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

  115. James Wood to Augustus Woodward, Aug. 18, 1807, Sandwich, Harris Hickman Papers, BHC, DPL. “An ACT to enable persons held in slavery, to sue for their freedom,” June 27, 1807, Laws of the Territory of Louisiana, Missouri Digital Heritage, Missouri State Archives. Petitioners held the burden of proof in demonstrating that they were actually free and being held by force. https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/education/aahi/beforedredscott/1807FreedomStatute. https://www.sos.mo.gov/archives/education/aahi/beforedredscott/history_freedomsuits. Accessed March 30, 2017.

  116. Woodward decision: Journal, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 386. As quoted in Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 25.

  117. Syllabi of Decisions and Opinions, In the Matter of Elizabeth Denison, Et Al, September 26, 1807, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 319.

  118. McRae, “Crossing,” 36.

  119. Pattinson Petition for return of slave Jenney, Woodward Papers, F: 1805–1807, BHC, DPL; Case 76, Pattinson’s Affidavit, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. II, 156. Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 24; Norman McRae, “Crossing the River to Find Freedom,” Michigan History 67:2 (March/April 1983): 35–39, 36. In the Case of Toby, a Panis Man, in Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. II, 404, 405.

  120. Calendar of Cases, Case 76 In the Matter of Richard Pattinson, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 99–100; Syllabi of Decisions and Opinions, No. 76 In the Matter of Richard Pattinson, October 23, 1807, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 321–22. Journal, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 414.

  121. Case 76, Pattinson’s Affidavit, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. II, 156; Case 76 In the Matter of Richard Pattinson, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, 99. Pattinson Petition for return of slave Jenney, Oct. 19, 1807 Woodward Papers, June 14, 1811 F: 1805–1807 BHC, DPL.

  122. James Heward vs. Charles Curry, Affidavit In the Case of Matthew Elliott Esq., October 21, 1807, Selected Papers SC of Michigan, 155–56; James Heward Papers, File 29 (new No. 49), BHC, DPL. “Matthew Elliott Essex County,” (Toronto: York University, Harriet Tubman Institute, 2012), 7.

  123. Calendar of Cases, Case 60 In the Matter of Elizabeth Denison, James Denison, Scipio Denison and Peter Denison, Jr., 1807, Habeas corpus, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan Vol. II, 86–87. Brush representing Elliott: Selected Papers, Case 90, Affidavit of Elijah Brush, 1807, in Blume, ed., Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. II, 215–16.

  124. Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. II, 216.

  125. As quoted in Littlejohn, “Slaves,” 24.

  126. Veta Smith Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom in Frontier Detroit,” in Karolyn Smardz Frost and Veta Smith Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier: Slavery, Resistance, and the Underground Railroad in the Detroit River Borderland (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2016), 27–42. Veta Tucker gives a detailed account of the Denisons’ time in Canada; see Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom,” 35. Sandwich is now a historic neighborhood in the city of Windsor, Ontario.

5: The Rise of the Renegades (1807–1815)

1. According to David Poremba, the Smyth tavern was located on present-day Woodward Ave., near the Woodbridge intersection. David Lee Poremba, Detroit in Its World Setting, 90. Smyth as hatter: Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. II, 216.

2. Augustus B. Woodward to James Madison, March 17, 1808, Ms/Woodward A. B., BHC, DPL. Translation by Michelle Cassidy, November 2016.

3. Duffey, “Northwest Ordinance,” 953–54.

4. Braithwaite, “Military Record,” 96–98, 97; quote from Braithwaite, 96. Anthony J. Yanik, The Fall and Recapture of Detroit in the War of 1812 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2011), 13, 14. Hull children, Lake Erie winds, vanished town: “Introduction,” MHPC Vol. XL, 30, 31.

5. SH (Sarah Hull) to William Hull, April 10, 1809, William Hull Papers, BHC, DPL. Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, 1982), 1805 Lists, 82–86. Catherine Cangany captures this aspect of Detroit’s insularity: Detroit’s “insularity, its dogged preservation of social and political localisms, its disdain for things unwanted and external, and its refusal to stand on ceremony”; Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 167–68. Quote about French residents: Augustus B. Woodward to James Madison, March 17, 1808, Ms/Woodward A. B., BHC, DPL. Quoted description of Detroit: Alec R. Gilpin, The War of 1812 in The Old Northwest (2012; reprint, East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1958), 24–25. Braithwaite, “Military Record,” 96–98, 96. Sarah and William married in 1781; Braithwaite, “Military Record,” 96. Sarah Hull at Saratoga: “Biographical Sketch: Sarah Fuller Hull, Wife of General William Hull,” Hull Family Association Journal 15:3 (Autumn 2004): 99; reprint of Elizabeth F. Ellet, The Eminent and Heroic Women of America (New York: Arno Press, 1974, repr. of 1783 ed.), 95–96.

6. Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, & Indian Allies (New York: Vintage Books, 2010), 102–105. Hull route by boat: Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 14.

7. Impressment numbers: James Miller and John Thompson, National Geographic Almanac of American History (Washington, D.C.: National Geographic, 2007), 124; ten thousand American men had been captured, with thousands gaining release and six thousand remaining in British custody by 1807; Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 105. Jenkin Ratford: Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 102.

8. Embargo: Miller and Thompson, Almanac of American History, 125. Indian fears and Fort Mackinac Letter: Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 16–17.

9. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 16. “Introduction,” MPHC Vol. XL, 34–35.

10. Lieutenant Colonel E. Brush Commission by William Hull, Sept. 12, 1805, William Woodbridge Papers, DPL. Brush resigned from this post in 1809.

11. James Askin to Charles Askin, August 18, 1807, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 566. John Askin to Isaac Todd, September 4, 1807, Askin Papers, Vol. II, 570; quoted in Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” 85.

12. Lieut. Colonel Grant to Secretary Green, August 17, 1807, MPHC Vol. VI, 41–43.

13. Case 60, In the Matter of Elizabeth Denison, James Denison, Scipio Denison and Peter Denison, Jr., Calender of Cases, Papers in File, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. I, 87. Examination of James Dodemead respecting the ill treatment said to have been received by James Heward, a subject of his Britannic Majesty, October 27, 1807, Heward Papers, DPL.

14. Examination of James Dodemead respecting the ill treatment said to have been received by James Heward.

15. Examination of James Dodemead respecting the ill treatment said to have been received by James Heward. Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. II, 216. Case 91, Affidavit of Harris H. Hickman, 218–19.

16. Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, 217.

17. Examination of James Dodemead respecting the ill treatment said to have been received by James Heward, a subject of his Britannic Majesty, October 27, 1807, Heward Papers, DPL. Affidavit of Elijah Brush, respecting ill treatment of Matthew Elliott, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. II, 216. Augustus B. Woodward to James Madison, March 17, 1808, Ms/Woodward A. B., BHC, DPL.

18. Lieut. Colonel Grant to Secretary Green, August 17, 1807, MPHC Vol. VI, 41–43. Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 8, 68, 83. Blacks boarding ships: Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 113. Starting with Virginia in 1639, American colonial governments banned the arming of people of African descent, but they rolled back these prohibitions at times when officials felt the need for extra military manpower, such as in the Yamasee War of 1715, during which South Carolina approved of arming Africans, including those who were enslaved, to fight Native combatants. This process did not include training or a formalization of black men’s leadership or authority. Charles Johnson, Jr., African American Soldiers in the National Guard: Recruitment and Deployment during Peacetime and War (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992), 1–2. The African American military historian Charles Johnson dates the formal beginning of African American militia groups to the late nineteenth century (1877) and notes that territorial policy sometimes deviated from national policy. This was, he states, the case with William Hull, who “formed a company composed entirely of Africans to assist in protecting the frontier against British invasion.” Johnson, African American Soldiers, 5. The force from Santo Domingo that fought with French troops in support of the American cause in Savannah during the American Revolution in 1779 was not American-born but Haitian; Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution, 82. In Massachusetts, an all-black company was led by Col. George Middleton during the Revolutionary War; Middleton was African American; Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 49. Monuments to black soldiers in the Revolutionary War exist in Savannah as well as Washington, D.C.

19. A.B. Woodward to William Eustis, Secretary of War, July 28, 1812, Clarence Edwin Carter, Territorial Papers, Volume 10, 389–92.

20. William Hull to Jaspar Grant, September 3, 1807, MPHC, Vol. 31, 600, quoted in Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” 91.

21. “Black History Month: Remembering the First Black Militia,” [no date listed], MonroeNews.com, Accessed March 19, 2012. Reconstructing the formation and engagements of the black militia of Detroit is a difficult task due to the piecemeal nature of the written record. Only a handful of primary sources have been found to date about the militia. Two of those sources, a journalistic report on the war from July 2012 and a letter by Augustus Woodward in June of 1811, are, to my knowledge, noted first here. A search for Peter Denison in the War of 1812 pension files achieved no new results. It is my hope that future historians of early Detroit will keep digging for records about this occurrence. Secondary accounts of the development of the militia have been offered in the black history month article cited above as well as by the following scholars. In some details of chronology and interpretation the descriptions by these scholars differ from my own. The lack of plentiful source material means that each scholar working on this topic has had to connect the dots, and they have done so in varying ways at the level of detail. I am indebted to all of the following individuals and projects for their published reconstructions of these events. Veta Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom,” in Frost and Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier. Charlie Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” in Brunsman, Stone, and Fisher, eds., Border Crossings, 85–100. Gene Allen Smith, The Slaves’ Gamble: Choosing Sides in the War of 1812 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 33–34. Donald R. Hickey, Don’t Give Up the Ship: Myths of the War 1812 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006), 191. Johnson, Jr., African American Soldiers in the National Guard, 5. “Peter Denison,” Detroit African-American History Project, Wayne State University, www.daahp.wayne.edu/biographies. Accessed August 16, 2012. Veta Tucker’s chapter, in particular, helped me to see that Peter Denison may have given up freedom to flee with his family. Charlie Keller’s chapter is the most precise and best cited account in print.

22. The 1805 law establishing the Michigan militia directed that each “company” should be assigned a captain, lieutenant, and ensign and should wear uniforms. Laws of the Territory of Michigan, Vol. I, The Making of Modern Law, Yale Law Library, 47, 48.

23. Augustus B. Woodward to James Madison, July 18, 1807, Folder January–July, 1807, Box 1806–1808, Augustus Brevoort Woodward Papers, BHC; also transcribed in MPHC, 12: 511–18. Quoted in Charlie Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” in Brunsman, Stone, and Fisher, eds., Border Crossings, 89.

24. Judge Woodward’s Resolution on Sundry Subjects, and the Report of the Committee on the Same, Dec. 31, 1806, MHPC, V. 12, 462–65, 463. Only the transcription has been found of this document, and the 1806 date appears to be an error. All other primary sources indicate that the black militia was formed in 1807, after the Chesapeake incident. The introduction to the Michigan Historical Collections series that includes the transcription in question notes that Woodward delivered his document to the committee in the fall of 1808. “Introduction,” MHPC Vol. XL, 41.

25. Judge Woodward’s Resolution on Sundry Subjects, and the Report of the Committee on the Same, Dec. 31, 1806, MHPC, V. 12, 462–65, 463.

26. There was no independent or elected legislature in territorial Michigan. The governor and three judges governed the territory, with Hull and Woodward being the most prominent voices. Hull likely dictated or wrote much of the committee’s response to Woodward’s Resolutions, which was signed by Judge John Griffin; “Introduction,” MPHC Vol. XL, 44. Charlie Keller also points out that Governor Hull probably steered the findings of this committee; Keller, “Detroit’s First Black Militia,” 91. Judge Woodward’s Resolution, MHPC, V. 12, 462–65, 470, 472. Woodward to Leib, [Gesurel?], June 14, 1811 Woodward Papers, BHC, DPL.

27. Indenture of Charlotte Moses, Askin Papers, Vol. II: 607–608.

28. Case 432, Box 9, Supreme Court, Michigan Territorial Records, Archives of Michigan, Michigan Historical Center, Lansing, MI. Laura Edwards presents an illuminating analysis of why textiles were so sought after in the nineteenth century for both their use value and exchange value; she also shows the importance of enslaved women’s assumed ability to own textiles as possessions. Laura F. Edwards, “Textiles, Popular Culture and the Law,” Buffalo Law Review 64 (2016): 193–214.

29. Lieut. Colonel Grant to Secretary Green, August 17, 1807, MPHC Vol. VI, 41–43.

30. Case 60, In the Matter of Elizabeth Denison, James Denison, Scipio Denison and Peter Denison, Jr., Calender of Cases, Papers in File, Supreme Court of Michigan, ed., Blume, Vol. I, 87.

31. Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 139–40, 154–55.

32. Treaty of Detroit and Related Treaties, American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of the United States, Part 2, Volume 1 (Gales and Seaton: 1832), digitized Pennsylvania State University, 745–48.

33. Treaty of Detroit and Related Treaties, American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of the United States, Part 2, Volume 1 (Gales and Seaton: 1832), digitized Pennsylvania State University, 745–48.

34. William Hull to Dearborn, February 20, 1807, MPHC Vol. XL, 1805–1813, 100–102.

35. Treaty of Detroit and Related Treaties, American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of the United States, Part 2, Volume 1 (Gales and Seaton: 1832), digitized Pennsylvania State University, 745–48. Treaty of Detroit, 1807. http://clarke.cimich.edu/resource_tab/native_americans_in_michigan/treaty_rights/text_of_michigan-related_treaties/detroit1807.html. Accessed March 15, 2012. Poremba, Detroit, 91. For an analysis of native political leadership in the region, see: Cary Miller, Ogimaag: Anishinaabeg Leadership, 1760–1845 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).

36. Treaty of Detroit and Related Treaties, American State Papers: Documents, Legislative and Executive of the Congress of the United States, Part 2, Volume 1 (Gales and Seaton: 1832), digitized Pennsylvania State University, 745–48.

37. Charles E. Cleland, Rites of Conquest: The History and Culture of Michigan’s Native Americans (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 218, 229. Poremba, Detroit, 91.

38. Walter Johnson makes the similar and instructive point that the development of lands for plantation enterprises in Louisiana reduced enslaved people’s means of hiding and escaping in forested landscapes. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 220–21.

39. Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 157, 158. Arthur Mullen, “Detroit through 300 Years—Physical Clues to Our Long History,” www.cityscapedetroit.org/articles/Physical_clues.html. Accessed November 18, 2013.

40. Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 150, 152, 154, 155; Poremba, Detroit, 90.

41. Farmer, History of Detroit, 24–25; Quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 24; quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 25; quoted in Farmer, History of Detroit, 27–28. “Introduction,” MHPC Vol. XL, 33.

42. M. Agnes Burton., ed., Governor and Judges Journal: Proceedings of the Land Board of Detroit (Detroit: 1915), 20, 44, 47, 116, 207, 230, 231. In the Matter of Hannah, A Negro Woman, Supreme Court of Michigan, Vol. I, ed., Blume, 163, 486–87.

43. Taylor, Divided Ground, 399. Ainse encountered her own problems with land boards, finding that the Canadian government refused to fully recognize her land claims that were based on previous Indian deeds.

44. Hull to Dearborn, February 20, 1807, MPHC Vol. XL, 96–97; “Introduction,” MHPC Vol. XL, 39.

45. Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses, 87–91.

46. Cangany, Frontier Seaport, 152; Ste. Anne’s Church Records.

47. For a discussion of the flexibility and changeability of racial and color terms such as “mulatto” and “mustee,” see Jack D. Forbes, Africans and Native Americans: The Language of Race and the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993).

48. Poremba, Detroit, 91. Deed of Bargain and Sale from Elijah Brush, and wife; Deed of Mortgage from Governor Hull to Elijah Brush; deed Joseph Watts sells land to William Hull; Sarah, Alexander and Angus Makintosh lease land to William Hull; Indenture of lease between Pierre Toussaint Chesne and William Hull; Deed Joseph Mini and Javotte Mini to William Hull; Deed of Pierre Rivier, Relinquishment of dower Archange Rivard to William Hull; Deed, Pierre Toussaint Cécile Thérèse Chêne to William Hull; Incomplete deed between Hull and Daniel Robinson; Watson of New York to William Hull mortgage 1¾ acres lots in Detroit, William Hull Papers, Folder L2: 1808–1810, Folder L2: 1811–25, BHC, DPL.

49. SH (Sarah Hull) to William Hull, April 10, 1809, William Hull Papers, BHC, DPL.

50. Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 66. “St. John’s Anglican Church, Sandwich, Ontario, http://essexanglican.awardspace.com. Accessed June 25, 2016.

51. Peter and Hannah baptism: quoted in Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom,” 37. Family baptisms: Swan, Lisette, 8; the church register includes several individual Denison names in baptism, birth and burial notes (such as James, Hannah, Scipio, Lisette/Elizabeth, Phoebe, Juliet, and Charlotte) between 1811 and 1819. Juliet is listed as a fourteen-year-old daughter of Peter and Hannah in 1816; Phoebe is listed as the daughter of Scipio and Charlotte Denison, so a grandchild of Peter and Hannah; St. John’s, Anglican, 1802–1827, Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, 1802–1827, Sandwich, Ontario, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. A third generation was born, raised, and baptized in Canada, and some of these descendants stayed there. Slaveholders in the church: Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom,” 35.

52. Peter as “Negro Servt [servant] of Angus McIntosh [Mackintosh]” is noted upon Peter’s death: St. John’s Register, August 28, 1812. Also quoted in Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom, 37.

53. Rebecca J. Scott, “Social Facts, Legal Fictions, and the Attribution of Slave Status: The Puzzle of Prescription,” Law and History Review (2017): 1–22, 10.

54. Anonymous Ledger, MS/Anonymous, L4: 1806–15, BHC, DPL. Hum-Hum, a cotton fabric from Indian, was most popular in the mid- to late eighteenth century; Elisabeth McClellan, Historic Dress in America, 1607–1800 (Philadelphia: George W. Jacobs & Co, 1904), 388.

55. The Askin Ledger, part of the John Askin Papers at the Detroit Public Library, is a lengthy fifty-page account in the original cursive script that employs financial shorthand. I was very fortunate to have the assistance of an undergraduate student, Paul Rodriguez, aided by a graduate student, Michelle Cassidy, who worked on an initial transcription of this ledger as well as the Macomb ledger over the course of two academic years. Even with this remarkable effort, the ledger is challenging to work with. I have summarized all references to the Denisons here and quoted only when I could be quite sure of my transcription, which drew from the original text and the students’ transcription. The Askin ledger has its own page numbers in the top right hand corner, but these are difficult to read and not always present. We therefore renumbered the pages from 1 to 50. When possible, I give two page numbers for references to indicate our numbering and the original numbering. References to the Denisons appear on pp: 35/180, 36, 37, 38, 39/222, 41/235, 42, 43, 44, 47, and 50. Lisette working winter nights: 36. Many other early Detroiters also appear in this ledger, including Elijah and “Mrs.” Brush. MS Askin, J. L4, 1806–1812, BHC, DPL.

56. Askin Ledger, Askin Papers, BHC, DPL.

57. Mary, Tom, George: 35, 33, 34, 37/205. Jim: 29. Jobs performed by people of color: 13, 24, 33/177. Askin Papers, BHC, DPL.

58. Anonymous Ledger, MS/Anonymous, L4: 1806–15, BHC, DPL. Adelaide Brush to Charles Askin, July 27, 1810; Elijah Brush to John Askin, February 13, 1810 Askin family fonds [textual record], Correspondence with the Brush family, 1801-1850, MG 19 A 3 Volume 37, Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON. These letters do not make clear who Peter Denison was buying himself from. The money may have gone to Catherine Tucker, who had indentured Peter and Hannah to Brush, or to William Hull or the town of Detroit due to Peter’s abandonment of the black militia in 1807 to flee with his family to Canada. It is possible, but unlikely, that Elijah Brush paid himself to free Peter, since he promises to “furnish the money.” I am grateful to Rachel Whitehead for leading me to these letters.

59. Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 27, 28, 29; Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 23.

60. Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 142, 144.

61. Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 4, 6, 13, 16; Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 20–21. For a detailed study of Tecumseh’s revolution and broader native resistance campaigns, see Dowd, A Spirited Resistance.

62. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 21–22. John Tyler was Harrison’s vice presidential candidate in the 1840 presidential race.

63. Memorial to Congress by Citizens of Michigan Territory, MHPC Vol. XL, 346–53.

64. Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 327.

65. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 17; Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 28, 29; Hull quoted in Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 22.

66. The longevity of the black militia is a point of debate among the handful of historians who have written about it. Most state that the company was disbanded by 1811, before the start of the war. This argument is sound and based on the fact that Judge Augustus Woodward’s references to the group conclude in this year and no primary sources from Michigan officials note a continuation of the force. One historian states that the militia continued past 1811, and its men served in the War of 1812, but the primary sources he cites do not actually show evidence for this claim. There is logic on the side of the argument for War of 1812 involvement. It seems unreasonable that Hull, having taken the risk to form the black militia and being supported in this by a territorial special committee, would not use this group during war preparations. My representation of the black militia’s involvement in the very first months of the war is based on the uncovering of a new source by a reporter that is not full proof of the group’s continuation (as the reporter’s source could have passed on dated information) but is certainly evidentiary and highly suggestive. Report to readers on war developments, Zanesville, OH, July 20, 1812, Document Transcriptions of The War of 1812 in the Northwest, Vol. IV, Anecdotes of the Lake Erie Area War of 1812, Transcribed from Original Sources by Richard C. Knopf (Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1957), 120–21.

67. Letter from Detroit to New York, July 18, 1812, Document Transcriptions of The War of 1812 in the Northwest, Knopf, trans., 110.

68. Black Swamp: Harry L. Coles, The War of 1812 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 45–46; Gilpin, War of 1812, 36, 51. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 48.

69. We learn that letters have been received, Document Transcriptions of The War of 1812 in the Northwest, July 25, 1812, Knopf, trans., 111.

70. We learn that letters have been received, Document Transcriptions of The War of 1812 in the Northwest, July 25, 1812, Knopf, trans., 111.

71. Eustis quoted in Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 50–51.

72. Report to readers on war developments, Zanesville, OH, July 20, 1812, Document Transcriptions of The War of 1812 in the Northwest, July 20, 1812, Knopf, trans., 120–21. Hull’s Proclamation: Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 56; Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 73–74.

73. bell hooks, “Revolutionary ‘Renegades’: Native Americans, African Americans, and Black Indians,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992).

74. Fort Mackinac: Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 89; Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 63. A. B. Woodward to William Eustis, Secretary of War, July 28, 1812, Clarence Edwin Carter, Territorial Papers, Volume 10, 389–92. While not conclusive for the argument that the black militia was active at the start of the war, Woodward’s complaint does not foreclose this likelihood. He makes no mention of the militia having been disbanded, which would seem relevant in a letter about Hull’s misdeeds and the war’s development in real time.

75. Yanik Fall and Recapture, 91, 92; location of artillery on present-day Jefferson Ave., Yanik 89; Brock quoted in Yanik, 88.

76. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 88, 94.

77. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 94–96, 100.

78. Denison in Quebec quote: Smith, Slaves’ Gamble, 34. Number of Detroit prisoners: Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 175.

79. Hull was released from the British on parole in October of 1812. He returned to Massachusetts before being court-martialed by the U.S. government in 1813 for the charges of treason, cowardice and neglect of duty. Although Hull was found guilty of the second two charges and sentenced to death, President Madison commuted this sentence. Negative representations of Hull both at the time and in histories of the war have led to debate and the historian Anthony Yanik’s recent book, subtitled “In Defense of William Hull.” Yanik and others argue that Hull was a scapegoat for Madison, Hull’s officers, and the Republican Party for larger failures of the war. Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 232. Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 125–27. Elijah Brush was apparently released by February of 1813; Jacobson, Detroit River Connections, 62. Denison’s death: St. John’s Register, August 28, 1812. Also quoted in Tucker, “Uncertain Freedom, 37.

80. Treaty of Ghent, Primary Documents in American History, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/rr/program/bib/ourdocs/Ghent.html. Accessed July 29, 2016. For more on the reduction of Native negotiating influence after the War of 1812, see White, Middle Ground, 516–17, 523, For more on Native persistence, population, and strength in the Great Lakes beyond the War of 1812, see Witgen, Infinity of Nations, 27, 325–27; McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 318–19.

81. French Town: Ralph Naveaux, Invaded on all Sides: The Story of Michigan’s Greatest Battlefield, Scene of the Engagements at French Town and the River Raisin in the War of 1812 (Marceline, MO: Walsworth Publishing Co., 2008), 17. For more on the battle at the River Raisin, see Naveaux, Invaded on All Sides. Brush’s death: Swan, Lisette, 8; Jacobson, Detroit River Connections, 61–63. Gilpin, War of 1812 in the Old Northwest, 126; Yanik, Fall and Recapture, 162. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 243. Ominous quote: Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 439.

82. “Forgotten war”: Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (1989; reprint, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, Bicentennial Edition, 2012); Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 10.

83. Coles, War of 1812, 255. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 10. Ste. Anne’s Church Records: Marie Louise baptism, February 3, 1799; Jean Baptiste Rémond, baptism, July 5, 1812; Julie Ford, baptism, August 11, 1813. Ste. Anne’s Church Records; Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses, 101–147; Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” 62. R. G. Dunlop, W. L. Mackenzie, John H. Dunn, Adolphus Judah, W. R. Abbott, David Hollin, Malcolm Cameron, and J. Levy, “Records Illustrating the Condition of Refugees from Slavery in Upper Canada before 1860,” Journal of Negro History 13:2 (April 1928): 199–207, 205.

84. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 327.

85. Fergus Bordewich is the first scholar I know of to offer this supposition that black men’s involvement in the War of 1812 informed a larger black population about the liberatory possibilities of Canada. Fergus M. Bordewich, The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America (New York: Harper Collins, 2005), 114.

Conclusion: The American City (1817 and Beyond)

1. Swan, Lisette, 8. St. St. John’s, Anglican, 1802–1827, Register of baptisms, marriages and burials, 1802–1827, Sandwich, Ontario, Archives of Ontario, Toronto. Marriage Certificate of Scipio Dennison and Charlotte Paul, Zd4-Denison Family, Solomon Sibley Papers, DPL.

2. George McDougall, attorney for Sarah Macomb, Detroit Gazette, September 17, 1817, p. 4; George McDougall, agent for David B. Macomb, Detroit Gazette, September 17, 1817, p. 4. Clarence Burton, History of Detroit, 1780–1850, Financial and Commercial (Detroit: 1917), 58–61. Jacobson, Detroit River Connections, 25, 129.

3. “Notice. A Meeting,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 3. “Commission Store,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 3. John Williams to Samuel Abbott, May 1817, John R. Williams Papers, BHC, DPL. Monroe: MPHC, Vol. 38, p. 446. John R. Williams was the son of Cecile Campau; his father, Thomas Williams, hailed from Albany, NY; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 144–145.

4. John Williams to Samuel Abbott, May 1817, John R. Williams Papers, BHC, DPL. William was elected mayor in 1824; Poremba, Detroit, 76, 104. “American city”: F. Clever Bald, Detroit’s First American Decade, 1948; “Subscription List,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 1; “Statutes of the University of Michigania,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 2; “Subscription List,” Detroit Gazette, October 10, 1817, p. 3; Poremba, Detroit, 98, 99.

5. “Subscription List,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 1; “Statutes of the University of Michigania,” Detroit Gazette, September 19, 1817, p. 2; “Subscription List,” Detroit Gazette, October 10, 1817, p. 3. The subscription lists printed in the newspaper name thirty-five people but are incomplete. The newspaper does not include some names (such as James May, Augustus Woodward, and Barnabas Campau) that are listed as donors in other sources. Augustus Woodward also kept a subscription list for $150 donors that may have been independent of the university treasurer’s list. Woodward’s list reference: Campau Papers, MS/Campau Family, 1817 May–December, BHC, DPL. Terrence McDonald, director of the Bentley Library at the University of Michigan, calculated that “the total amount of subscriptions was $5100. The two newspaper lists total $4086 . . . we are missing the names of those who together contributed about $1000. The subscriptions were raised between Sept. 19 and Oct. 10 1817.” Terrence McDonald to Tiya Miles, email correspondence, July 31, 2016.

6. C.M. Burton, “Augustus Brevoort Woodward,” MPHC Vol. 29, p. 658.

7. Burton, “Augustus Brevoort Woodward,” MPHC Vol. 29, pp. 658–659.

8. May donation: R.N. Drake, “Sketch of Judge May: Grandfather of Mrs. Seymour,” Drake Scrapbook in Possession of R. N. Drake, Seattle, Washington, From SB of Drake loaned to C.M.B., James May Papers, Wallet 1, BHC, DPL, 8. Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County, 729. Drake gives a figure of $100 for May’s contribution. Farmer gives a figure of $25. Both authors provide transcribed or quoted copies of these pledge documents; however, the originals have not been found in the University of Michigan archives at the Bentley Library or in papers at the Detroit Public Library. Records of other contributions: Barnabas Campau: Campau Papers, MS/Campau, Barnabas, Folder 1819–21, BHC, DPL; “the Lodge”: Campau Papers, MS/Campau Family, 1817 May–December, BHC, DPL; use of city fire fund: Campau Papers, MS/Campau Family, 1817 May–December, BHC, DPL. Woodward’s slave: Robert B. Ross and George B. Catlin, Landmarks of Detroit: A History of the City (Detroit: Evening News Association, 1898), 416. Burton, History of Detroit, 1780–1850, 73. Michelle Cassidy, “The Origins of Article 16 and the University of Michigan,” paper written for the University of Michigan Bicentennial Committee, Ann Arbor, MI, 2015. Joseph Campau was a member of the Ancient Free and Accepted Masons, Zion Lodge, Number 10; Gitlin, Bourgeois Frontier, 54–55. He reportedly died as the richest man in Michigan; Jacobson, Detroit River Connections, 85.

9. Cassidy, “The Origins of Article 16 and the University of Michigan,” University of Michigan Bicentennial Committee. An Act to Establish the Catholepistemiad, or university of Michigania (August 26, 1817), Frank Egelston Robbins, ed., University of Michigan Early Records, 1817–1837 (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan, 1935), 3–5.

10. Quote by John Petoskey, University of Michigan College of Literature, Science & the Arts (2016) and School of Law (currently enrolled); used by permission of John Petoskey, June 21, 2016. To be eligible for the tuition waiver, applicants must be enrolled in a United States federally recognized tribal community, of one-quarter blood quantum, with established Michigan residency of at least twelve months. The waiver is defined as a benefit stemming from political relations between government entities (such as the state of Michigan and tribes) rather than race or ethnicity. Michigan Indian Tuition Waiver Frequently Asked Questions, Michigan.Gov, https://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/faqsmitw_329746_7.pdf. Michigan Indian Tuition Waiver, Michigan Department of Civil Rights, http://www.michigan.gov/mdcr/0,1607,7-138--240889--,00.html. Accessed June 20, 1016.

11. First Minority Graduates and Attendees, Bentley Historical Library, UM, http://bentley.umich.edu/legacy-support/umtimeline/minfirsts.php. Accessed July 1, 2016.

12. Catherine Sibley quoted in Swan, Lisette, 9.

13. MPHC, Vol. 38, p. 446.

14. Swan, Lisette, 9, 13. Deed, Stephen Mack to Elizabeth Dennison; Lease of lots in Pontiac, Scipio and Elizabeth Forth to Scipio Dennison; Lease of lots in Pontiac, Scipio and Elizabeth to Scipio; Promissory note, Scipio Dennison to Elizabeth; Letter, Scipio Dennison to Solomon Sibley; Zd4-Denison Family, Solomon Sibley Papers, DPL. A Michigan state historical marker in Pontiac recognizes Elizabeth Denison Forth’s biography and land purchase. http://www.michmarkers.com/startup.asp?startpage=L1860.htm. Accessed July 23, 2016.

15. Swan, Lisette, 10, 14, 16, 17; Visitor Elizabeth Campbell quoted in Swan, Lisette, 18. Biddle served as mayor from 1827 to 1828; Poremba, Detroit, 106. Sibley family: Sibley House Detroit, http://sibleyhousedetroit.com/the-sibley-family; Accessed July 13, 2016.

16. Maurice M. Manring, Slave in a Box: The Strange Career of Aunt Jemima (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 61–65, 74–75. Eliza Biddle to Aaron Ogden, January 15, 1855, Gershom Mott Williams Papers, BHC, DPL, transcribed in McPherson, Looking for Lisette, 440. The set of documents that Mark McPherson calls the “Lisette Letters” in his Appendix B refers to twelve letters in the Biddles’ correspondences that mention Elizabeth Denison.

17. Swan, Lisette, 8, 9, 14, 21. Eliza Biddle to Susan Biddle, June 28, 1859, transcribed in McPherson, Looking for Lisette, 445–46.

18. Elmwood Cemetery internment record, B/Negroes-Forth, Elizabeth Denison, Reading Room, DPL. This record is not wholly accurate. It states that Elizabeth Denison Forth was 114 years old at the time of her death in 1866 and that she was born in Virginia. All other records indicate that she was born a slave in the 1780s in Detroit, which means that she died close to the age of 90. Lisette Denison’s grave location is given as Strangers Ground 45–194 in the Elmwood record.

19. Draft of Elizabeth Dennison’s Will, Zd4-Denison Family, Solomon Sibley Papers, DPL. Elizabeth Denison Forth Will, Folder B/Negroes-Forth, Elizabeth Denison, Reading Room, DPL.

20. Swan, Lisette, 15; Indenture of service between Scipio and Eastman Dennison and Charles E. Brush in Green Bay, 1834, Zd4-Denison Family, Solomon Sibley Papers, DPL.

21. Swan, Lisette, 49. Saint James Church has produced a historical pamphlet that covers the history of Elizabeth Denison as its “founder.” This pamphlet is informative and engaging, but my account here differs from it in some respects, especially regarding the relationship between Lisette Denison and Eliza Biddle. The pamphlet states that the two women “shared a strong bond” and made a “vow” to found a church together on Grosse Ile. I have not seen evidence for this claim. I am grateful, though, to the church for sharing their version of the history so generously; “Saint James Story of the Chapel,” Saint James Church, Grosse Ile, MI.

22. Histories of American Indian enslavement retain the idea that the practice died out by the middle 1700s and that Indian slaves after that time were likely to be mixed Afro-Native or lost to the designation “Negro” in plantation records. Studying slavery in Detroit shows the continuation of a clear practice of Indians being kept as slaves well into the nineteenth century.

23. The novelist Gayl Jones includes a haunting refrain of the call to “make generations” in her classic story of generations of black women sexually abused in slavery; Gayl Jones, Corregidora (Boston: Beacon, 1975), 10, 60, 90, 101. The historian Susan Sleeper Smith developed this concept of Midwestern Indians using a hiding-in-plain-sight strategy of survival, with a focus on Indiana. Susan Sleeper Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 115, 116; see Chapter Seven.

24. Swan, Lisette, 49. Sibley House Detroit, http://sibleyhousedetroit.com/the-sibley-family/. The Charles C. Trowbridge House is located at 1380 East Jefferson in downtown Detroit, Detroit 1701, http://detroit1701.org/Trowbridge_Hist.htm. Accessed July 13, 2016.

25. Frost and Tucker, “Introduction,” in Frost and Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier, 2–4. EdDwight.com, http://www.eddwight.com/memorial-public-art/international-underground-railroad-memorial-detroit-mi-windsor-canada; Accessed July 13, 2016. Detroit 1701, http://detroit1701.org/UndergroundRailroad.htm; Accessed July 13, 2016.

A Note on Historical Conversations and Concepts

1. Charles Bright, “‘It Was As If We Were Never There’: Recovering Detroit’s Past for History and Theater,” Journal of American History (March 2002).

2. Therese A. Kneip, “Slavery in Early Detroit,” MA Thesis, University of Detroit, 1938. David M. Katzman, “Black Slavery in Michigan,” American Studies 11:2 (fall 1970): 56–66. Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 129–49.

3. Bill McGraw, “Slavery Is Detroit’s Big, Bad Secret. Why Don’t We Know Anything About It?” Deadline Detroit, www.deadlinedetroit.com, August 27, 2012. Accessed August 28, 2012. In 2005 a senior honors thesis addressed the topic of Midwestern slavery with particular attention to Michigan: Daniel Rhoades, “There Were No Innocents: Slavery in the Old Northwest 1700–1860,” Senior Honors Thesis, Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, 2005. Brunsman and Stone, eds., Revolutionary Detroit. Brunsman, Stone, and Fisher, eds., Border Crossings. David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001).

4. David M. Katzman, Before the Ghetto: Black Detroit in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973). Reginald R. Larrie, Makin’ Free: African-Americans in the Northwest Territory (Detroit: Blaine Ethridge Books, 1981). Norman McRae, “Blacks in Detroit, 1736–1833: The Search for Freedom and Community and Its Implications for Educators” (Ph.D. diss., The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 1982). Swan, Lisette. Swan is also the author of a lengthy local history of Grosse Ile: Swan, Deep Roots. Mark F. McPherson, Looking for Lisette: In Quest of an American Original (Dexter, MI: Mage Press, 2001). Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, PA, 1–2.

5. Frost and Tucker, eds., A Fluid Frontier. Gregory Wigmore, “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland,” Journal of American History 98:2 (2011): 437–54.

6. Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2015). Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (New York: Penguin, 2012). Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 9.

7. Brian Leigh Dunnigan, Frontier Metropolis: Picturing Early Detroit, 1701–1838 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Cangany, Frontier Seaport. The three-hundred-year chronology by David Lee Poremba has also been central to the reimagining of Detroit as a diverse and complex settlement. David Lee Poremba, ed., Detroit in Its World Setting: A Three Hundred Year Chronology, 1701–2001 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). Silas Farmer, History of Detroit and Wayne County and Early Michigan: A Chronological Cyclopedia of the Past and Present (1890; reprint, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1969). Clarence M. Burton, ed., The City of Detroit Michigan: 1701–1922 (Detroit-Chicago: The S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1922).

8. Cooper, “The Fluid Frontier,” 130.

9. In my use of the term “refusal” here and elsewhere in this book I am drawing mainly from the theoretical work of anthropologist Audra Simpson, who has interrogated the U.S.-Canada border as it has shaped the political and familial lives of Mohawk people in the community of Kahnawake. A key concept that I draw from Simpson is that even while taking into account the many costs and compromises, indigenous people have refused to be defined in static ways by settler states; therefore, the meaning and future of Euro-American and Euro-Canadian political borders on present and former indigenous lands are far from settled. Simpson calls a stance that rejects state “recognition” a politics of “refusal.” Audra Simpson, Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Border of Settler States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014); see especially pp. 7, 11–12, chapter 4. I am also drawing from the work of Beth Piatote, a literary scholar who examines reactions to forced domesticities and competing nationalisms in the work of Pauline Johnson and others during the “assimilation” policy period. Beth H. Piatote, Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 17, 26.

10. Visit the Detroit Historical Museum at http://detroithistorical.org/detroit-historical-museum/plan-your-visit/general-information. The Detroit Historical Museum is run by the Detroit Historical Society: http://detroithistorical.org. Shawna Mazur, a ranger at the River Raisin Battlefield, has researched and published on the black militia and shared her work with the public, park staff, and visitors. In 2009, reenactor Xavier Allen portrayed a black militia member at the River Raisin Battlefield Commemoration. His photo is featured and captioned in Shawna Mazur’s essays. Shawna Mazur, “In Support of America and Freedom: The Establishment of the First Black Militia,” Monroe Evening News (February 2010); Shawna Mazur, “Slavery and the Black Militia,” River Raisin News & Dispatch, Newsletter of the Monroe County Historical Museum, Monroe County Historical Commission & Monroe County Historical Society (July/August/September 2009). Visit the River Raisin Battlefield at: https://www.nps.gov/rira/index.htm.

11. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), x. For more studies that focus on Native history in the Great Lakes and Midwest as a borderland, see Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Modern North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013); John P. Bowes, Exiles and Pioneers: Eastern Indians in the Trans-Mississippi West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alan Taylor, The Divided Ground: Indians, Settlers, and the Northern Borderland of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 2006); Daniel P. Barr, ed. The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006); Karl S. Hele, ed., Lines Drawn Upon the Water: First Nations and The Great Lakes Borders and Borderlands (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008). For work that treats the Detroit River as a borderland region, see Wigmore, “Before the Railroad,” 437–54; Lisa Philips Valentine and Allan K. McDougall, “Imposing the Border: The Detroit River from 1786 to 1807,” Journal of Borderlands Studies, Special Issue: The Canadian-American Border: Toward a Transparent Border? 19:1 (2004): 13–22. For work that sees the Midwest as a borderland for African American history, see Matthew Salafia, “Searching for Slavery: Fugitive Slaves in the Ohio River Valley Borderland, 1830–1860,” Ohio Valley History 8:4 (Winter 2008): 38–63; Gary Knepp’s Freedom’s Struggle: A Response to Slavery from Ohio’s Borderlands (Milford, OH: Little Miami Publishing Co., 2008). For treatments of social exchange and development in the Midwest borderlands, also see Elizabeth A. Perkins, Border Life: Experience and Memory in the Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); James Z. Schwartz’s, Conflict on the Michigan Frontier: Yankee and Borderland Cultures, 1815–1840 (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009).

12. White raises and then critiques an aquatic metaphor in his introduction to The Middle Ground. He suggests that the story of white-Indian relations has often been told as a story of the sea (representative of Europeans) repeatedly smashing into a rock (representative of American Indians) like a relentless, inevitable storm. White explains that this is a simplistic metaphor of European advancement and Native assimilation (or, in more progressive histories, Native persistence) that he will strive to avoid; White, Middle Ground, ix.

13. Heidi Bohaker closely examines pictographs representing Anishinaabe clans (often used as signatures on treaties) to build an argument that troubles Richard White’s representation of the Great Lakes. Bohaker shows that Native people were accustomed to a mobile lifestyle and maintained a clan system and out-marriage structure that meant they had relatives across the region. These groups, she argues, could therefore not be “refugees” with nowhere to go after conflicts and wars. In addition, she asserts that a focus on the “middle ground” fixes our attention on cultural exchange rather than on indigenous cultural formations and practices; Heidi Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag’: The Significance of Algonquian Kinship Networks in the Eastern Great Lakes Region, 1600–1701,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, 63:1 (January 2006): 23–52. In his broad study of Ottawa influence in and on the Great Lakes, Michael McDonnell chooses to limit his use of the middle ground frame to military forts, making the point that beyond these dispersed spaces of European or American influence, Native people controlled the terms of interaction. McDonnell also offers a strong overarching dissent from Richard White’s characterization of the Great Lakes region, taking issue with White’s assessment that the inhabitants were “shattered” groupings of indigenous people in the aftermath of trade wars. McDonnell, Masters of Empire, 14, 333, note 6. Andrew Lipman takes a humorous approach to situating and unseating White’s argument through a review of several works; Andrew Lipman, “No More Middle Grounds?” Reviews in American History 44:1 (March 2016): 24–30.

14. In the use of the term “groundless,” I have borrowed from my colleague Greg Dowd, who plays rhetorically with the slate of Native American history text titles that implicitly reflect on Richard White’s phrase, “middle ground.” Gregory Evans Dowd, Groundless: Rumors, Legends and Hoaxes on the Early American Frontier (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015).

15. White, Middle Ground, ix. In her sweeping study of French and Indian families engaged in the western fur trade, Anne Hyde captures the influence and longevity of mixed-race networks. She describes these mixed-race families as making up one of “three worlds” or “three streams” next to the white and Native worlds identified by Richard White. Although she does illuminate people often rendered invisible, like White, Hyde does not explore a black world, or even a world of enslaved Indians. Elite mixed-race families make for compelling objects of study, but, as Hyde notes, they were also people of privilege who owned others as slaves. Her work is an indication that even when we turn to the rubric of “family” as a means of powerfully illuminating the histories of marginalized people—particularly women—we can miss other groups who were oppressed by the very subpopulations that our work unearths. Building on White’s and Hyde’s formulation of European, Native, and mixed-race Euro-Indian worlds, I point to a world of the unfree on which these other worlds relied for strength and standing. Hyde, Empires, 1, 3. Brett Rushforth’s broad and insightful study of slavery in New France focuses almost wholly on Native American slaves. Brett Rushforth, Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). As I worked toward this picture of the shared world of bondspeople, I found conversation partners in studies on New England slavery; see, Daniel R. Mandell, “The Saga of Sarah Muckamugg: Indian and African American Intermarriage in Colonial New England,” in Martha Hodes, ed., Sex, Love, Race: Crossing Boundaries in North American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 72–90; Margaret Newell, Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015); Wendy Warren, New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2016).

16. Jennifer Kirsten Stinson, “Black Bondspeople, White Masters and Mistresses, and the Americanization of the Upper Mississippi River Valley Lead District,” Journal of Global Slavery 1:2 (October 2016), pp. 165–195. Christian Crouch, “The Black City: African and Indian Exchange in Pontiac’s Detroit,” revised version of Christian Crouch, “The Black City: Detroit and the Northeast Borderlands through African Eyes in the Era of ‘Pontiac’s War,’” The War Called Pontiac’s Conference, April 5, 2013, Philadelphia, PA, 20–21. Michael Witgen, book manuscript in progress, “Native Sons: Indigenous Land, Black Lives, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America.”

17. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1894).

18. Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African American Slaves (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 153, 154, 182, 188, 192, 198.

19. Lea VanderVelde, Redemption Songs: Suing for Freedom before Dred Scott (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 16.

20. William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), xviii–xix.

21. John Mack Faragher, “‘More Motley than Mackinaw’: From Ethnic Mixing to Ethnic Cleansing on the Frontier of the Lower Missouri, 1783–1833, in Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika Teute, eds., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 304–326, 305. Faragher borrows the notion of “frontiers of inclusion” from geographer Marvin W. Mikesell. For more on cross-cultural relations in the Old Northwest, see Daniel P. Barr, ed., The Boundaries Between Us: Natives and Newcomers along the Frontiers of the Old Northwest Territory, 1750–1850 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2006).

22. A slate of field-changing twenty-first century works that can be categorized as a new incarnation of the “New Indian History,” or, as the University of Michigan doctoral student Harold Walker Elliott has termed it, the “Power School” of Indian history, has explored Native empire, power, and influence in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. See, for instance, McDonnell, Masters of Empire; Kathleen DuVal, The Native Ground: Indians and Colonists at the Heart of the Continent (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); Pekka Hämäläinen, The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Witgen, Infinity of Nations.

23. Max L. Grivno, “‘Black Frenchmen’ and ‘White Settlers’: Race, Slavery, and the Creation of African-American Identities along the Northwest Frontier, 1790–1840,” Slavery and Abolition 21:3 (December 2000): 75–93, 76, 78, 85. Grivno cites examples from Minnesota and Wisconsin where black men claimed a “white” self-identification and were defined as white for a time by territorial organizers, “Black Frenchmen,” 85, 89; Michael Witgen explores this dynamic in Minnesota at length in his manuscript in progress, Native Sons. In Detroit over the time period of my study, I found no examples of black residents stating that they were “white” or wishing to be seen as such. Zainab Amadahy and Bonita Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada: Settlers or Allies?” In Arlo Kempf, ed., Breaching the Colonial Contract: Anti-Colonialism in the US and Canada (New York: Springer, 2009), 121, 120. Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xxx. Byrd credits the Caribbean (Barbadian) poet Kamau Brathwaite with the origination of this term, xix.

24. Tiya Miles, email correspondence with Jill Mackin (doctoral candidate, Montana State University) and Crystal Alegria (co-director, The Extreme History Project), March 17 and 18, 2017. Quoted material is taken from Alegria’s email, March 18, 2017. Prominent historian of the Black West Quintard Taylor also uses the term “refugee,” but more often attached to wartime experience and without an explicit critique of Native land dispossession. Taylor frequently uses “pioneers” and “settlers” to describe black migrants. It is important to note that his work predates the currently common critical discussions of settler colonialism in Native American and indigenous studies. Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial Frontier: African Americans in the American West, 1528–1990 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). For an illuminating analysis of comparative racialization and settler colonialism, see Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” The American Historical Review 106:3 (June 2001): 866–905. For an innovative use of “refugee” reflective of current events, see David Blight, “Frederick Douglass, Refugee,” The Atlantic, February 7, 2017.

25. Amadahy and Lawrence, “Indigenous Peoples and Black People in Canada,” 120.

26. The historian Roy Finkenbine of the University of Detroit Mercy has compiled a three-page list of primary and secondary sources related to Indians and the Underground Railroad in the Midwest. He is working on a chapter based on his findings, which will appear in the edited collection-in-progress: Damian Pargas, ed., Fugitive Slaves in North America (University Press of Florida). For a slave narrative that features Native collaboration, see especially Josiah Henson, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave (Boston: Arthur D. Phelps, 1849). Manuscripts and dissertations related to this topic are underway by Natalie Joy, at Northern Illinois University, who is working on a book titled “Abolitionists and Indians in the Antebellum Era,” and by Darryl Omar Freeman at Washington State University, who is working on a dissertation titled “The First Freedom Line.” I have made short forays into this area; see Tiya Miles, “Of Waterways and Runaways: Reflections on the Great Lakes in Underground Railroad History,” Michigan Quarterly Review (Summer 2011); Tiya Miles, “‘Shall Woman’s Voice Be Hushed?’ Laura Smith Haviland in Abolitionist Women’s History,” Michigan Historical Review (Winter 2013). Bohaker, “‘Nindoodemag,” 52.