Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Also by Tiya Miles

  Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom

  The House on Diamond Hill: A Cherokee Plantation Story

  The Cherokee Rose: A Novel of Gardens and Ghosts

  Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era

  © 2017 by Tiya Miles

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, in any form, without written permission from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to reproduce selections from this book should be mailed to: Permissions Department, The New Press, 120 Wall Street, 31st floor, New York, NY 10005.

  Published in the United States by The New Press, New York, 2017

  Distributed by Perseus Distribution

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Miles, Tiya, 1970- author.

  Title: The dawn of Detroit: a chronicle of slavery and freedom in the city of the straits / Tiya Miles.

  Description: New York: The New Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017018381 (print) | LCCN 2017031043 (ebook) | ISBN 9781620972328 (e-book)

  Subjects: LCSH: Detroit (Mich.)--History--18th century. | Detroit (Mich.)--History--19th century. | Detroit (Mich.)--Race relations. | Slavery--Michigan.

  Classification: LCC F574.D457 (ebook) | LCC F574.D457 M55 2017 (print) | DDC 977.4/3401--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018381

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  For the renegades closest to my heart: Sylvan David Gone, Erik Miles, Seante Lackey, and Fred Johnson; and in loving memory of Adrian Gaskins

  Hence then, commences the history of Detroit, and with it, the history of the Peninsula of Michigan. . . . No place in the United States presents such a series of events, interesting in themselves, and permanently affecting. . . . Five times its flag has changed, three different sovereignties have claimed its allegiance, and since it has been held by the United States, the government has been thrice transferred; twice it has been besieged by the Indians, once captured in war, once burned to the ground. Identified as we are with its future fate, we may indulge the hope, that its chapter of accidents has closed, and that its advancement will be hereafter uninterrupted.

  —Governor Lewis Cass, State Historical Society of Michigan Inaugural Address, 1828

  The story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime.

  —Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism, 2011

  Contents

  Introduction: The Coast of the Strait

  1. The Straits of Slavery (1760–1770)

  2. The War for Liberty (1774–1783)

  3. The Wild Northwest (1783–1803)

  4. The Winds of Change (1802–1807)

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

  Conclusion: The American City (1817 and Beyond)

  A Note on Historical Conversations and Concepts

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliographic Abbreviations and Quotations

  Notes

  Index

  Captain D.W. (David William) Smith, Rough Sketch of the King’s Domain at Detroit, 1790. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan. This rare, hand-drawn map of Detroit in the British period was identified and authenticated in 2016. Clements Library associate director and curator of maps Brian Leigh Dunnigan has pointed out that key features distinct to this map include the depiction of private landholder “encroachments” within the town walls. Landholders identified by Dunnigan thus far include the prominent slaveholders William Macomb (letter A), John Askin (letter D), and Captain Henry Bird (letter E). The map also shows the rivulet, Savoy Creek, flowing behind the settlement and the abatis, intertwined tree branches used as a defensive barrier, around the fort at the rear. Smith, the creator of the map, expressed support for slavery.

  Introduction:

  The Coast of the Strait

  It has risen from the ashes. We hope for better things.

  —Seal of the City of Detroit, 1827

  Detroit is a city of ash, the charred remains of a burning. For centuries the fire has raged, consuming lives, igniting passions, churning up the land and animals, swallowing humans whole. The burn that Detroiters feel—that the nation uncomfortably intuits as it looks upon the beleaguered city as a symbol of progress and of defeat—traces back through distant time, to the global desire to make lands into resources, the drive to turn people into things, the quest for imperial dominance, and the tolerance for ill-gotten gain. We attach a series of words—coded and clean—to the residue left behind by that fire: racial tension, white flight, industrial decline, financial collapse, political corruption, economic development, even gentrification and renaissance. But the challenges faced by the residents of this city, and increasingly by residents of all of our industrial urban places, are not neat or new. Deep histories flow beneath present inequalities, silent as underground freshwater streams. The racial and class divisions that set groups against one another are old, aquatic creatures. We sometimes sense this. We sometimes feel the nearness of history—the imprint of people acting and events unfolding in the past. Beneath the popular culture chatter that calls Detroit a “ruin,” grotesquely suggesting some natural process of decay at work, we can dip our fingers into the water and touch the outlines of an alternate, historical dimension. In this dimension, the firestorm that engulfed Detroit was not the result of inevitable decline brought on by invisible market shifts akin to the force of gravity. In this dimension, Detroit is not the scene of natural disaster, but rather the scene of a crime—a crime committed by individuals, merchant-cabals, government officials, and empires foaming at the mouth for more. This book reconstructs that crime, tracing it to the intertwined theft of bodies (both human and animal) and territories (both lands and waters) that we call slavery and settlement. The perpetrators are not always evil, the victims not always noble, and, at times, they join forces for reasons admirable or lamentable. This is the human relational muck of how a great city—how a great nation—came to be, pushed from the guts of an all-consuming capitalism.

  Detroit was born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people and the taking of land occupied by Native people. Captivity and capture built and maintained the town, forged Detroit’s chin-up character as a place of risk and wild opportunity. Detroit was formed not only by the labor of enslaved people on indigenous lands, but also, and as importantly, by what those enslaved people came to signify for the identity of the city. It was ultimately through the dauntless acts of fugitive slaves, and the changing ideas about slavery held by free residents of the working and political classes, that Detroiters began to perceive themselves as distinctly American. Black and red people traversing the river between the United States and Canada compelled Detroiters to confront their long-standing, multinational practices of slaveholding. The presence of renegade bondspeople from British Canada tested Michigan’s limits on the legalization of slavery and led Detroit dockworkers, ha
t-makers, and sailors of European descent to threaten their own lawmakers if they returned runaway slaves. By the end of the War of 1812, the second war for U.S. independence, Detroit was an American metropolis that slavery had made.1

  This is a chronicle of Detroit, an alternative origin story that privileges people in bondage, many of whom launched gripping pursuits of dignity, autonomy, and liberty. To tell the history of the dawn of Detroit with a focus on the experience of enslaved people reveals yet another chapter in the larger narrative of a national truth: America was a place ridden by slavery, where chains stretched as wide as the midnight sky, trapping diverse peoples in an ironclad hold that took generations and bloodshed to break. Even in Detroit, in the North, and in Canada—places that we like to imagine as free—slavery was sanctioned by law and carried out according to custom. And where there was slavery, there were efforts to wrest away indigenous territory, the lands from which elites could draw wealth by means of exploited slave labor. Slavery and colonialism were bundled together in Detroit as in the rest of North America, creating a complex ecosystem of exploitation and resistance. The Ojibwe historian Michael Witgen has succinctly observed about the Great Lakes region: “The two primary sources of wealth for Europeans who came to North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been the profits made from this vast inland trade, and land.” He need only have added “slaves” in order to complete this catalogue. Productive plots, beaver pelts, black and red bodies—all were viewed as natural resources ripe for commodification.2

  Remapping Detroit

  Please rip your mental map in half and turn it upside down—the one that sees Detroit in Michigan, Michigan in the Midwest, the Midwest as fly-over country in the United States of America. That is a modern map, developed long after Detroit was settled by Euro-Americans and the grinding process of westward expansion gave some Americans a new West from which to turn back and view a “Middle West” and an “Old Northwest.” In the 1600s, Bkejwanong (an Anishinaabe place name) was a hunting ground and transitional village site for the many indigenous groups who peopled the lake country, expertly moving across this wetland terrain to suit their subsistence needs from season to season. At the end of that century, French explorers associated this spot with another name, Détroit, or “strait,” a narrow channel joining two bodies of water. It was the French who built the first permanent European post here—to foster the lucrative trade in fur-bearing animal skins. Detroit was therefore seen for over a century by Europeans and Americans alike as a Francophone place, as a subordinate and marginal “dependency” of French Canada to the north, and then of British Canada following a French military defeat. It would take two wars between Great Britain and the fledgling United States before the American claim on Detroit, and on the loyalty of Detroiters, was actualized. When Detroit became American in 1783 (or 1796, or 1815—the date was always in motion and a French elite maintained economic and social influence well into the 1830s), it was located in the “West,” a frontier post not yet matched by Chicago (in the Anishinaabe language, Chigagou, “the wild-garlic place”), let alone cities on the horizon of that mangled mental map. A linchpin port town in the Great Lakes by the mid-1700s, Detroit is the second oldest French settlement in what is now the United States, with roots dating back before New Orleans and St. Louis.3

  The strait that inspired Detroit’s first European name stretches thirty-two miles in length and shelters twenty-one islands. This waterway, now the Detroit River, was the hinge that joined the Lower and Upper Great Lakes, a “junction of the continent’s major watersheds” that served as a hub of ancient indigenous travel and trade.4 Centuries later, these massive lakes so central to the continent would form the heart of America’s Old Northwest Territory. Water was the earth’s blood pumping to and from that heart, making all life and the growth of human societies possible. Le détroit joined Lake Erie to the south with Lake Huron to the north by way of the relatively delicate Lake St. Clair. Narrowing above Lake Erie and again below Lake Huron, the strait could duplicate itself, being first one channel, and then two. This waterway, fanciful in configuration, linked the Great Lakes freshwater chain, which merged with the St. Lawrence River, then spilled into the Atlantic Ocean that bound four continents together. North America, South America, Europe, and Africa joined in an embrace at once enigmatic, abusive, and consequential, reverberating inland by way of the rivers and lakes, a fluid “transit of empire.”5

  The swaths of land rimming the Detroit River teemed with plants and wildlife at the moment French explorers arrived in the late seventeenth century. Father Louis Hennepin, a Recollet priest who traveled with René-Robert La Salle on the ship Griffon in 1679, called the river a “most agreeable and charming Streight,” overflowing with deer, bears, turkey hens, and swans.6 When Frenchmen journeyed there in the decades that followed, they encountered indigenous people who already knew the place and its bounty, principally Hurons (who came to be known as Wyandots in this region) and Ottawas. The Detroit River zone was chosen ground for Native hunters, including local Algonquian speakers and Iroquoian speakers from the northeast. Hurons, originally from Georgian Bay of Lake Huron, traveled frequently through the area from villages southeast of Lake Michigan and near the straits of Mackinaw. As intimates of the place, they called the Detroit riverbank “the Coast of the Strait.”7 This evocative Huron phrasing brings to mind not only the thin waterway connecting “inland seas,” but also land: the marshes, meadows, fields, and forests abutting that river. The strait formed a shoreline from which a signature city would spring. This was a place where the ground met the waters, as much riverscape as landscape. The indigenous phrase “Coast of the Strait” captures the sense that Detroit took shape on organic borders, edges between one kind of environment and another. Social and political life there would come to mirror that aspect of nature, taking on the quixotic qualities of a coastline surrounded by land. Here, where waters and lands made enduring and unpredictable contact, a diverse collection of individuals settled and built their lives. They would become River People who lived, in the words of Midwestern poet Richard Quinney, “on the border, on the edge of things.”8 The edge is not the most comfortable space for habitation, as the Chicana feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa explained when she characterized zones like this as “borderlands.” In her classic treatise on the U.S.-Mexico border, Anzaldúa called the borderlands (borderlands/la frontera): “This thin edge of barb wire.” For her, and for many others such as Detroit River People, spaces of merger shaped by conflict are difficult places to reside and, at the same time, are “home.”9 They were a motley bunch, the human inhabitants that would gradually populate the fertile strip along the Detroit River and give it the character of a bustling fur trade town. Hailing from points near and far—indigenous North America, French Canada, Great Britain, Africa, and what would eventually become the United States—with ranging ethnic and national backgrounds and competing cultural sensibilities, Detroit’s residents perfectly reflected the quality of the place where they dwelled. These inhabitants lived on the Coast of the Strait, on the edges of each other’s cultures, on the line between warring empires, on the border between bondage and freedom. Most of Detroit’s early residents arrived at the strait as free individuals, but a significant number of them were held as slaves. Working with, and just as often against, one another, free and enslaved Detroiters built a distinctive community that has faced down time despite its trials.

  While the history of colonial and early Detroit has been told from many perspectives and is now a growing area of historical inquiry, published studies tend to render invisible or inconsequential the existence, struggles, and contributions of enslaved people in the city. In contrast to the existing historical literature, and as a hoped-for contribution to it, this book chronicles the rise, fall, and dawn of Detroit while centering the experiences of those who were held in bondage there from the mid-1700s to the early 1800s. In the mercantile settlement that would eventually become an American ur
ban behemoth, hundreds of people—Native Americans, African Americans, men, women, and children—were kept captive, stripped of autonomy, and forced to labor for others. The composite story of their lives across five decades and under three imperial governments illustrates the extraordinary and all-too-ordinary character of Detroit, reveals the role of enslaved people as key actors in the history of the city, and illuminates a defining theme, and indeed paradox, of American history: the breadth and elasticity of slavery and the epic, ongoing quest for liberty.10

  Native Americans, African Americans, and Euro-Americans were differently positioned in this quest. The Coast of the Strait was a place where their varied fights to realize freedom played out in stark comparative relief, from the colonial conflict known as Pontiac’s War in 1763, to the American Revolution from 1775 to 1783, to the War of 1812 in which the young United States sought to reaffirm its political separation from Great Britain. Like the American revolutionaries who called themselves Patriots, enslaved people in Detroit exhibited a deep-seated drive for independence. They verbally and physically challenged their owners and, in the ultimate blow to the system of bondage, fled across the Detroit River to secure their freedom in another country. Native communities living near Detroit likewise adopted a rebellious stance against authoritarian imposition, laying siege to the city and competing with colonial authorities in the battle to retain autonomy in the region. Often these various freedom dreams clashed, but sometimes they coincided, when indigenous groups sided with the Redcoats or Patriots to better their own position, or when enslaved blacks took advantage of wartime chaos to launch escape attempts.11 Red, black, and white American freedom bids, three streams of purpose and passion in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, merged at the turbulent site of Detroit just as the waters did.