Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Cadillac’s Town

  Surrounded by rich, moist soils and deciduous woodlands, a community, a town, and even an empire, could be anchored at le détroit. Such a town could extend its economic reach across the western interior, accessing a vast array of indigenous trade alliances and moving prized materials from the Great Lakes hinterlands into the lucrative markets of North America’s eastern colonies and western Europe’s populous cities. These materials consisted in the main of treated and untreated animal skins and items crafted from peltry, like textured beaver hats of the kind we can imagine on the head of a mature Benjamin Franklin. The eighteenth century was the height of the international fur trade, which locked European colonial powers in fierce competition for indigenous trading partners: Indian men who had the skills to hunt the animals that were driving a fashion frenzy among the transatlantic cosmopolitan set. The vessels that launched from a site such as Detroit carrying away beaver, fox, and deer parts would return from the East with capital in the form of credits and payments, as well as with sundry practical wares like cloth, guns, and kettles. The town that stood at the western edge of so abundant a trading system would grow fat and important over time, raising its own status beyond that of outpost and stretching the imperial girth of its mother country, France.

  This was the vision imagined by the officer and “opportunist” Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he founded Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit in 1701.12 Cadillac sought to expand the reach of the French Empire, then situated in the northerly region known as New France (now Canada), to block a growing exchange between Anishinaabe and Iroquois traders at the British post of Albany and thereby hem in the trading activity of British rivals, and to benefit personally from the results. He bet that by building a fort along the Detroit River, what was then a far western point for European colonists, the French Crown could hold back a British advance, buffer economic partnerships that French traders had cultivated with Ottawa, Huron, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi hunters, and gain still more trading partners to the west. “Dream[ing] of the personal riches that would accrue to him by making Detroit the preeminent post for a vastly extended trading network,” Cadillac proposed a trial settlement at the strait that would entice indigenous groups to move nearby, hence ensuring immediate access to the animal pelts brought in from their hunts.13 Native men were “procurement specialists” of these sought-after furs, and the women of their villages were expert at tanning and drying.14 By keeping Native trade partners close at hand, Cadillac aimed to dominate the region’s market in furs, thereby shoring up French supremacy in the eastern Great Lakes and stretching French influence farther west.

  From the 1600s through the mid-1800s, the fur trade economy was an Atlantic world phenomenon that linked European and American continental societies by a common ocean and drive for profit. The European rage for apparel fashioned from beaver skins, “a scarce luxury product” then available only in the so-called New World, was augmented by a more mundane use for leather goods made from the thicker hides of species like deer and bison, including “shoes, belts, clothing, bags, book covers, housing, straps, fasteners, and floor coverings.”15 Although there were rises and dips, periods of growth and recession, in the fur trade over the centuries, the historian Claudio Saunt has estimated that in the last thirty-five years of the eighteenth century alone, nearly “six million beaver pelts were exported from North America.”16 The bodies of local animals became sought-after commodities and sources of startling profit, akin to oil in the twentieth century if only people could wear it (and we do, in the synthetic materials that make up much of our thin, breathable, water-resistant yoga and outdoor apparel, not to mention those millennial stretch-style “skinny” jeans).17

  Skins fueled European expansion into the interior of the continent, becoming, as the historian Anne Hyde has put it, “an industry that dominated commerce in North America and provided the underpinning for its first capitalist boom.” That commerce had drawn whole villages and tribes into ferocious combat over position and primacy, including a series of bloody conflicts between Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) people and French-allied Anishinaabe (Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Potawatomi) people, as well as Hurons, in the mid- and late 1600s. These wars ended in a costly victory for the French alliance in the form of the Great Peace Treaty of Montreal in 1701.18 In a contest between European empires dedicated to a modern capitalist ideology and longing to control the natural riches of North America, principally the animal pelts and hides of the trade, Cadillac vowed to deliver France the upper hand and schemed all the while to increase his own wealth and local authority.19 The French minister of marine, Jérome Phélypeaux, Comte de Pontchartrain, championed Cadillac’s cause, leading reluctant officials in Quebec to grant him settlement rights.

  Aware that the cost for prime positioning within the fur trade had meant warfare and bloodshed in the all-too-recent past, Cadillac nevertheless did precisely what he had plotted. He established a fort along the strait that joined the Great Lakes together as one mammoth commercial waterway. Westerly enough to connect French traders with untapped sources of furs in the interior, and far enough to the south to provide a longer agricultural growing season than could be had in Montreal or Quebec, or in the older French Great Lakes posts of Michilimackinac and Sault Ste. Marie, Cadillac’s preferred location seemed ideal for a settlement with staying power in the French pays d’en haut, “Upper Country” or “High Country.” From this strategic strait, he hoped to control one of the most powerful resources in the development of human civilization: water. Together with the interconnected major rivers that flowed across this central region—the Missouri, the Mississippi, the Red River, and the St. Lawrence—this tucked-away strait formed approximately “eighteen thousand miles of Inland navigation.”20

  Cadillac sited his military fort where the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown Detroit still tower today, favoring a spot on a slight incline at what he believed was the narrowest stretch of the river. The rise provided good sight lines and higher ground for the essential protection of the military post, while the river provided a ready thoroughfare for the transport of goods as well as people. A proximate stream flowing parallel to the river dipped below this incline, forming a natural barrier to the rear.21 Cadillac’s settlement on the ridged slope at the strait was special from the beginning. He had the self-advantageous insight to invite disparate Native groups to settle new villages on the outskirts of his fort, which some did in the hopes of bypassing tedious trading treks to Montreal.22 Cadillac also exhibited the unusual commitment to sustain long-term residency for not just lone French Canadian men but also their families, through extensive agriculture. Unlike other commandants of French forts and trading posts in the Great Lakes woods, Cadillac brought a sizeable contingent of one hundred people along, including farmers and artisans as well as military personnel. Enslaved people were likely among this group that settled Detroit and planted a crop of winter wheat that first season. By the fall of 1702, French wives of the leading officers had begun to arrive, making Detroit a settlement where families would grow in the houses abutting the wheat fields.23 The settlers established “ribbon farms,” vertical homesteads of just four hundred to five hundred feet in width that opened onto the banks of the river and backed into fragrant orchards and dense forestland.24 These ribbon farms, poetically named because of their thin, elongated shape, would, a few decades later in the 1730s, cradle French Canadian style homes inspired by those in the north of France.25 Dwellings featured wood plank or shingle-sided exterior walls, sloped thatch cottage-style roofs, massive chimneys made of stones, and distinctive glass windows of petite geometrical panes. Residents cultivated the fertile land around their homes, planting orchards of peach, apple, and most notably pear trees, which would come to signify the French botanical heritage of the settlement.26 The look of this charming, rustic village behind its protective walls was that of a European “fortress town.”27

  In time, the population increased at the fort
that came to be known as Detroit, a truncated version of its formal designation, Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit. As the settlement grew beyond its walls, it encompassed farms along both sides of the river to take full advantage of that magical liquid highway. The town grew long and slender, following the water’s edge and shaping Detroit’s early footprint into what we might now call sprawl. The settlement came to engulf the bight of the river, or bend in the coastline, stretching eastward to westward just as the river flowed. And as social relations became more strained in a vise grip of proximity and exploitation, the people there would soon come to feel in their own skins the second meaning of the word bight: a loop in a taut rope.

  In 1710, Cadillac was appointed governor of Louisiana, which would become the site, in 1718, of another famed French colonial settlement: New Orleans. The commandant had made a timely exit. After Cadillac’s departure, his town on the Coast of the Strait remained, made up of diverse inhabitants who dwelled together in unsettling intimacy: indigenous people of the Huron, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Miami societies, French people from New France and old France, the children of Indian and French unions, and enslaved people of indigenous descent. The forced diversity and social hierarchy of Detroit made it a tinderbox. In 1712–13, a conflict called the Fox War broke out between Native villages near the fort. Cadillac had asked more than one thousand members of the Fox, Kickapoo, and Mascouten tribes from the west to move to Detroit in 1710, just before he relocated to New Orleans. A rivalry developed between hunters from these new groups and previous Native residents already established near Detroit. Indigenous men vying for the primacy of their own bands began killing each other in the woods of their hunting grounds. The tension escalated into group attacks that the French authorities did little to settle, leading to the death or captivity of hundreds of Fox and Mascouten people, many of whom would remain in Detroit as slaves.28

  La Riviere du Detroit, 1701. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.

  The racial, cultural, and national multiplicity of Detroit would only increase over the following hundred years to include British residents of English, Scottish, and Irish heritage, African Americans held in bondage, and white Americans from various points east and south. The Coast of the Strait was a place of overlapping borders—natural, cultural, and political—where peoples of various backgrounds struggled to make their lives in a context of growing economic disparity and political volatility. The most vulnerable of those people are also the most invisible in traditional historical treatments of Detroit and the greater Midwest. They are those whose presence was compelled rather than freely chosen, the enslaved who were integral to the town that would one day become the Motor City.

  Remnants of Slavery

  At the post of early Detroit, free white residents were fiercely resourceful. They invented effective ways to live in an isolated riverine environment, and they plundered natural resources in order to profit beyond their needs. Unfree people were just as creative, as subjects of their own lives and as objects of chattel slavery. Participants in the innovative process of supporting life in a difficult place out of the raw materials around them, they were at the same time viewed as a kind of natural resource themselves. Like the hunted beaver, enslaved people could be trapped and traded, their best parts—intellect, feeling, strength, and versatility—extracted to further what was then a model mercantile experiment. Straining to live worthwhile lives and contributing to the cultural mosaic that characterized this rough-hewn trading post town, enslaved residents of Detroit shared close quarters with those who exploited them like animals. Their owners ran the gamut of society: merchants, traders, gentleman farmers, political leaders, belles of the balls, and even priests.29

  Piecing together a composite picture of enslaved people’s experience in Detroit has depended on scant documentation. Unlike many locales in the American South (and even some places in the Midwest, such as Indiana), Michigan has yielded no full-length slave narratives or WPA slave interviews recorded by employees of the Federal Writers’ Project. Even narratives of African Americans who escaped to Ontario in the 1850s do not include fugitives who had been enslaved in Detroit.30 In a few rare instances, the cloaked thoughts of unfree people filter through formulaic documents like criminal proceedings and dictated wills. But for the most part, we must read the minds of those who were enslaved by identifying and interpreting their actions—by closely examining the things they did—in the light of their circumstances. Although there is a nearly nonexistent record of Detroit bondspeople’s direct words, several Detroit slaveholders wrote about their human possessions in matter-of-fact language captured in letters and financial account books. Due to Detroit’s character as a swashbuckling fur trade settlement that tolerated a loose legal and political infrastructure for close to a century, and due to a devastating fire in 1805 that destroyed businesses and private homes, even slaveholder records from the town are limited. Perhaps because of the slim nature of the Detroit slavery archive, very few scholarly works, and no full-length books, had yet been written about this subject. (For a discussion of the related historical literature, please see the essay at the end of this book.) But not having at our disposal the sources that make for a fuller history does not mean we should ignore the enslaved in Detroit. Their lives had meaning to them, to their families, and to the region, and can, when illuminated even by the refracted light of limited sources, have meaning for caretakers of the city today. The odds have been against some Detroiters from the dawn of the city’s founding, and yet they still fought and fled, created alliances and evaluated circumstances, crashed across international borders and challenged entrenched racial biases. We owe it to them, and ourselves, to bear close witness to their triumphs as well as their trials.

  Primary sources for this book consist, in the main, of the wills, letters, and account ledgers of Detroit slaveholder-merchants such as William Macomb, John Askin, and James May. Legal cases in the Michigan Territory Supreme Court involving slave freedom suits and attempts to recapture runaway slaves, together with the papers of prominent Detroit attorneys like Elijah Brush and Solomon Sibley, also provide crucial material. The registry of Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church, the only religious institution in Detroit for decades, as well as diaries of Protestant Moravian missionaries who settled in the area, contribute ritual and observational details about enslaved people’s daily and religious lives. Census lists, receipts, and bills of sale partially fill the many gaps inherent in this historical reconstruction.

  The scattered nature of the archival record on slavery in Detroit resists the wish that we might have for a comprehensive story that includes beginnings, middles, and endings for each individual and family that will emerge on these pages. Rather, the fragmentary state of the Detroit slavery archive reflects the rough, unpredictable nature of enslaved people’s experiences. So instead of pushing for story in some coherent and seamless sense, I have striven to offer what I see as a quilted chronicle: a chronological but oftentimes broken account of important events that stitches together historical interpretation, context, and causes, while patching in intuitive descriptions of people moving through a fraught place. What we can come to understand through this patchwork project is that Detroit was both common and uncommon as a site of American slavery. Detroit was a place built not on tobacco, sugar, or cotton but on the skins of animals often prepared and transported by slaves. Its geographical centrality in the fur trade circuit during the heyday of the industry made Detroit unusual even in a broader context of slavery as it was practiced in the Midwest. Most slaveholding settlements in the areas of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota applied stolen labor to military officers’ personal services at various forts, domestic duties, wheat production (Indiana and Illinois), mining (Illinois and Wisconsin), and resort hotels for vacationing southerners (Minnesota).31 In contrast, Detroit’s enslaved, while certainly employed to cushion daily life for others through domestic pursuits and in small-scale agriculture, were criti
cal among the labor force that greased the wheels of trade. A close look at life in Detroit therefore draws together two aspects of the U.S. past that are often narrated separately: the fur trade of the great West (often imagined as involving whites and Indians) and chattel slavery (often imagined as involving whites and blacks). Trading in the pelts of beavers and trading in the bodies of persons became contiguous endeavors in Detroit, forming an intersecting market in skins that takes on the cast of the macabre. While black men’s backs and legs served as the locomotives that moved these furs across vast distances, indigenous women’s bodies were plundered for sexual riches, much like the land was stripped of beaver and other fur-bearing mammals. The theft of unfree people in Detroit, of their knowledge, skills, and corpuses, made the city we know today possible. But out of the shadows of exploitation, enslaved people rose to accomplish a set of rare, phenomenal feats: they ran away consistently, testing new laws of the territory; they contributed to the growth of a subversive Afro-Native community that came to be known as “Negrotown”; they formed an armed fighting force that paraded the streets of Detroit while conflicted officials looked on with worry. In spirit, and surely in flesh for some, they were the ancestors of modern-day Detroit.

  Inspired by passionate public discussions about Detroit’s past spurred by commemorations of the Underground Railroad, the sesquicentennial of the Civil War, and the bicentennial of the War of 1812, I took up this research project in the summer of 2011 with the aid of a small team of student researchers. I had the privilege of following these public conversations and sometimes contributing to them in spaces such as the Detroit Historical Museum, Wayne State University, the University of Detroit Mercy, the University of Michigan, the Michigan Local History Conference, Underground Railroad tours in the city, and the River Raisin National Battlefield Park. No doubt, the intensity of dialogue among residents and scholars from Detroit and beyond took some sense of urgency from media accounts that repeatedly described Detroit as a symbol of ruin and collapse.32 But History may have a constructive rebuttal for this demoralizing rhetoric. One of Detroit’s prominent slaveholders once called the city “ruined,” and yet, from the vantage point of Detroit’s most vulnerable residents in his time—enslaved men and women—disarray meant the opportunity for reinvention.