by Tiya Miles
Contradictions of the Coast
A “strait” is a channel of water and also a state of difficulty. Native American and African American slaves in Detroit experienced dual and dire straits. The life they knew along the Detroit River was hard and rife with risk. Most of them had been snatched away from their families of origin in indigenous lake country and the plains, French Canada, New York, Kentucky, or Virginia, and were then sold and shared among members of the area merchant class. Tasked with the essential work of making a distant settlement habitable and even comfortable for their needy owners, slaves cleared land and built dwellings, chopped wood and tended livestock, grew food and prepared meals, and did the onerous heavy cleaning required in a location seasonally soggy with river mud and marshlands.33 Many of them were compelled to perform intense and dangerous labor as sexual servants or as crewmembers on boats that plied the rough, local waterways. Some slaves in the Detroit area, forced to do work out of doors without proper protection, succumbed to the harsh winter weather of the blustery lakes. An unknown number dwelled in an emotional cloud of anxiety, fearing physical restraint, injury on the waters, separation from loved ones, and violent punishment.
But at the same time that enslaved people in Detroit confronted certain hardship, they lived in a place that afforded them a degree of constructive mobility that was not without significance. Detroit was on the far periphery of European settlement. In some senses the town was like an island in an archipelago, separated from other colonial cities by long stretches of water but connected to imperial networks through trade. Surrounded by indigenous villages and hunting grounds, Detroit had no immediate support from either European colonial or American territorial infrastructures. It possessed what legal historian Lea VanderVelde has described as “frontier characteristics,” which meant the town was perpetually engaged in “building itself up, inventing first generation solutions in the absence of long-standing institutional foundations.” Far from being strong enough to comprehensively enforce the subjugation of enslaved people, Detroit depended on the cooperation of captives in the city. The tiny free white population of this borderland town always felt itself vulnerable to Indian, British, or American attacks, which meant the settlement needed combined efforts for defense from residents across the class hierarchy. Members of the Detroit elite marginalized, exploited, and punished their slaves, but only to a point. References to whippings and beatings are few in local slaveholders’ records. The callous separation of family members, emotional coercion, physical restraint, and imprisonment appear more frequently as mechanisms of control. On an inland coast in a frontier town that stood at the far reaches of European, and later American, centers of finance and government, enslaved people could, to a certain extent, negotiate their immediate circumstances.34 They seized the opportunity to broaden the scope of their personal actions, to push out the walls of their containment, to adjust relations of power, and, sometimes, to escape. In a lightly populated northern area bordered by Native towns and a navigable river, enslaved men and women found leverage that they applied to the goal of gaining freedom.
Detroit, the experience of enslaved people shows, was a compelling and confounding place in the history of American slavery. Besides being sited near multiple indigenous villages and at a great distance from established white towns, Detroit was shaped by diverse cultural influences, including indigenous practices and the religious mores of the Catholic Church. And just as significantly, Detroit was positioned on a pivotal waterway that, after the Revolutionary War, comprised an international border between the United States and British Canada, guaranteeing freedom for slaves who managed to cross in either direction. In this culturally heterogeneous frontier-borderland environment, slavery evolved as a palimpsest, with subsets of the population enacting and challenging slavery in different ways, and with new cultural practices of human bondage inscribed on top of old. The history of Detroit reveals long-term Indian bondage originating in Native American captive-taking practices that the French adopted and elaborated, as well as African bondage derived from French, British, and American norms. Three categories of enslaved people therefore lived in Detroit: those possessed by the French and their Indian allies, those owned by British officers and businessmen, and those held during the period of American occupation and settlement prior to Michigan statehood. Beyond demonstrating that Detroit was a distinctive site of American slavery due to its geographical, multiracial, and international makeup, this book illustrates the way in which early America was nowhere a place that guaranteed the enjoyment of freedom for peoples of color. Even in the Old Northwest, on the border with Canada, America was a land where freedom necessitated a hammering out blow by blow, and moment by moment, like molten iron in the blacksmith’s forge. In this way—in the torpid forging of freedom and long denial of corporeal security and meaningful citizenship for former slaves—the fort town of Detroit was all too common.
The five chapters in this book unfold chronologically. Chapter 1 describes the practice and experience of slavery in the era of Pontiac’s siege of Detroit in the 1760s, detailing how slavery came to the settlement with the French and their Native allies and how the practice persisted and changed under British jurisdiction following the French and Indian War. Chapter 2 traces the activities of a circle of British slaveholders in the period of the American Revolution in order to offer glimpses into the world of their slaves, whose numbers reached a high point and shifted demographically during and following the War for Independence. Chapter 3 uncovers the fiction of a free Northwest Territory by detailing the ways that slaveholders evaded the ambivalent antislavery clause of the Northwest Ordinance as well as the ways that enslaved people used the new federal legislation to their advantage. Chapter 4 explores the initial period of American authority in Detroit’s history, after the British finally relinquished key military posts in the Great Lakes. It traces the pace and scope of Americanization in the town and evaluates the effect of this political shift, as well as the impact of the great fire of 1805, on the enslaved. It also details a series of cases in the Michigan Territorial Court in 1807, a year that saw a surge in slave freedom suits and formal attempts by owners to recapture runaways. Peter and Hannah Denison, a black couple suing for their children’s freedom, launched the first such case that year, setting a precedent for the limits of slavery in Michigan law and establishing a route of escape to Canada that others would follow as an Underground Railroad network developed decades later. Chapter 5 traces the formation of a unique fighting band of runaway slaves known as the “Negro Militia.” After an international maritime incident, the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, raised American fears of an Indian attack backed by the British, Michigan Territorial Governor William Hull authorized the formation of a defensive force made up of Canadian ex-slaves led by Peter Denison. This chapter concludes with an overview of the War of 1812 and speculates on the role of Detroit’s black militiamen in the conflict. The conclusion of the book follows the surprising adult life of the eldest daughter of Peter and Hannah Denison, Elizabeth Denison Forth, and reflects on the history of slavery in Detroit in relation to public memory. A final essay briefly positions the book and its arguments within various streams of historical and academic conversation.
The City of the Straits, yet another name for the venerable Detroit, brims with untold stories of crisis and courage, of bold bids and daunting defeats. Although the people once held as slaves have disappeared from public consciousness and have no marker to their memory on the streets of that metropolis, their stories lend meaning and urgency to our understanding of the city’s past. By bringing hundreds of captive people into the light of our awareness, people who were expected to fade into the dim recesses of history, I hope to show the struggles, the strivings, and maybe even the soul of Detroit, a place like no other.
Slavery has a deep history on the Coast of the Strait, and echoes of that era sound beneath the surface even now. In 2012, a man named Sedrick Mitchell was convicted and sentenced for hol
ding women captive in the city of Detroit. For months he had secreted away two African American girls in a nondescript house on the east side of town. Mitchell demeaned and physically assaulted the fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls, forcing them to perform certain acts against their will. His case and others have been investigated by the Michigan attorney general’s Human Trafficking Unit. Still, sufferers of modern-day slavery in Detroit, and hundreds of missing and murdered aboriginal women in neighboring Canada, continue to await liberation and justice. It seems that the old streets of Detroit are still drawing traffickers, who rely on the unwieldy size of the 139-square-mile city, its decreasing population, its proximity to major highways and bridges, and its status as America’s most active border for international trade to ensure ease of passage and anonymity for dreadful deeds.35 Centuries ago, slaveholders used the same waters of this river to hike their profit margins, forcing enslaved people to ply the vessels carrying goods processed by still more slaves. But bondsmen and women turned this waterway to their advantage and hijacked the river as a route to liberation. Emancipatory action in our time, too, might be waterborne—ferried by the physical waters that embed social power, fed by the underground stream that is history. On the borderlands of bottom-line globalization, capitalistic expansion, and postindustrial flux, recognizing the historical links between land-seizers and body-snatchers, and exposing the tools and techniques of bondage as well as liberation, are incremental but purposeful ways to make room for visions that see the earth and all of its creatures free.
1
The Straits of Slavery (1760–1770)
How can we make these barbarians, Christians, if we do not first make them men? How make them men, if we do not humanize them? . . . How can we conquer them and make them subjects of the king if they have neither docility, nor religion, nor friendly commerce? All of this is easily accomplished by the means spoken of in my memoir, and by perfecting the establishment at Detroit.
—Cadillac to M. de Pontchartrain, 1702
Hundreds of ten-foot-high hardwood planks encompassed Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, just as the French commandant had originally envisioned it in 1701. Antoine Laumet de La Mothe le Sieur de Cadillac had specified oak as a strong material from which to construct the defensive walls of the post. Fashioned from the solid cores of sheltering trees that grew plentifully in the forestland of the southern Great Lakes, Cadillac’s stakes still rose to sharp points above eye level and bored into the rich earth three feet deep. The French fort that had just seen its sixtieth birthday was not only picketed but also manned. Sentries guarded the gates of this old-world village, monitoring the comings and goings of outsiders.1 A water gate shuttered the river; a rear gate faced down the forest; side gates capped either end of the main road called Ste. Anne’s. These fortified barriers were meant to secure the vulnerable populace of a small and fledgling trading town. Here, within a 372-by-600-foot expanse tucked beside an ambling river, streets such as Rue Ste. Anne, Rue St. Louis, and Rue St. Jacques were packed to bursting with buildings: private homes, merchant houses, a bakery, a church, a guardhouse, a storehouse, military barracks, and military commanders’ stations.2 On Ste. Anne’s Street, the major thoroughfare running east and west, perched Ste. Anne’s Church with its newly erected belfry, dating, the rugged residents would tell any properly admitted guest, to 1755. Saint Anne, blessed mother of the Virgin Mary, was a favorite saint in Quebec, Canada, and a spiritual match for this riverine coastline, as she was believed to be a protector of sailors and safeguard from storms. Rocking up to the churchyard like so many wooden boats with sails were neat rows of family homes with steep, triangular rooflines. The King’s Gardens, a parcel of land set aside for commanding officers, grew near the water southeast of the fort. Below the unwieldy incline of the southern wall, windmills spun beside the river, their oblong fans producing power to grind the wheat so carefully cultivated to sustain the survival of the remote, western settlement.3
Past the fortified town that sat on the northwestern edge of the river, elongated “ribbon farms” unfurled along the banks. Indigenous villages curled like strings of gleaming glass beads beyond them, on the north side as well as across the water to the south. A Potawatomi village to the west of the fort marked the border of settlement on the north bank of the river, where present-day Michigan is located. An Ottawa village could be sighted just across the river in the area of present-day Ontario, Canada. Farther west on the southern side, a Huron village was neighbor to an Ottawa settlement, and below the Hurons, French farmers had established another stretch of homes at a bend of the river known as la petite cote, “the little coast.” The portion of Windsor, Ontario, as we know it today, that shares the coastline with Detroit and is often viewed as a northern destination on the Underground Railroad of the pre–Civil War era, actually lies south of Detroit city. But in the 1760s, there was no Michigan and no United States; there was no Ontario and no international border that drew a stark political line between two nations, or marked a bloody line of desire and loss between two states of being: slavery and freedom. There was, instead, a wooden fort surrounding a French Catholic town that had recently fallen to the British in a costly, protracted imperial war.
To the rear of the fort called Detroit marshlands spread into a dense thicket of forestland used by Native peoples as hunting grounds. To the front of the fort a wooded swath buffered the rich bank of the river, below which sundry boats regularly approached to trade in goods. These waterborne vessels delivered textiles, household supplies, and metal weaponry, and carried away animal pelts headed for distant markets, as well as the flour, oats, and meat that Detroit regularly supplied to the smaller population of Fort Michilimackinac, located at the straits of Lakes Michigan and Huron, nearly three hundred miles to the north. The town on the bluff and its satellite settlements embraced the strait of Detroit, a waterway toward which all life here oriented. For this was a river that flowed into the rippling Great Lakes and, through them, the St. Lawrence River, the Atlantic Ocean, and the greater world. When Cadillac selected this site for his fort in 1701, he described the Detroit waterway as a channel made wondrous by versatility. The river could be accessed for trade and sealed off for defense, depending upon the circumstances. “The situation is agreeable,” Cadillac wrote about his chosen spot, “it is none the less important because it opens and closes the door of passage to the most distant nations which are situated upon the borders of the vast seas of sweet water. None but enemies of the truth could be enemies to this establishment so necessary to the increase of the glory of the king.”4
Fort Detroit was at once a strategic military stronghold and a pivotal commercial trading post set in the hinterlands of the pays d’en haut, a French term for Upper Country. Besides the French farms and Indian villages that spun around the picketed town like spokes on an elongated carriage wheel, Fort Detroit was positioned in an interior spot far from any European urban center. Montreal and Quebec, the bustling cities of colonial New France (the province to which the post at Detroit had previously been attached) were 560 and 723 long and tedious miles to the north and east. Although Great Britain had won the war and now claimed this post, the British colonies of the Atlantic seaboard had no effective influence here. Even New York, a principal city with which Detroit did business on an annual basis as the trading boats made their slow circuits in warmer months, was a full seven hundred miles away.5
The fur trade formed the economic core of this chiefly mercantile community, with the preponderance of its residents engaged in the business. As an inland hub of the trade, Detroit hosted the people and attracted the activities that kept enterprise alive and thriving. Resident merchants received goods from crewmen from the east, procured furs from indigenous hunters in local villages, imported a portion of those furs through the services of French voyageurs (rowers and traders), employed free and enslaved laborers to process and pack those furs, and then exported the products to eastern and Atlantic markets by way of combined free and slave
labor power. Intimately attached to the cities of the east through the flow of this global trade, Detroit was at the same time a world apart: small, rustic, and surrounded by Native hunting grounds, villages, trails, and preexisting trade networks.
John Montresor, Plan of Detroit, 1764. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan.
Various classes of French men and women, as well as inhabitants of mixed Native and French descent, peopled the riverside town’s dirt-packed roads. On the streets of Detroit in the latter half of the 1700s, a newcomer, perhaps a trader relocating from British New York who had arrived in early summer after the lakes had thawed, would have noticed the elided tones of the French language, along with Algonquian and Iroquoian dialects and a smattering of the English tongue. He would note the formal style of local merchants, the highest class of folks in town, who dressed to signify their position. For even in the so-called backcountry, these wealthier residents kept in step with trends of the cosmopolitan Atlantic. The men wore their hair powdered in white and paired brocaded waistcoats with breeches that buckled at the knees. Their wives donned long gowns wrapped with shawls and accented by strands of hair delicately piled atop the head. Merchant-class women in Euro-Native mixed-race families would have been similarly appareled as they stood on the shop floors with their husbands, co-managing the affairs of the fur trade.