Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  Sexual relationships between white men and Indian women, whether those women were enslaved or free, represented complex forms of bondage and intimacy that trapped many Native women in situations of captivity. Although Indian women owned as “concubines” experienced a degree of incorporation into French social networks, they were still essentially a class of people who could be bought and sold. Their children, like the children of black women in North America, inherited their unfree position. As the historian Kathleen DuVal has captured in her summary of this circumstance, “enslaved Indian women had more in common with their African counterparts than with free Indian women living among their own people.”78 In the American territory claimed by France, unfree black and indigenous women shared a similar subjugated status and the expectation of lifelong servitude that they would pass on to their progeny.

  Indigenous women redefined by the French as “Panis,” a word that would effectively become the equivalent of “Negro,” had been stolen from their home communities, sold to Europeans, and unredeemed by manumission or formal marriage. Their fate was linked to the imperial struggle over authority in the Great Lakes being waged among European empires and indigenous societies, but their fate was not the same as that of free Native people in intact tribal units who could ably negotiate the cultural “middle ground” with European interlopers.79 Intermarriages and intimacies between Frenchmen and Native women existed on a spectrum that blurred into sexual slavery, and it is often difficult, in evaluating existing records, to distinguish among these various relationships. Due to their ambiguous position in relation to Native groups and the pattern of French-Indian intermarriage, indigenous women may well be the most invisible population in the history of American and Canadian slavery.

  Lives of Bondage

  Detroit was a Catholic town dominated by a Catholic faith that saw no other religious influence until 1800, when a lone Protestant missionary arrived from distant New England.80 A petite cathedral built of wood and topped by a narrow belfry with a silver gilded bell, Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church fronted the street named for it, facing the river near the fort’s eastern gate and adjoining a burial ground where Catholics and people of Protestant heritage were interred together. This had been the first building erected in Cadillac’s Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, and it had burned or been torn down and then rebuilt four times by the 1760s.81 Detroit’s oldest institution, one that had outlasted even the French military, Ste. Anne’s served as a moral and social center, bringing people together across class status, racial groups, tribal affiliations, and nations of origin. Native people from Huron, Iroquois, Miami, Ottawa, Potawatomi, Sauk, Sauteur (Ojibwe), and Sioux communities participated in church services over the years. In the decades of British rule following Pontiac’s Rebellion, even British merchants with Protestant backgrounds attended Ste. Anne’s and had their slaves baptized there. For members of Detroit society seeking spiritual and interpersonal connection, this church was the core of community life.82

  Enslaved people in Detroit were counted among the number who moved through the physical and social space of Ste. Anne’s, as their inclusion in spiritual community was a feature of bondage among the French. French slaveholders in the colonies were expected to raise their slaves in the teachings of the Catholic Church, to baptize their bondspeople and care for their souls. Slaveholders served as the godparents of their slaves or the slaves of family members and associates. And rarely, an enslaved person acted as godparent to another slave. Unfree people, like free people, attended church services and joined in the communal life of the parish. Slaveholding families tended to own just a few slaves who resided in or near the homes of their owners. Enslaved people within Detroit households therefore came to know their owners, as well as one another, intimately. Each household was tied to others through the church. Ste. Anne’s connected separate domestic spaces within and beyond the walls of the fort, linking otherwise isolated enslaved people across the Detroit River archipelago. Within the yard and walls of the church, enslaved members of various households saw one another regularly, affording the chance to exchange a glance, touch a work-worn elbow, and share the personal stories of their days. And so it is in the Ste. Anne’s Church register, a record book kept by priests in the second oldest diocese in the present-day United States, that the shrouded lives of people in bondage during the era of Pontiac’s War emerge.

  Several of Detroit’s French middle-class and wealthy households contained one to two enslaved people, mostly of American indigenous ancestry and very rarely African. Ste. Anne’s register mentions the births, deaths, and baptisms of eighty-two slaves in the decade of the 1760s. The largest category of these—thirty-two—are “Panis” girls and women. Eighteen are “Panis” boys and men. Fourteen are “Panis” with gender unrecorded. Three “Black” slaves are listed, along with two “Mulatto” slaves. Several enslaved people are not identified by race and sex in this record, making precise total counts difficult. One fact is clear, however: most enslaved people present in Ste. Anne’s Church in this decade, and indeed prior to the year 1800, were women. The greater part of these captive women were indigenous.

  At Ste. Anne’s in the 1760s, most free congregants were French, one was British (the trader James Sterling), and three were Native people listed by name and tribe (Huron, Métis, Sauteuse).83 The French Campau (also spelled Campeau) family, whose members appear frequently in Ste. Anne records, typifies the lifestyle of early Detroit elites. The Campau line traces back to seventeenth-century Montreal, where they were, according to French Canadian historian Marcel Trudel, among the “leading” holders of human property, evidencing “an extravagant taste for slaveownership.”84 The Campaus put down roots in Detroit in the early 1700s, when two brothers, Michael and Jacques, moved to the fort, received land grants from Cadillac, and sired an extended clan whose members became influential in Detroit society as landowners, militiamen, and civic leaders. Their progeny would, generations later, co-found the Detroit Free Press newspaper, the Bank of Michigan, and Farmers and Mechanics Bank, amassing a fortune worth millions. Jacques Campau lived in a house on Ste. Anne Street, acquired land, and became a successful farmer. His son, Jacques Campau II, gained and sold still more land around the Detroit River.85 The Campaus may have brought enslaved people with them when they first arrived, or they may have accessed human property through contacts back in Montreal after settlement. At the age of twenty-eight, Jacques Campau owned one slave according to the 1762 French census of Detroit. Louis Campau owned three slaves that year; Simon Campau owned one; Claude Campau owned no slaves but had two paid employees. All of these men were described as economically “comfortable” in the estimation of the census taker, the French notary for the town, Robert Navarre. Three members of the Campau family (Baptiste, Michel, and Charles) who had no slaves were listed as “poor,” suggesting, as would be expected, that slave ownership correlated with rising wealth.86 The two largest slaveholders on the 1762 census each had five slaves: Zacharias Chicoste is listed as “rich”; Claude Jean Gouen is categorized as “comfortable.”

  Ste. Anne Church Slavery Data, Race by Decade. Compiled by Michelle Cassidy. Ste. Anne’s Church Registers, 1704–1842, Archdiocese of Detroit, available at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Courtesy of Ste. Anne Parish (Detroit), Sacramental Parish Register (Marriage, Birth, and Death Records, 1704–1842), Archdiocese of Detroit.

  Ste. Anne Church Slavery Data: Race and Gender by Decade. Compiled by Michelle Cassidy. Ste. Anne’s Church Registers, 1704–1842, Archdiocese of Detroit, available at the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. Courtesy of Ste. Anne Parish (Detroit), Sacramental Parish Register (Marriage, Birth, and Death Records, 1704–1842), Archdiocese of Detroit.

  Ste. Anne’s Church records also reveal the Campaus’ active ownership of Indian slaves. In 1761 Louis Campau had his slave, Joseph Marie, child of the enslaved Susanne, baptized. In 1763 Simon Campau had his Panis slave Marie Louise baptized with Alexis Campau
serving as godfather. When the enslaved infant Cacille (or Cecille) was born in 1763 to Marie Louise, a Panis slave owned by Chauvin Pere, her godparents were Nicolas Campeau and Cacille Campeau, the slave child’s namesake. Large slaveholders relative to other Detroiters at the time, Cicotte and Gouin appear frequently in the church register upon the births, baptisms, or burials of their Panis slaves. Not a single child born of a Panis woman is listed as free in the record.

  The registry kept by the priests at Ste. Anne’s Church in a sprawling French cursive is visually intricate but lacks texture regarding the experience of enslaved people. Nonetheless, a most striking and moving aspect of an otherwise spare record is the litany of deaths of Indian slaves in their infancy or childhood, often described as “small” or “young” “Panis.” The story of one enslaved woman in the priests’ notations also demands to be told but resists full reconstruction because of the starkness of the record. She was an unnamed “Panis slave” doubly confined in the state of slavery and a cell of the military prison in the winter before Pontiac’s siege. The reason for her incarceration went unstated, but it was within the walls of the prison house that she gave birth to a baby, Marie Joseph, with the aid of a midwife. The enslaved infant was baptized “with condition” in January of 1763. The baby had apparently been intended to go to “Monsieur Goduel Major commandant pour le roy de Detroit”—the commander of the fort—but was given instead to the master gunsmith. This change in the plan of who would gain ownership rights to the infant raises questions about paternity as well as clandestine deals between men of influence. It also begs questions about the unnamed mother’s imprisonment, her reaction to her and her child’s lamentable situation, and her fate after release, if indeed she survived the ordeal. Had this woman been confined because she fought her owner or someone else who had taken advantage of her lack of power? Had she attempted to run away in the weeks before giving birth, realizing that her child would inherit her unfree condition? Certainly other enslaved women in the coming decades in Detroit would take such drastic measures in order to gain a slice of freedom from authoritarianism and abuse. Although we cannot identify the precise conditions of this particular indigenous woman’s life, we can try to imagine the bleakness of her circumstances and the possibility that she rebelled against them.87

  The French Canadian Campaus, the Cicottes, the Gouins, and the master gunsmith who acquired the jailed woman’s infant represented some of Detroit’s earliest settlers and first slaveholders. Indeed, those categories overlapped, as colonial Detroit seems never to have been a place free from slavery. The British merchants and military men who came to Detroit in the wake of the French and Indian War also owned slaves. With greater access to African-descended bondspeople from the Atlantic coastal markets, British newcomers were more likely than French locals to have black people among their holdings. A chief example is James Sterling, the transplanted merchant from New York who first saw Detroit as a place of exile but soon learned that intermarriage combined with black slave labor was a recipe for success in that place.

  In 1762, the “hurry of Business” had kept James Sterling from “having so much pleasure” in the company of the “fair sex,” and he was “obliged to content [him] self with that of a Copper Hue,” a reference to relations with Native women, likely enslaved. A few years later, his outlook had brightened.88 In 1765, he reported his marriage to Marie Angelique Cuillerier, a daughter of the slaveholder-trader Antoine Beaubien. For Sterling, this was an excellent match. A reportedly lovely and spirited young French woman who could lightly converse and gracefully dance with equal finesse, Angelique had charmed the first contingent of British officers who arrived in Detroit in 1761. But it was the sharp-eyed Irish merchant seeking his fortune in Detroit who won her hand (as well as her considerable dowry) and used that bond to further his business ventures. Sterling described his bride as “a very prudent woman and a fine scholar” who had “been raised to trade from her infancy and is generally allowed to be the best interpreter of the different Indian languages at this place.” Continuing in his rhapsody, Sterling enthused: “Her family is in great esteem amongst the Indians. . . . We shall carry on trade much better and with a great deal less expense than formerly, my wife serving as interpreter and she and I myself as clerks.” Besides being multilingual and skilled in the ways of trade, Angelique Cuillerier was a member of a well-connected family with close links to local Native people. She was able to bring unusual Indian items, such as fox fur muffs and beaver blankets, into the channels that her husband used for the trade of foodstuffs and other supplies. Her father, according to Sterling, was trusted by the Indians who had led the attack in Pontiac’s War and would likely have been positioned as a French commander in Detroit had the rebellion against the British triumphed. And for Angelique’s family, an intimate bond with a subject of Great Britain ensured their staying power after the French defeat. This was a match made in imperial fur trade heaven, where patriotic divides could fade in the face of economic opportunities.89

  Between their dual nationalities, similar experience in business, access to different sources for goods, and shared zeal for trade (a fact borne out in Angelique’s independent control of items in her possession and use of her husband’s networks to distribute them), James Sterling and Angelique Cuillerier were the perfect mid-eighteenth-century Detroit power couple. And for each of them, black slaves made up an essential part of this winning package.90 Sterling is the only person noted as owning black slaves in the Ste. Anne register in the 1760s; he is also one of few British residents listed at all in this early decade of church records. Sterling’s human property included a black child named Marie, daughter of the black enslaved couple Babet and Emanue. On the occasion of this child’s baptism, her owner was described as “Sieur Sterlin Bourgois commercent of the town.” Sterling also owned Antoine, a child born to a black slave, Fébe, in 1768 (with no father named). After Pontiac’s War, Sterling continued to procure and distribute black men for his use and the use of his business partners. In fact, he stated a preference for black men over white men who might be employed to do the same work of carrying heavy animal pelts over challenging portages (the miles to be crossed on dry land between waterways on a journey). In a series of letters in 1764 and 1765, Sterling complained about the poor performance of a white worker, Charles Morrison, writing that Morrison was not as good as “negroes” in transporting merchandise (in this case, a massive “eighty-five packs of peltry”).91

  For her part in this successful slaveholding union, Angelique Cuillerier was the child of a slaveholder who probably enjoyed the services of Indian slaves before her marriage to James Sterling. She also secured “a negro wench for her own use” from John Duncan, a business partner of her husband. Angelique paid for this black woman with “the price of the peltry,” a trade to Duncan, skins for skin. A black woman held in bondage would have been more than a source of domestic labor for a French elite woman like Angelique. Similarly to the black boy that Pontiac sought in the heat of conflict, such a woman symbolized the status of her owner. A living, breathing ornament that highlighted her mistress’s access to exotic, costly things, a black woman in 1760s Detroit was worth her weight in furs.92 For black slaves were still much more difficult to acquire than Indian ones in the Great Lakes, and females of African descent were the rarest kind of human being transformed into commodities in the settlement on the strait.

  Beyond serving as luxury goods for a few European elites, black women could find themselves enslaved in Detroit as a means of keeping black men in line. While French, and to some extent British, men set aside Indian women for their own self-serving sexual purposes, these slaveholders sometimes maneuvered to pair black women with black men. In one recorded example of this kind of strategic purchase of African American women, the explicitly stated reason was to placate black men being held in bondage. James Sterling reveals as much when he writes in 1764 that he has gotten hold of “2 young Negro wenches for the two big negroes whom I have
employ’d . . . with the Engineer for the winter. The French are afraid to buy them without wenches for fear they should run away. Yet I have been offered a good deal more than what they cost.”93 Sterling’s words indicate not only the high value placed on black women, but also his attempt to allay the fears of French clients by providing sex partners for black male slaves who might otherwise abscond. His stated intention to artificially manufacture couples suggests the existence of more than one sexual market for bondswomen in Detroit. Indigenous women were paired with white men as sexual and domestic servants, and black women were paired with black men as sexual consorts to quell resistance.

  Sterling’s cynical action here has an element in common with the breeding practices of southern slaveholders who forced black women to lie with black men in order to increase the size of an enslaved population. But rather than explicitly trying to produce greater numbers of slaves through compelled procreation, Sterling is seeking to produce complacency through the formation of black pair bonds. This nuanced exploitation of black women’s sexual labor in Detroit is difficult to pinpoint and verify, but trace evidence in the records of merchants like Sterling leaves a trail to follow. The letter book of Schenectady, New York–based merchants provides another example pointing to the constructed coupling of black women and men. The Phyn and Ellice Company often took purchase orders from merchants and residents in Detroit, including several for slaves. In June of 1771, the pair informed Detroit merchant John Porteous: “We have contracted with a New England Gentleman . . . for some green Negroes to be dilver[ed] here. . . . When your wench will be forwarded together with Negro Boy in case she may sometime hereafter choose a Husband we apprehend he will be useful to you or advantageous at the Sloop or you can despose [sic] of him as you find best the price £50 each.”94 In this case, Phyn and Ellice were providing Porteous with the woman slave he had requested (again, an indication of the market for black women) and throwing a young black man in with the deal, assuming that the man would make a fitting sex partner for the woman, prove useful in boat work, and barring either outcome, be resalable in Detroit.