by Tiya Miles
Although the merchants who doubled as slave traders paired black men and women for practical reasons that served their own profit motives, by forcibly arranging enslaved blacks into couples, Detroit elites provided for the formation of black nuclear families. Sometimes enslaved men and women formed ties that endured and entered the state of formal marriage recognized by the Catholic Church. Most of these enslaved couples were composed of black husbands and wives; the few interracial marriages were between black men and Native women. The pattern of these rare Afro-Indian couplings among slaves stemmed from demographic realities: larger numbers of Indian women than Indian men in the enslaved population and increasing numbers of black men in the area due to British merchants’ active procurement of them. The children of these couples were labeled as “Panis” or “Negro” in church records, both terms being synonymous with “slave.”
This fate of inherited slavery for mixed-race children with Indian mothers and black fathers departs from much of what we know about how indigeneity functioned for Afro-Native people in early America. In the American Northeast and the South in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having a Native American mother could be a means to freedom for black people of mixed ancestry. This is because the enslavement of Native Americans was outlawed in northeastern as well as southern colonies and states by individual laws passed between the middle and late 1700s. Holding an Indian person as a slave became illegal in most locations in the east. This did not mean that Native people previously enslaved there were not still secretly held on farms and plantations. Certainly they were, and many of these hidden American Indian bondspeople would fade into the recesses of historical consciousness. It did mean, though, that people trying to buy or sell indigenous slaves could come under scrutiny and see their claims challenged in the courts. In many cases, when enslaved individuals with Indian mothers and black fathers brought suit for their freedom in American courts, they prevailed on legal grounds tied to an assumption of the indigenous rights to liberty inheritable through the maternal line.95 Just as black women were seen as producing slave children nearly as a matter of course, Native American women were seen as producing free children.
But Detroit presented a starkly different context. Here in the western borderlands, Indian slavery was the norm, and the practice of owning Native slaves was sanctioned by governing authorities—the French and then British Crowns—as well as by the Church. Having a Native American mother guaranteed nothing to a mixed-race slave, except the likelihood of lifelong bondage. The situation of Marie-Marguerite, an enslaved Native woman, is a case in point. Marie-Marguerite was owned in Detroit by a mixed-race (French and Miami) woman, Marie Suzanne Richard. Marie Suzanne Richard had retained her slaves as part of her inherited estate after her husband’s death in a French legal context that permitted women to own and inherit property with fewer restrictions than in British North America. Marie-Marguerite married Charles, a black man also owned by Richard. When the two had a daughter, Catherine, in 1752, the priest recorded the baby’s race as “negresse,” making clear that this child was to be considered a slave and drawing a visible line of differentiation between this unfree infant and her owner.96 This instance also shows, like the example of Angelique Sterling, that white men were not the only slaveholders in Detroit. French, mixed-race, and Native women owned slaves as well. In another case, a Miami woman, Tacumwah, who coupled with a British and then a French man in Detroit, had acquired slaves by trading rum. The Frenchman with whom she lived in the early 1770s was a Beaubien, the same family to which Angelique Sterling belonged and that owned the slave arrested by the British for suspected betrayal during Pontiac’s War.97
Whether held by white or Native owners, children born to enslaved Indian mothers and black fathers were in the extreme minority in Detroit and other French colonial towns. Even fewer enslaved families with both a Native father and mother existed here, and only one such family was listed in the Ste. Anne register in Detroit: Babet, Piere, and their child Catherine, Panis slaves of Charles Cicotte.98 This marriage pattern, or lack thereof, for indigenous women strongly suggests that white male owners were claiming sexual rights to their slaves, leaving little room for Indian women to marry enslaved men even in a society that sanctioned such unions.99 Frenchmen, and the British men who moved into town after them, wanted Indian women, sometimes as free wives, but more often as unfree sexual consorts. This may be why Mr. Collbeck, a British trading partner of Detroit merchant James Sterling, liked to keep the Indian women near his home in Niagara, New York, “frequently drunk.”100 The particular value that Native women were perceived as possessing, a value of erotic and sexual potential long instantiated in the social and cultural expectations of fur trade society, coincided with their value as household laborers. In the 1760s and beyond, uncountable infants born to enslaved Native women had been conceived by white men in Detroit. Most of these babies went unclaimed by their fathers and were listed in the Ste. Anne’s registry along with their mother’s name, their mother’s status as “Panis,” and the notation that they were the progeny of an “unknown father.” For sixty-nine “Panis” babies born in Detroit, the father was listed as “unknown” or not mentioned at all.101
There were, of course, exceptions to the scenario in which the child of an enslaved Indian mother was also consigned to slavery. A small number of French slave-owners in colonial settlements are recorded as formally freeing Indian women in order to marry them, women with whom these men had shared beds and conceived children.102 The majority of Frenchmen did not bother with this formality, however, and did not bestow on their enslaved consorts the legal protections of freedom. With the turnover from French to British control, British military officers and merchants joined the slaveholding ranks in Detroit, though the cultural prohibition against sexual relations across racial lines was stronger in British colonial society than in the French settlements. Still, Englishmen pursued sexual relations with Native women, too, continuing a pattern that was all too familiar in their adopted region. The best-documented example is that of John Askin, who had braved a trip to Detroit to deliver provisions during Pontiac’s siege and would later return to become one of Detroit’s most prominent merchants and leather-good manufacturers.103
The young John Askin had arrived in North America in 1758, hailing from a family of shopkeepers in Ireland. After building a business in Albany, New York, that chiefly provided supplies to the British army, Askin moved to the northwest fur trade post of Michilimackinac in search of new opportunities in the Upper Great Lakes. In Michilimackinac, most likely in the 1760s, he acquired a Native slave woman named Mannette from a Mr. Bourrass. Mannette was probably Ottawa from a nearby village, and her cultural knowledge and social connections along with her linguistic versatility were beneficial to Askin’s trading enterprise. Askin’s access to rum smoothed his relations with Native traders as did his intimate ties with this unfree Indian woman. He had three children with Mannette: John Jr., Catherine, and Madelaine, born in 1762 and 1764. Askin claimed, cared for, and educated his children with Mannette. In 1766 he freed the children’s mother in a manumission letter in which he promised to “set at liberty and give full freedom unto my Panesse slave named Mannette.”104 Askin vowed, further, that “She is a free woman at full liberty and Mistress of herself to dispose of herself as good Seemeth unto her.”105
Apparently, what seemed good to Mannette was cutting ties with her former owner, John Askin, even if that meant leaving their little ones behind. The children remained with Askin and his French wife from Detroit, Archange Askin, who raised them in a household served by Indian and black bondspeople. John Askin Jr. would become a trader and Catherine Askin would marry Samuel Robertson, a British employee of the Phyn and Ellice Company, whose job was to captain boats carrying furs, supplies, and, likely, slaves, in the New York–Western circuit.106 The children of an enslaved mother, they were now part of a mixed-race class that participated in slavery. But after Mannette’s manumission, there is
no trace of this Ottawa mother in Askin’s correspondence; she fades into the shadows of colonial history like so many other Indian women held as slaves across the Great Lakes.
Askin’s act of emancipation is a rare recorded example of such largesse among British slaveholders in Detroit. Later, John Askin would hold several more Native women as slaves and one Native woman as his ward. These women may have been vulnerable to sexual advances in a household in which their owner had bedded an Indian slave in the past. While there is no indication in the existing documents that John Askin engaged in relations with any of these women, records often fail us in the search for the experiences of slaves in Detroit. There is one thing we can know for certain: most stories of the women owned by John Askin, like most stories of slaves held in Detroit between Pontiac’s Rebellion and the American Revolutionary War, did not end like Mannette’s, with “full freedom.”
A Dim Force
In the 1760s, Detroit was an isolated place where people lived in a concentrated area, depending upon a local exchange of goods and services for their survival. A dim force drove the growth of this linchpin port town in the Great Lakes. Slavery was integral to the workings of the settlement.107 Leading French and British families owned one or two slaves, usually of indigenous descent and acquired mainly through Native brokers in exchange for utilitarian items such as guns, ammunition, and blankets. Enslaved people could be found laboring in every capacity in the town—in bedrooms, in kitchens, in wheat fields, and in manufactures. And importantly, enslaved men crafted the storage containers, manned the boats, and transported the bundles that comprised the town’s chief economic activity—the fur trade.
More invisible in the historical literature than even these unfree men whose labors supported the frenzy for fur, were unfree women. Most enslaved people in Detroit, as notated in the Ste. Anne’s Church register, were indigenous and female. Both the practice of marrying Indian wives according to local customs and the habit of using Indian slaves for sex informed the unspoken view among male slaveholders in Detroit that indigenous women were fit for sexual-domestic roles. Free Native women with a recognized tribal or national designation, and the protections that came with this political identity, were accorded social regard in this French-Indian dominant community. Panis women, by contrast, those stripped away from their families and tribes of origin, were just as vulnerable to sale and abuse as slaves of African descent. Because Indian women could be found in a spectrum of arrangements with white men in Detroit, the lines between free Indian wife, long-term Panis concubine, and casual Panis sex slave blur in the historical record.108 In popular understandings of Midwestern history, Native women who were owned by Frenchmen have faded into the background behind more positive narratives of Native women who were married to them. But unfree indigenous women lived and struggled in Detroit, too, making up the largest portion of the enslaved population.
In the era of Pontiac’s War, slavery in Detroit was a multidimensional, multicultural, multiracial, and malleable tradition. Traders, merchants, farmers, and priests could own people of color in this fortified French-Indian-British town where colonial laws governing slavery were inapplicable, unenforced, or undeveloped. Due to the relatively short life spans of enslaved people in New France (with an average death occurring before the twentieth birthday) most bondspeople in this period were young and Indian; a handful were black.109 These individuals were compelled, by the theft of their freedom, to meet the fundamental demands of privileged residents in the Detroit River region—residents who sought slaves for mobility (the movement of goods), for intimacy (the satisfaction of sexual desires), for domesticity (the maintenance of households), and for luxury (the pleasures attached to owning prestige goods). On this razor-thin edge of settled life along the strait of Detroit, scores of Indians and a smattering of Africans were held as captives by fur trade elites, and also held captive, along with their owners, by forces that were changing the course of North American history.
2
The War for Liberty (1774–1783)
If that Post be reduced we shall be quiet in future on our frontiers.
—Thomas Jefferson to George Rogers Clark about Detroit, 1780
What was going through Ann Wyley’s mind when she entered and burgled the furrier shop of two of Detroit’s most successful merchants? Certainly not that she and her accomplice, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Contencineau, would escape unpunished if caught for theft.1 Like most British businessmen in the bustling frontier maritime town, James Abbott and Thomas Finchley, targets of the break-in, dealt in furs and imported goods. Their job was to procure skins from local hunters or middlemen and ship those pelts to purchasers in the East in exchange for supplies; they then sold or distributed manufactured items to customers and American Indian trade partners. The pair operated a shop located near a host of others along the northern bank of the Detroit River, the liquid-gold main street of colonial Fort Detroit.2 And in addition to co-owning the store itself, Abbott and Finchley co-owned Ann Wyley, an enslaved woman of African descent. Abbott was an Irishman by birth whose arrival in 1768 had been timed to take advantage of opportunities afforded by the British assumption of former French posts. Finchley, his business partner, is a more reclusive figure in the records of early Detroit, who appears only infrequently in conjunction with shorthand notations about the pair’s firm. Both men were slaveholders, as were other members of the newly arrived British merchant elite. Between Pontiac’s Rebellion and the American Revolutionary War, these men joined their French and Euro-Indian mixed-race counterparts in the capitalist enterprise of the Great Lakes skin trade, acquiring the pelts of beasts and bodies of humans to build wealth and influence. Between the waning years of the French period and the rise of the British period, the ratio of indigenous to black slaves tilted only slightly. An approximate count of the Ste. Anne’s parish records indicates sixty-four Natives to five blacks in the 1760s and forty-six Natives to eight blacks in the 1770s. It would take a revolution and shifting political balance of power for numbers of enslaved blacks to substantially increase in a town defined as part of the American Northwest Territory.3
Ann Wyley was among few blacks, enslaved or free, living in Detroit in the early 1770s. How the firm of Abbott & Finchley came to count her among its assets is unknown. Equally mysterious are the precise details of what took place on the night the storehouse was robbed, as the fragmented testimony of participants varied at the time, and the testimony of Ann Wyley, portrayed as the instigator by her co-conspirator, was not preserved in the record. In the spring and summer of 1774, a series of petty thefts had been taking place inside the walls of the fort, wrangling the frayed nerves and thinning the pocketbooks of resident merchants. Ann Wyley, “a negro slave” of Abbott & Finchley, Jean Contencineau, “a Canadian of humble station” in the employ of Abbott & Finchley, and Charles Landry, another laborer at the firm who worked alongside Jean packing peltry, were all suspected as perpetrators in “a system of small pilfering that had been going on for some time.”4 The most dramatic of these crimes—the burglary at Abbott & Finchley’s store apparently facilitated by an act of arson—was the final straw, the bold incident that led to a government crackdown, Ann Wyley’s jailing, and Jean Contencineau’s death. The violation of property rights within the heavily guarded fort unnerved the moneyed class in Detroit, and “a feeling prevailed that there could be no security until such worthless characters were adequately punished.”5
In this heist that set the wheels of Detroit’s barebones justice system in motion, “eight pounds of beaver skins, two otter skins, and some raccoon skins, to the value of four pounds sterling” along with a handful of domestic items and “little knives” had been stolen. Of the spoils, Ann Wyley had come away with “a purse containing six guineas, the property of James Abbot . . . which purse were found on [her] person,” as well as “a handkerchief, containing two pair of women’s shoes and a piece of flannel.”6
Was Wyley making a statement of political import
through her illegal action? Did she wish to adorn herself with the feminine items now in her possession, to embellish the rough apparel provided by her owners that likely marked her inferior status as a slave?7 Did she think she could improve her material condition by taking the goods and selling them on the illicit market? Or was there a deeply emotional element motivating her actions? Perhaps Ann had bonded with or felt indebted to her accomplice, Contencineau, who worked in the shop as a “servant,” and might have been indentured (bound for a period of years) to Abbott & Finchley’s firm.8 Perhaps Ann longed to strike a blow against her owners where she knew it would hurt the most—their commercial enterprise, the other valuable “things” they owned.
Whatever her reasons for taking the risk, Wyley, along with her accomplice, faced dire consequences for her actions. Arrested by the authorities, the duo faced indictment for “subtilly, privily [and] craftily . . . steal[ing], tak[ing], and convey[ing] away” the “goods and chattels of the said Abbot and Finchley” as well as “attempting to set fire to the house of the said Abbot and Finchley.” Confined to the barracks where prisoners were kept in the fort, the unlikely pair awaited trial for nearly two years, an expanse of time during which Wyley stood at the mercy of her military jailers, much like the unnamed “Panis” slave woman who was similarly imprisoned there for reasons unknown in 1763.
In the spring of 1776 Ann Wyley and Jean Contencineau finally had their day in court, but the proceedings of that court were far from regular. The passage of the Quebec Act in 1774 had established the boundaries of British Canada and included Michigan within the legal jurisdiction of Quebec.9 Officials in Quebec then appointed military and civil leaders to run the distant posts. In 1775, Henry Hamilton, a captain in the British army described as “overbearing and supercilious,” became lieutenant governor of Detroit. As the town’s chief civil leader, Hamilton worked closely with Philip Dejean, Detroit’s notary and justice of the peace since 1767, who was suspected of being “a bankrupt merchant from Montreal . . . that came west to better his fortune by leaving his debts and creditors behind.”10 Dejean’s mandate was never clearly defined by British officials in Quebec; nor were the legal rights of Detroiters in relation to local governance.11 But there was a sense among residents that Dejean’s nebulous authority did not grant him the right to judge serious offenses or exact harsh punishments.