by Tiya Miles
If Alexander Macomb and his future son-in-law, Arent De Peyster, protested too much in the aftermath of the Grosse Ile deal, insisting that the massive sale was the result of the Potawatomis’ entreaties and therefore voluntary as well as ethical, William Macomb quietly profited from the land grab, becoming one of the wealthiest men in Detroit by the time of his death in 1796. Owning vast swaths of land as well as several slaves meant that William Macomb could lay claim to the game hunted there, harvest natural resources, extend agricultural development, and charge other residents for rent, creating capital and income streams that would allow him to do more of the same: trade goods, acquire acreage, buy slaves, and put those slaves to work on his property as caretakers, farmers, builders, transporters, and domestics.
The Macomb brothers’ conduct is an exaggerated example of the mode of settlement and urban development adopted by most elite British residents in the late eighteenth-century Detroit River region. They moved to the area, imported and produced goods for the local market, processed and sold furs collected by Indian hunters, acquired tracts of Native land under specious circumstances, built homes and operated farms with slave labor, and used slaves to transport raw materials and finished goods from west to east and east to west. The most successful of these men attached themselves to a branch of official government business, principally supplying the British military or serving as Indian agents, and they used the pressure of rising white land speculation as well as wartime violability to further encroach on Native territories. In short, British subjects, who did not want for ambition, combined access to Indian land and Indian-procured furs, slave labor, and government connections to build their businesses, and with these, the town of Detroit. Like the metropolis of New York whose backstory of black slavery is now widely recognized, the great industrial and cultural center of twentieth-century Detroit had its roots in greed, graft, and forced racialized labor. Those roots crossed the cultural lines of British and French elites, whose family trees began to merge in the 1760s and ’70s. Some British merchants were wise enough to marry into wealthy French families, like James Sterling, the well-positioned trader whose shop was in place before the outbreak of Pontiac’s War, and like Alexander Macomb, who married Catherine Navarre, daughter of the French notary and slaveholder Robert Navarre.32 Within decades, the bicultural daughters of these first British residents would be attractive mates to incoming American businessmen who eyed Detroit as a space of new opportunity at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The networks and commercial ventures built by British Detroiters linked that interior hamlet to towns and cities near the eastern Great Lakes. Although Detroit was remote on the map of northern colonial settlements and surrounded by forests and Indian villages, it possessed close ties to colonial New York, which sat on Lakes Ontario and Erie. Indeed, Detroit resembled New York in situation and characteristics. Like New York City, Detroit was sculpted by waterways that moved around and through the town, forming a series of inlets and islands. Like broader New York, Detroit adopted an urban-style slavery oriented around skilled trades, manufacturing, shipping, and small-scale agriculture. Decades into the future, Detroit would follow the ambivalent and stuttering lead of New York in the development of gradual emancipation for its enslaved population.33 And consequentially in 1776, like New York City, Detroit was a British military and loyalist stronghold. Although they lived at “the edge of the West” and deep inside Indian territory, Detroiters were no country bumpkins as some easterners at the time liked to think.34 Detroit’s intrinsic relationship with the people, goods, and ideas of New York was one essential way in which this fortified frontier town was “poised at the intersection of East and West, empire and frontier, core and periphery, and imperialism and localism.”35
The power brokers in Detroit at the outbreak of the American Revolution were cosmopolitan British traders who trafficked in slavery and misappropriated indigenous lands. They were also members of a tight-knit economic and social circle, aiding one another, intermarrying, trading goods, and exchanging the bodies of slaves. British loyalists nearly to a man, these English, Scottish, and Irish businessmen found opportunity as well as difficulty as the once distant war for independence exploded, drawing ever nearer to their Great Lakes enclave.
War Comes to the Northwest
William and Alexander Macomb were sons of the British Isles, born to Scottish parents who were living in Ireland in the late 1740s and 1750s. Their father, John Gordon Macomb, relocated the family to Albany, New York, in 1755. There the Macomb men entered the brisk business of trade. With the blessing and financial assistance of their father, the adult-aged Macomb sons moved to Detroit in 1769, where they set up shop as traders and merchants, taking advantage of their father’s contacts and access to suppliers in the east. The Macomb, Edgar & Macomb mercantile company supplied British military personnel and other residents in Detroit with imported goods, plunged into the pelt trade that was Detroit’s chief commercial activity, and acted as local bankers. Besides the profitable land of Grosse Ile “purchased” from Potawatomi leaders, Alexander Macomb attested: “the Ottawas & Chippewas also granted us large tracts back of the Settlement & from the River.” The Macomb brothers did well for themselves despite the eventual refusal of the American Congress to affirm these latter land purchases. While Alexander would move back to New York after the Revolutionary War, William established a strip farm immediately west of Detroit’s fort pickets and, later, had a large log home built on Grosse Ile.36
In the summertime, William Macomb occupied the “Mansion House,” his breezy island abode on Grosse Ile, with wife Sarah Jane Dring Macomb and their children. In cooler weather, the Macombs resided at their townhome on seven acres beside the fort, sending their enslaved woman, Charlotte, to manage the island house.37 And William Macomb found no shortage of bondspeople to task with work on his various properties. He steadily increased his slaveholdings in the 1770s, ’80s, and ’90s. In November of 1776, “Mr Macome,” a Protestant, had a Panis male slave buried at Ste. Anne’s Church. In 1788 he was paying off the price of a “negro wench” to Detroit merchant James May.38 Macomb would come to own scores of slaves by the time of his death in 1796, and many of these had been acquired in the tumult of the Revolutionary War era. That massive conflict disrupted stability and threw lives into disarray, providing a golden opportunity for Macomb and other prominent Detroiters to snatch up slaves, mostly African Americans from the Upper South who were forced to Detroit at the hands of British soldiers and their Native allies. Gradually, over several years between the Declaration of Independence and the Treaty of Paris that cemented the war’s end in 1783, Detroit’s enslaved population increased by nearly a third.39
Although William Macomb was focused on acquiring land rather than fighting a war in the summer of 1776, by 1777 he and other Detroiters felt a mounting anxiety. William and Alexander Macomb’s father, John Macomb, was being frightfully harassed back in Albany for his Tory allegiance. By the summer of 1777 John Macomb was fleeing the Rebels, having, as he described it in an appeal for help to the Governor of Quebec, “just time to leave his House when the Rebels enter’d and Plunder’d it of every moveable thing also every living creature & thing out of doors to a very large amount.” John Macomb requested placement in Detroit as “commissary for that garrison,” for which he would “Relinquish his Salary.” He explained that “all his Family are now settled at Detroit [and] he wishes to live there with them.”40 He also hoped this move would bring relief from Rebel assaults. But given the strategic position of Detroit, the brawl between American revolutionaries and British loyalists would soon extend even there.
General George Washington had firmly felt, since 1775, that the northwestern forts were key to a Continental Army victory. He had written to General Philip Schuyler (uncle of Detroiter Arent Schuyler De Peyster, who stood on the opposite side of the conflict and would marry into the Macomb clan), saying: “If you carry your arms to Montreal, should not the garrison of Niagar
a, Detroit & c. be called upon to surrender, or threatened with the consequences of a refusal?”41 Although a Rebel attack on Quebec had failed in 1775, the prolonged conflict and a competition between the Crown and Continental Congress over the allegiance of various Native nations increased Detroiters’ fears that they could be targeted. Indigenous people figured prominently in the struggle between the Rebel and British forces, with each side desperately attempting to recruit Indian allies and fretting over the damage that Native warriors could unleash. While British leaders in Detroit managed to secure the support of the Detroit Potawatomies, Ohio Shawnees, and various bands of Ojibwes, Hurons, and Ottawas, they failed to gain the assistance of Potawatomies in Wisconsin and Illinois. By July of 1778, Lieutenant Governor Hamilton in Detroit had succeeded in passing a war belt to Shawnee, Ottawa, Mingoe, Wyandot, Potawatomi, Delaware, Mohawk, and Miami representatives, cementing an alliance that greatly distressed the Continental Congress.42
With important Native allies in place, British military officials sought to shore up Detroit’s defenses as well as prepare the way for offensive action using the fort as a staging ground. The British concentrated strength and strategy in Detroit, moving personnel to the settlement from New York and making Detroit the center of the western theater of war. Captain Richard Lernoult, reassigned from Fort Niagara in 1776, would oversee the building of a substantial new fort in Detroit located on higher ground behind the dwellings and mercantile shops rather than near the riverbank. Lernoult placed responsibility for the details of construction in the hands of his second-in-command, Captain Henry Bird, who had been transferred from Niagara in 1778. Bird served as the engineer for the new fortification, a star-shaped structure named Fort Lernoult, “which dominated the town of Detroit for almost half a century” (and is marked today by a plaque at Fort and Shelby Streets in downtown Detroit).43
Meanwhile, the threat of Rebel attack grew, as Virginia militiaman George Rogers Clark launched an aggressive plan approved by Virginia Governor Patrick Henry to strike at the British in the western interior. Clark’s advance into the West was spurred by Thomas Jefferson, who held grave concerns about the fort at Detroit. Jefferson saw Detroit as a pocket of strength that would facilitate Great Britain’s ability to maintain Indian allies and attack American settlements in the East and South. “It becomes necessary that we aim the first stroke in the western country and throw the enemy under the embarrassments of a defensive war,” Jefferson wrote to Clark on Christmas Day of 1780. “We have therefore determined that an expedition shall be undertaken under your command into the hostile country beyond the Ohio, the principal object of which is to be the reduction of the British post at Detroit.” According to Jefferson’s instructions, Clark and his men should be ready “at the Falls of Ohio by the 15 of March,” when “the breaking up of the ice” on the Wabash River and nearby lakes would allow for water navigation. And Jefferson had more than military strategy in mind when he considered Detroit. He was also thinking forward about financial gains that America would reap. If Captain Clark could successfully capture the post at Detroit, Jefferson wrote, “we shall be at leisure to turn our whole force to the rescue of our eastern Country from subjugation, we shall divert through our own Country a branch of commerce which European States have thought worthy of the most important struggles and sacrifices.” But this would depend on the Indians, to whom Jefferson told Clark to “hold out either fear or friendship as their disposition and your actual situation may render most expedient.”44 America, Jefferson imagined, could control the posts of the profitable western fur trade, displacing the British, who had displaced the French only decades prior.
Commander Clark partly succeeded in his invasion of the western front, taking control of former French towns in eastern Illinois including Kaskaskia, which had a large intermarried Native-French population, and Cahokia (where visitors today can tour a reconstructed indigenous Mississippian village). While holding control of the Illinois posts, Clark issued a Christmas Eve statement aimed directly at black and Native slaves. This population, Clark opined in his proclamation of December 24, 1778, had “too great a liberty . . . that prevents them from accomplishing the different pieces of work in which their masters employ them.” Clark stated that the mostly French slaveholders of Illinois had “begged” for help, as their slaves’ lack of productivity was “causing a total loss of this colony.” He intended to crack down on such license by prohibiting alcohol sales to “red and black slaves” and by disallowing “any red and black slaves” from renting private homes or public buildings in which they might gather for “dancing, feasting, or holding nocturnal assemblies.” In order to prevent robberies, he planned to forbid “red and black slaves” from leaving their masters’ homes after curfew without permission. He would also prohibit them from trading, selling, or buying items such as wood and pigs in exchanges with free residents without a master’s permission. Clark’s dictate included an enforcement measure, to “enjoin all captains, officers of the militia, and other individuals to enforce the execution of the present proclamation, and all white men to arrest the red or black slaves whom they shall meet in the streets of each village.”45
George Rogers Clark’s proclamation, a wartime slave code, reveals the extent to which enslaved people of Illinois, a Great Lakes area more connected to the South than was Detroit, were biracial in ways similar to Detroit’s unfree population. While indicting enslaved people for practicing “disorders, abuses, and brigandage,” Clark repeatedly emphasized their color as “red and black.” He also called for “white men” in the towns to help police this unruly colored population. Importantly, Clark was highlighting race in a way that had not been so clearly defined in the French and British periods of holding “Panis” slaves. In the eyes of this Virginian, there were categorical differences between “reds and blacks” versus “whites.” Indigenous people had been reduced to a color category and thrown in with African Americans, which occluded the tribal specificity of Native backgrounds. Even the French term “Panis” that flattened some Indian people into one subjugated group had been derived from a series of indigenous tribal names (such as Pawnee) and recognized an Indianness—albeit an unfree Indianness, that was not yet reduced to purportedly biological difference. Clark, a southern military man who had penetrated the Great Lakes at a time when “only a handful of American soldiers and settlers” had ever been there, focused on skin color as integral to caste. In his detailed proclamation we can glimpse the beginnings of the American racialization of Native people as “red” in this region, and the yoking together of redness and blackness as inferior states of being.46 On the cusp of the nineteenth century in the western interior, Americans were already exaggerating these fixed understandings of red, black, and white racial difference.47
Captain Clark saw “red and black slaves” as a group gone out of control, but his formal attempt to manage them revealed their own self-actualization, their social ties to one another, and their ability to negotiate with white residents even within a society that held slaves. If Clark had to pass a code prohibiting trade, space rentals, dancing, theft, and evening strolls around town, enslaved people must have been engaging in these activities and finding the wherewithal to gain bargaining power. They were turning to their advantage the needs of white settlers in an isolated environment where slaves were harder to come by and labor was dearly sought. Although Commander Clark stated that enslaved people in Illinois had been fomenting “disorders” “of so long duration,” it is probable that they, like enslaved black people in the eastern states, had seized upon the war as an opening for increased disobedience, recalcitrance, and escape. Clark never took the Michigan forts during his campaigns, and so we have no similar record of what he might have witnessed among the unfree population in Detroit. It is possible, though, that enslaved people in that town also used wartime disruption as an opening to push for a greater scope of action.48