by Tiya Miles
While George Rogers Clark proved that he could march his men through the dense western territory, British military commanders in Detroit anxiously anticipated a Rebel advance further north. To stave off an attack by the Continental Army and weaken “a wedge of colonial settlement thrust into the heart of Indian America, Captain Henry Bird led expeditions deep into Kentucky.”49 Marching with 150 soldiers and volunteers, hundreds of indigenous allies, and forty-three men charged with carrying supplies and armaments, Bird set out from Detroit in May of 1780, heading for Ohio. The soldiers, most of whom hailed from French families, were being paid by none other than the Macomb brothers, whose company, Macomb, Edgar & Macomb, held the government contract for fiscal agent to the British military. The number of men counted in the supply chain convoy most likely included enslaved blacks. By the time Bird and his contingent reached Kentucky, they comprised a force of one thousand men, large enough to crush the rural settlements of Ruddle’s Station and Martin’s Fort. And this they did, destroying homes, seizing booty, and taking more than three hundred prisoners.50
Bird would write to his superior officer in Detroit, Major De Peyster, that the Indians were the ones responsible for cruelty in excess that had occurred during these raids. While Bird had “entreated every Indian officer that appeared to have Influence among the Savages, to pursuade [sic] them not to engage with the Fort until the guns were up—fearing if any were killed it might exasperate the Indians & make them commit cruelities when the Rebels surrendered,” he claimed that he could not control “the Savages” who “tore the poor children from their mothers Breasts, killed a wounded man and every one of the cattle, leaving the whole to stink.” Nevertheless, Bird and his men, as well as their besmirched Indian allies, stood to gain from these attacks in the form of prisoners and plunder. Bird wrote of the grueling journey back to Detroit: “I marched the poor women & children 20 miles in one day over very high mountains, frightening them with frequent alarms to push forward, in short, Sir, by water & land we came with our cannon & c 90 miles in 4 days.”51 Although neither Bird nor the other officers mentioned enslaved blacks among the prisoners, several were seized in Kentucky and claimed by these men, as well as by Native combatants.
Bird acquired “the Wench Esther” at Martin’s Fort “whereby the Inhabitants and Defenders agreed to deliver up their Blacks and moveables to the Indians as their property, on condition that their persons should be safely conducted to Detroit . . . the said Esther became my Property by consent and permission of the chiefs.”52 Here, as in his earlier report on the raids, Bird disassociates himself from Indian actions that might be viewed as uncivilized. It was not Bird who took this woman in his account of events; rather, it was the Indians, who then bestowed her on Bird, in all likelihood, to strengthen that alliance. Perhaps Bird was aware of the Rebels’ penchant to smear British soldiers by describing them as virtual “savages” and used rhetorical distance to protect his reputation. Certainly by 1780, Detroit officials such as Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton had come under special attack by American illustrators and writers, charged with barbarity and with accepting the scalps of colonists from bloodthirsty Indians.53
The Americans as well as the British positioned Indians as scapegoats, seizing on cultural practices as well as skin color as markers of difference increasingly defined as race-based. While disavowing the Indian allies that were so crucial to his campaign, Captain Henry Bird personally profited from them. He soon turned Esther, the slave he had acquired during a Kentucky assault, into human capital. And by the time Bird sold Esther in 1784, she had borne a son to an unnamed father. Bird decided, as recorded in the deed of sale, to “Make over and give way my right and Property in the said Wench and her male child to William Lee in consideration of his having cleared for me Sixteen Acres of Land.” William Lee was a free black man, which raises uncomfortable questions about his purchase of Esther. Was Lee planning to treat Esther as valuable exchange commodity just as Bird had done, or was Lee seeking to help Esther? Perhaps William Lee was a relative or lover of Esther’s and sought to secure her freedom by trading his labor. We can only hope that her situation improved, as Esther’s documentary trail ends here, with the transfer of herself and child to William Lee. But the cleared land she was traded for, the land that Captain Henry Bird sought, has a traceable future in the record. The parcel would later become part of the ground upon which the defeated British military built a stronghold in their remaining Canadian territory: the town of Amherstberg, home to Fort Malden.54 In this transaction in which the future of a woman and her child hung in the balance, the value of slaves, as well as land, was paramount to British settlement. Each form of property reinforced and enhanced the other, as slaves were used as capital to acquire land and then to make that land habitable and profitable.
Pathways to Wartime Detroit
When Henry Bird and his compatriots returned to Detroit in 1780, they dragged along “the largest body of people ever gathered in the wilderness of Kentucky . . . about 1,200 of these consisting of the invading force, and about 470 miserable prisoners, loaded down with household plunder from their own cabin homes.” Many of these captives, like Esther, were enslaved. Prisoner Agnes LaForce owned thirteen slaves seized by the British and their Native allies during the raids.55 After having been relocated to Montreal, LaForce, who it turned out was a loyalist from a prominent Virginia family, enlisted the aid of Sir Frederick Haldimand, governor and commander in chief of Quebec, Canada, to recover her slaves. “On the 25th of June last year,” she wrote in her appeal, “your petitioner together [with] her five children and thirteen negro slaves belonging to her, were disturbed in their (as they thought) safe retirement by a party of Soldiers and Indians of his Majesty, and were by them taken Prisoners and carried to Detroit where on their arrival said negro slaves were sold and disposed of without your petitioner’s consent or receiving any benefit thereby to her great detriment said slaves being her only resource she had and her only property in this country.”56 Despite the governor’s effort on her behalf, the petitioner did not recover her slaves, who constituted a valuable infusion into Detroit’s labor force. Agnes LaForce’s African American property included Scipio, Tim, Ishener, Stephen, Joseph, Keggy (Kijah), Job, Hannah, and Candis—now in possession of French traders, British officers, and Indian interpreters in Detroit—as well as Bess (Betty), Grace, Rachel, and Patrick—now in possession of Indians. Joseph, the son of Bess, and his sister Keggy, were held by Captain Matthew Elliott, who would soon grow rich on such acquisitions. Job, the son of Hannah, fell to Jacques Duperon Baby, one of Detroit’s most successful French traders and an Indian interpreter for the military.57 These black captives joined a Detroit population swelling from an influx of American prisoners (such as Daniel Boone, the famed Kentucky frontiersman, and Jean Baptiste Pointe du Sable, the successful black trader who had married a Potawatomi woman named Kitihawa and became the first non-Native settler of Chicago), as well as many more black southern slaves whose names would never be recorded, and Native refugees from villages devastated by Rebel attacks.58
Just as captives, slaves, and exiles were crowding into Fort Detroit, two high-ranking officials were fleeing. Justice of the Peace Philip Dejean and Lieutenant Governor Henry Hamilton saw their past deeds catch up to them. The pair had lost favor by meting out harsh punishments to residents. Their authoritarian bent had irked influential Detroit merchants, like James Sterling and William Macomb, who served as witnesses to a Montreal grand jury that indicted Dejean and Hamilton for “divers unjust and illegal, tyrannical and felonious acts, and things contrary to good government and to the safety of his Majesty’s liege subjects.”59 The protest may have begun with an anonymous letter, likely penned by James Sterling, in September of 1777.60 The letter called Hamilton “cruel and tyrannical” and expressed “how unhappy we are under his government.” The complainant then listed among his grievances “the cruel manner in which he [Hamilton] treated Mr. Jonas Schindler, silversmith” as well
as the appointment of “a certain Philip DeJean.” With Hamilton’s approval, Dejean had taken out an “Advertisement” in 1777 announcing that German silversmith James (or Jonas) Schindler had been imprisoned in the garrison and would be driven out “with infamy and sent in the country below” for practicing without an apprenticeship.61 Dejean had, further, according to the whistle-blower, “passed sentence of death” upon a furrier named Joseph Hecker, accused of killing his brother-in-law in a “quarrel,” and “condemned and hanged, also, Jean Contancinau, a Canadian, for having stolen some money &c. from his master, and being concerned with a Negro wench in attempting to set fire to his master’s house.” While the writer allowed about the servant and slave, that “these criminals deserved death,” he angrily queried: “but how dared Lieutenant-governor Hamilton, and an infamous Judge of his own making, take upon them to try them, and execute them without authority?”62 Even loyalist Detroiters seem to have caught the revolutionary zeal that led them to question undue assumptions of power.
Amidst the turmoil of war, Dejean and Hamilton chose to run rather than face questioning in Quebec. They used the conflict as cover to escape, eluding officials in 1778 by marching out with British troops traveling to Vincennes, Indiana, to retake Fort Sackville from the American army. It was there, in 1779, that Hamilton, caricatured by Rebels with the scathing epithet “the hair-buyer general” for purchasing American scalps, was captured. Captain George Rogers Clark marched him toward Williamsburg, Virginia, where Hamilton, a man who had overseen the jailing of Detroiters, would take his turn as prisoner.63
Detroit was tense and full to bursting by 1782, when the enslaved population had increased to 180 souls, when desperate, hungry indigenous people pressed into town seeking assistance and shelter, and when Native military allies came to receive dramatically increased quantities of British gifts, including alcohol.64 At this moment, slaves of color and free Indians shared a slice of experience, all having been driven to Detroit by the chaos of combat. Native refugees did not always find a warm reception in Detroit. Put off by the expectation that they would support displaced Indians, even though those nations were their allies in battle, military officials sent Native men to attack southern settlements as a means of reducing population pressure in the fort.65 These attacks led to the capture of slaves from the South, and the vicious cycle of violence, captivity, and disruption continued.
During a period of intense growth born of upheaval, trader John Macomb joined his sons, Alexander and William, in Detroit. He had not been able to secure the commissary post that he had requested as a means of escaping Rebel assaults in New York. Nevertheless, he worked to advance his sons’ endeavors throughout the war. Trader John Askin also saw wartime Detroit as a refuge. In 1778, he had suffered the indignity of being fired as deputy commissary at Fort Michilimackinac, for “dispens[ing] the King’s stores too loosely.” Under Askin’s watch, quantities of rum, flour, pork, and butter had come up short, raising the suspicion of his boss, the newly appointed (since 1775) superintendent and lieutenant governor of Michilimackinac, Patrick Sinclair. Sinclair had replaced Askin with local physician David Mitchell, who would later be a supplier of slaves to Detroit, since the role of fort commissary in the Great Lakes came with a secondary, implicit duty: the role of slave trader.66 Just as historical research on slave traders in the South has found that, unlike the popular stereotype of uncouth and outcast brokers popularized in works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, these men had close ties with the planter class and often became planters themselves, in the Great Lakes, slave-dealing was not a marginal or socially sullied enterprise. Well-positioned fort officials engaged in the practice, and supplying customers with slaves became part and parcel of supplying them with wheat, rum, and other necessities.
As professional tensions about the distribution of military wares in Michilimackinac grew, John Askin cast his eyes south to Detroit. He was deterred, though, by the hostilities between Great Britain and the colonies, writing in 1778: “I have changed my plann of settling at Detroit untill the war is over, indeed in the present Situation of affairs, it’s hard to undertake anything.”67 Moving to Detroit, giving up his farm, and transferring his fleet of trading boats seemed a gamble to Askin, but so did remaining in Michilimackinac, where “everything [was] so scarce and so high-priced” and where he had lost his government position. Disgraced and financially weakened, Askin decided he could not wait out the war after all.68 He relocated his family and slaves to the hometown of his wife, the French Detroiter Marie Archange Barthe Askin. Archange Askin was a Barthe on her father’s side and a Campau on her mother’s side, and thus descended from one of Detroit’s oldest slaveholding families. Due to the influence of his in-laws, Askin acquired a choice piece of land east of the fort pickets in 1780. This ribbon farm, described as Lot 1 “above the fort” in a 1765 survey of Detroit, had been in the possession of the Barthe family prior to the war. Askin also relied on the help of his friends, like Commander Arent De Peyster, who vouched for Askin’s character, and James Sterling, who had been Askin’s local agent on the ground in Detroit during Askin’s Michilimackinac days. Gradually, Askin rebuilt his trade and mercantile business, as well as his thriving farm, with the essential aid of key local contacts and highly skilled slaves.69
Back at Fort Michilimackinac in the 1760s and 1770s, Askin had acquired a handful of African and indigenous people whom he held as property. The Native domestic, Charlotte, cooked and served in the house. Askin’s possessions also included two adroit black men, Pompey and Jupiter Wendell, whom Askin had purchased from Abraham Douw of Albany in 1775 for “the Sum of One Hundred & Thirty five Pounds Lawfull Money of the Province of New York.” Jupiter Wendell fashioned barrels, an essential task in an economy oriented around the storage and shipping of goods, and he also labored as a maritime crewman. Pompey was a skilled sailor who operated Askin’s trading vessels. A man named Toon, whose race was not identified in Askin’s records, also worked Askin’s ships and lost his life doing so, as Toon “was Drowned out of a small canoe coming from the Vessell” while laboring on the lakes. These ships on which Jupiter and Pompey drudged, and on which Toon had died, skimmed the Great Lakes and interconnected rivers, moving goods from Michilimackinac, north to Sault Ste. Marie, northwest to Grand Portage, and southeast to Detroit, where military Commander Arent De Peyster was a regular customer.70
John Askin was fastidious about satisfying those he supplied, holding the view that: “We must never disappoint people in the matter of shipping goods.” This is why enslaved men with construction and transportation skills were essential to Askin’s enterprise. Pompey was especially valuable, and Askin at times could not “do without him,” preferring to hold Pompey in reserve for vital tasks while finding others to fill Pompey’s shoes for certain outings. When Pompey sailed Askin’s ships, he did so with a multiracial crew. One of Askin’s employees, referred to as “the Indian,” was a free Native sailor, “a good man,” according to Askin, “if one could only understand what he says”; another crewman, Mr. McDonald, was a white employee, “somewhat overbearing,” but kept on by Askin due to a wartime labor shortage. Askin supplied all of the men with rum during these trading trips “as an incentive to good work besides keeping them from helping themselves from the cargo.” However, “Pomp,” as Askin called him, only received “half that quantity,” a lesser amount than the free white crewmen on the boat. Pompey was crucial to Askin’s outfit, but still a slave, entitled to neither his freedom nor equal rations.71
During his time as commissary at Fort Michilimackinac, John Askin had done double duty as a slave broker. In 1778, he informed Jean Baptiste Barthe of Sault Ste. Marie: “I sold your panis to Lavoine for 750 livres. He is too stupid to make a sailor or to be any good whatever.” A month before he so crudely sold this man using language that may hint at a burgeoning racialization of “Panis” Indians as unintelligent, Askin also sought to procure young Native female slaves. He wrote at the end of a mi
ssive to Mr. Beausoleil in which he had already addressed the need to “divide the merchandise equally” among merchants and reported the delay of a shipment of “liquor and provisions” from Detroit: “I shall need two pretty panis girls of from 9 to 16 years of age. Please speak to these gentlemen to get them for me.” The attention paid to the girls’ youth and appearance in this order suggests their intended purpose for household ornamentation and eventual sexual service in an eroticized gutter of the Great Lakes slave market. John Askin himself had kept an enslaved Indian woman, Mannette, as a sexual object before freeing her in 1766. These “panis girls” may have been sought by Askin for undisclosed personal reasons, or through him for local male associates with illicit designs on the victims of this trade. The direct reference here to physically appealing Native girls stands alone in the extant Detroit records. However, we can read into the silences in this regional history a pattern that has been confirmed in the southern states. In the U.S. South, white men developed an extremely profitable “fancy trade” in which African American women, most often of mixed-race ancestry, were sought for sexual slavery. Marketed at exorbitant prices, these women referred to as “fancy girls” or “fancy maids,” were sexually abused by slave dealers in slave pens, markets and prisons along trade routes, as well as by a string of buyers. While we do not have a record as explicit in its ugliness as that which exists in the South, this particular order for young girls in Askin’s letter whispers of unseemly ends, especially when viewed in the context of the numerous Native women who were bearing babies to unknown fathers in Detroit. We have now come to recognize the horrendous trials and compromised survival strategies of “fancy girls” in the southern slaveocracy. On the shores of interior lakes and rivers of the West, women sold as “pretty panis” likely suffered similar fates. And in the Great Lakes, as in the South, protected white women benefited from wealth derived from the sale of “pretty panis.” In the same month that John Askin was ordering up Indian girls to satisfy himself or his clients, he was also ordering twelve pairs of fancy shoes in the “French fashion” for his French Canadian wife. But the reality was not so simple in its color coordination; women of Native descent could also be members of the slaveholding class. While attending to his white wife’s specialty footwear, Askin also ordered in from Montreal a wedding gown of “light blue Sattin” in “the french fashion” for his daughter, whom he affectionately called Kitty. Kitty was a girl of mixed Euro-Native parentage and herself the daughter of an Indian slave. She nevertheless luxuriated in the lifestyle generated by the sale of other indigenous girls, whose impending sexual subjugation allowed her to enjoy a proper continental wedding.72