Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  In another transaction that year, Askin attempted to protect one Native slave at the expense of another whom he deemed less valuable. Askin informed Charles Patterson that an Indian boy in whom Patterson should have an interest was in the possession of Ottawas. This boy was Patterson’s son conceived with a Panis mother. Askin, who had claimed and cared for his own children from an Indian slave, including the favored Kitty, wrote in rebuke to his friend: “there is a Boy here who was sold to the Ottawas, that every body but yourself says is yours, he suffered much [,] poor child [,] with them. I have at length been able to get him from them on promise of giving an Indian Woman Slave in his Stead—he’s at your service if you want him, if not I shall take good care of him untill he is able to earn his Bread without Assistance.” In concern for this mixed-race child, Askin got the boy back by trading an “Indian Woman Slave” for him, proving again the vulnerability of Native women in the Great Lakes slave market. One wonders if this unfortunate woman was the rescued boy’s own mother. John Askin’s letters reveal nothing of her identity. This indigenous enslaved woman, a member of a class of people whose bodies were “routinely violated,” also became disposable in the historical record.73

  Patrick McNiff, A Plan of the Settlements at Detroit and Its Vicinity from River Rouge Upwards to Point au Ginglet on Lake St. Clair, 1796. Courtesy of the Clements Library, University of Michigan. This map depicts French-style ribbon farms as strips along the river and individual farmhouses as squares on the opposite bank. The farms of wealthy slaveholders William Macomb and John Askin, as well as members of the Campau family, are prominently located near the fort.

  At Fort Michilimackinac, John Askin built his wealth by diversifying his interests: serving as a commissary on the payroll of the Crown (while allegedly misappropriating military provisions); managing the infusion of Indian furs from the privileged vantage point of his government position; securing land and operating a farm; acquiring boats for the shipment of goods; and using, selling, and placing slaves to strengthen trade and satisfy desires. He would seek to reproduce this winning pattern in his new home at Fort Detroit, which he made with his wife Archange and their multiracial household of young adult Anglo-Ottawa children (the progeny of Askin and his former slave, Mannette), Anglo-French children, and black and Indian bondspeople. John Askin settled near William and Sarah Macomb, whose farm was located on equally prized riverfront property immediately west of the fort.

  The Macombs and the Askins, who would become business associates and family friends, were transplanted Detroiters in the opening years of the American Revolution. Also new to Detroit, but not of their own volition, were Protestant missionaries of the Moravian Church who had run afoul of the British authorities. Accused of harboring an allegiance for the Rebels despite a profession of pacifistic neutrality, Moravian ministers David Zeisberger, John Heckewelder, and others stationed at the church’s Ohio missions were captured by pro-British Native warriors in 1781. In 1782, the ministers were ordered to appear in Detroit on suspicion of “sympathy and complicity with the American cause.” And indeed, the ultra-observant Moravians had been operating as pseudo-spies, passing along messages to Rebel leaders about intended attacks on a nearby Ohio fort. This may have been why the Moravian’s “taciturn” leader in the region, Reverend David Zeisberger, expressed relief when Native combatants burned mission diaries and letters, confessing he was “glad that they fell into the flames and not into strange hands.” While their writings escaped capture, the Moravians themselves did not. A forced relocation to Detroit swiftly followed the assault on their missions.74

  The Moravian Church, which was founded in Moravia, Central Europe, in the seventeenth century and retained a strong German cultural heritage, had its northern American headquarters in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. A fervent commitment to evangelism had led Moravians to carry the word of their faith into American Indian communities in the West and Southeast in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It is from Pennsylvania and in service of this cause that the Reverend David Zeisberger had set out as the lead minister on a proselytizing expedition to the Ohio country, once depending on an “old Mulatto” who had lived with Shawnees for twenty years “to translate for them.” The Moravians made successful forays into Delaware and Shawnee country and saw their Ohio missions enlarged by Native converts who formed a string of small Christian Indian towns. Pro-British forces ransacked these settlements as the Moravian leaders were seized.75

  On the arduous march from central Ohio to southern Michigan, Reverend Zeisberger described trudging through “deep swamps and troublesome waters” and passing by a constant stream of people in motion: “a multitude of Indians of various nations, who were all bringing from Detroit horse loads of wares and gifts.” These were individuals who had spent time in Detroit, trading goods and receiving presents from British officers as tokens of goodwill meant to secure economic and military alliances. When the Moravians finally reached “the city” and saw “the whole country round about, on both sides [of] the river . . . about a mile wide,” they had passed through a territory made wild by the vagaries of a natural water-rich environment as well as by the vicissitudes of an unpredictable war.76 The Moravians had likewise passed through lands inhabited by indigenous people whose villages and trade routes surrounded Detroit from as near as the Detroit River to the southern reaches of Ohio and into the Cherokee territory of the Southeast. The scene was similar far north of Detroit where Fort Michilimackinac was situated and far west of the city at the southeastern shores of Lake Michigan: Native people and Native lands encompassed Detroit, a center for distributing goods, passing information, and crafting wartime strategy that pulled in people of various colors, cultures, and creeds.

  At Fort Detroit, Commander Arent De Peyster summoned Reverend Zeisberger and members of his congregation, including Delaware Christians, for questioning. He released the group soon thereafter, apparently convinced of their innocence, but ordered them back to Detroit within a matter of months to hedge his bet. While this subset of the Ohio Moravians was being held captive at the fort, Native converts to the faith back in Ohio faced a horrible fate. In March of 1782, American militiamen from Pennsylvania had attacked two Delaware villages at Salem and Gnadenhütten, taking the lives of nearly one hundred unarmed Indian Moravians in a senseless massacre. Heartbroken by this crime perpetrated by Americans that they had once secretly assisted, the Moravians could do nothing. They stood at the mercy of the British commander at Detroit, who treated them well, according to Zeisberger, but would not let them leave the area. With their remaining missionaries and a smattering of Indian followers, the Moravians moved to the outskirts of Detroit by order of the British, who wished to keep them under surveillance and had secured a parcel of land from a band of Ojibwes on which the Moravians could reside.77

  Captives of the power-center at Detroit and refugees from the western theater of war, the Moravians established a mission and farm on the Huron River (now the Clinton River), twenty miles northeast of Detroit near the edge of Lake St. Clair. They resumed their longtime habit of diary-writing, observing the soldiers who had intended to keep a watch on them, and jotting notations about the activities of Detroit traders and farmers that offer clues about the slaves these men and women held. Mourning the loss of their fellow congregants, the Moravians and Delaware converts watched developments of the war from their vantage point on the Huron River. In late spring of 1783, upon returning from a supply trip to Detroit, the Moravian Brother Edwards “brought word that peace would certainly be made.” One month later, the Reverend Zeisberger penned in the mission diary: “from the articles of peace it is plain to be seen that Niagara, Detroit, and Michilimackinac will be ceded to the States.”78 But even under the coming sway of an upstart nation that had risked all for liberty, slavery would remain a feature of the Detroit landscape as prominent as the river.

  3

  The Wild Northwest (1783–1803)

  By an ordinance enacted by congress, dated July 3, 1787
. . . there was a clause in Article VI saying that “there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” This was a safeguard by congress to prevent the extension of slavery northwest of the Ohio River. Notwithstanding this wise provision, our ancestors paid little attention to it, for whenever a spruce young negro was brought by the Indians he was sure to find a purchaser at a reasonable price.

  —General Friend Palmer, Early Days in Detroit, 1906

  The Great Lakes region could have been different. Acquired by the United States after a bloody revolution that had championed the principles of equality and liberty, and separated from the entrenched slaving stronghold of the South by physical distance, cultural makeup, and economic interdependencies that leaned northeastward, this might have been a place where freedom won in full-throated fashion, matching hot revolutionary rhetoric with reality. In the northern states, the Revolutionary War had generated a sense of disquiet about holding human beings as chattel. Enslaved petitioners and plaintiffs in Massachusetts had exposed the blatant hypocrisy of this upstart would-be country espousing ideals of liberty while maintaining a slave society. Prompted to act by burning desire and the opportunities afforded by wartime disarray, thousands of slaves in the North as well as the South had escaped during the war, evidencing the “contagion of liberty.”1 New England colonists who had employed the rhetoric of slavery as a metaphor to describe their political relationship to Great Britain could not help but see the irony in Americans owning humans as things. This recognition of hypocrisy, and indeed, immorality, at the center of American life fed the gradual abolition of slavery in the New England states, with Vermont at the lead in 1777. In the northern mid-Atlantic states, including New York, emancipation would come even more incrementally as legislatures adopted molasses-like plans for bestowing upon enslaved people the right to personal liberty.

  America was no innocent when it came to the beast of slavery. When we look back on decisions made at the founding moments of this nation, we cannot in good conscience claim that political leaders were ignorant of scathing critiques of the practice. Slavery had in fact been a subject of fierce debate in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Some of the country’s leading men were sickened by the vile mistreatment of a whole subset of the populace; others saw slavery as an unfortunate but necessary economic practice that should be phased out over time, and still others felt that slavery was a social and financial good, ordained by a Christian vision of paternalistic social hierarchy based on natural strengths and deficiencies that fell along racial lines. These differences in points of view were mainly, but not fully, regional, with New England and southern states chafing against each other’s interpretations of how the new nation should be imagined. But the seeds of deep division that would later explode in a Civil War were buried by the state representatives who met in Philadelphia that May to September in order to establish the nation’s governing text. Flushed with their unexpected military victory over a global superpower and chastened by the grave import of their collective task to build the legal scaffolding of a free democratic republic, northern and southern attendees found their way to compromise. They banned the ugly international trade in slaves after the passage of twenty years and developed the callously creative Three-Fifths Clause, which counted enslaved people as equivalent to three-fifths of free people toward congressional representation for the states. This meant that slaveholders, especially those in the South where the majority of unfree laborers lived, could deny enslaved people freedom and citizenship while using these same enslaved people’s presence to amass greater congressional power for white male citizens with property. This three-fifths provision, in the words of the historian Edward Countryman, “made slavery the only special social interest that the new national order explicitly recognized.”2

  The freshly acquired region of the Great Lakes, or Northwest, as it came to be called, also triggered tension over the place of slavery in the nation and the boundaries of slavery’s expansion into the West. Two months before the delegates of the Constitutional Convention finalized that foundational document in preparation for ratification in the states, the Confederation Congress had laid out a plan for western terrain ceded by Great Britain. Building on a document drafted by Thomas Jefferson and his committee in 1784 that had not been adopted due to perceived insufficiencies, the final legislation written by a new committee in 1787 provided for the division of these lands into three to five states and created a process for the admittance of those states (later, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a portion of Minnesota) into the Union after a temporary territorial stage. The previous text penned by Jefferson’s committee had addressed the difficult matter of slavery, recommending that: “after the year 1800 of the Christian aera [sic] there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said states, otherwise than punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty.” The final legislation adopted in 1787 included this language nearly verbatim, principally to encourage the immigration of white northeasterners into the region.3

  In July of 1787, during the Constitutional Convention, representatives adopted the Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio, handily shortened to the Northwest Ordinance, with a prohibition against slavery modified but intact. Always reaching for compromise, architects of the nation’s founding documents made the ban on slavery immediate in the Northwest and added a fugitive slave clause. The finalized language of Article 6 included reassurance for southern slaveholders: if their human property should abscond to western lands, that property would be returned. The text also legalized the bondage and forced labor of convicted criminals as a form of punishment. On the issue of slavery, Article 6 of the Northwest Ordinance declared: “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted: Provided, always That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.”4 (The logic of this careful wording that managed to prohibit slavery while simultaneously protecting some forms of it still operates today in the legal use of prison labor to perform some of the country’s most dangerous jobs.)5 But what of the hundreds of Native and African-descended slaves in Detroit who were not runaways from the states and had not been convicted of crimes? They found no safe haven in this new Northwest. As legal historian David Chardavoyne has baldly put it: “The arrival of American rule and enactment of the Northwest Ordinance did not emancipate any slaves in Michigan—on the contrary, for many black and panis slaves, the words of Article VI of the Ordinance were just words, seemingly incapable of freeing them.”6 Riven with loopholes that revealed its ultimately equivocal stance toward slavery, the Ordinance, functionally a constitutional document for the region, left people of color at the mercy of previous customs.7 Under American jurisdiction, the Northwest would become a wild, wild West for enslaved people, who had very little protection under legislation that upheld a compromised form of abolition and included no enforcement provision. Colonialism and slavery would remain braided together in the new national terrain, as this “foundational document of American expansionism” was careful to protect the property rights of southern slaveholders and to legalize the theft of prisoners’ labor on lands still claimed by Native societies.8

  While the Northwest Ordinance banned blatant slavery in what would later be called the Midwest, it protected access to slave labor. It was not long before the region’s slaveholders and would-be slaveholders devised strategies for taking advantage of wiggle room in the federal law. They interpreted the prohibition of Article 6 as applying only to incoming residents in the territory (not to previous settlers) and aided in the seizure and return of fugitives. The Northwest Ordinance, which is often i
magined today as outlawing slavery in the interior North, actually allowed for “a de facto slavery through a system of long-term indentures, rental contracts, enforcement statutes, and the recognition of the status of slaves who had been brought to the territory before 1787.”9 In a Revolutionary era characterized by radical talk of natural rights, American leaders came close to abolishing slavery in the new western territory that was, by right of prior occupation, indigenous land—but “close” was not good enough to make an immediate, meaningful difference for those enslaved in Detroit.

  Betting on Detroit

  To elite Detroiters, the settled peace in 1783 represented a startling turn of events. The Treaty of Paris, negotiated by John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin at the behest of the Continental Congress in 1783, called for the relinquishment of the interior region east of the Mississippi to the nascent American government. The specter of occupation by a foreign military force and unfamiliar political authority, and the threat of draconian laws and taxes, hung like a scrim over British Detroit. In a place peopled mostly by loyalists and an even larger longtime French population, the loss carried the potential for political unrest and social instability. Worse, in the aftermath of the war, inflation and a scarcity of goods were ravaging the local economy.