by Tiya Miles
One slice of luck for Detroit’s white settlers was the physical soundness of the settlement. Detroit had been a military hub during the conflict but had seen no immediate fighting, which could have devastated buildings and cropland. With the town structurally intact, trade could resume as soon as the market recovered. A second boon was the promised protection of colonists’ property under the new American government. Even before the end of the war, Thomas Jefferson, hoping for a capture of Fort Detroit, had directed Commander George Rogers Clark to safeguard the inhabitants’ material possessions, writing: “Should you succeed in the reduction of the Post, you are to promise protection to the Persons and property of the French and American inhabitants, or of such at least as shall not on tender refuse to take the Oath of fidelity to this Commonwealth.”10 Clark would have seized upon this directive, especially regarding the security of human property, as he had already demonstrated in his Illinois Proclamation of 1778 that he believed “red and black slaves” should be kept in their place as chattel. Beyond Jefferson’s dictate to an officer in the field to guard the property rights of previous settlers from New France and newcomer Americans, the formal Treaty of Paris sought to further ensure Americans’ investment in slaves, insisting that: “his Brittanic Majesty shall with all convenient speed, and without causing any destruction, or carrying away any Negroes or other property of the American inhabitants, withdraw all his armies, garrisons and fleets from the said United States.”11 Although the British did in fact remove from American territory former slaves who had been promised freedom for serving on their side of the conflict, Great Britain did not yet condemn slavery unilaterally. Neither did the United States, which would permit certain forms of slavery on Great Lakes lands just as Great Britain had done. Weighing out all of these factors—politics, economics, infrastructure, and slavery—British merchants had to determine whether making a life in Detroit still made sense.
Some British-identified residents, such as John Macomb and his son Alexander Macomb, chose to leave Detroit for New York after the end of hostilities; but others, such as John Askin, stayed on. Askin’s neighbor and fellow Scotsman William Macomb wagered on Detroit as well. While the political terrain on which they planted their personal flags was still uncertain, the legal terrain was secure enough in one key respect: the protection of present colonists’ right to hold slaves. This proved providential for Detroit’s Anglo elite. Men like John Askin and William Macomb would benefit from the weak prohibition on slavery, numbering among the town’s eighty-four slaveholding households and steadily accruing more human chattel to work or sell at a profit in the 1780s and ’90s.
The slave trade among Detroit merchants boomed during these postwar decades. In 1789 William Macomb was attempting to sell two African Americans belonging to Alexis Masonville for £200. The black woman, he vowed to Charles Morrison, the recipient of his letter, was “very handy & a very good cook.” The black man was “a very smart active, fellow and by no means a bad slave.” Macomb wanted them “disposed of,” preferably by the fall and not on “a longer credit than the first of June.” He added in a postscript that he hoped Morrison could purchase him “a very good Carabois [caribou] skin” while he was out making trades, as their “hair” was “most esteemed.” Directing the sale of “disposable” black bodies in this letter, Macomb then immediately turned to procuring the skins of valuable beasts whose numbers were then in decline due to overhunting. Macomb was less than pleased a month later about the intended sale of the slaves to a Mr. Ceré and wished Morrison had instead accepted Mr. Ainse’s offer. Morrison corrected his error, soon responding that he had indeed made the better sale to Ainse but “had not seen a Carabois skin.”12 The black man and woman had been passed on to other owners in the Northwest. The woodland caribou had perhaps escaped with their lives farther north where their habitat still remained intact.13 In 1794, James May sold “a certain negro man, Pompey,” to John Askin for £45. The next year, Askin made a profit by selling Pompey to James Donnelson for £50.14 In 1801 John Askin received a request from James Mackelm, a colleague downriver, to “part with your Negro (who can do every thing).” After asking to be informed of Askin’s “price” and “line of payment,” Mackelm promises to “look for the feathers and Cyder” already on order. In a follow-up letter, Mackelm again presses for the black man, asking if “he is a slave for life, how old he is, and [if] his price [is] payable six months after Delivery.” Those who held on to their slaves rather than selling them in a hot market used them to keep business brewing, especially through the transport of goods, including Elijah Brush, Dr. Thompson, and Robert McDougall, who all sent “their” black men and boys to Joseph Campau’s general store to pick up silk, bushels of corn, rum, flour, and gunpowder.15
Askin, Macomb, and others in their circle also seized the opportunity to grab more indigenous land. The American Revolutionary War had been waged not only between the British and the Americans but also between both these powers and scores of Native nations that strategically fought with either side or strove to remain neutral, all with the goal of maintaining indigenous strength on a rapidly changing continental map. The Revolutionary conflict had therefore been “a continuation of the struggle about Indian land and who was to get it.”16 Now that the United States had proved itself the victor, indigenous lands were among the spoils. The Crown granted the United States sovereignty over the original thirteen colonies as well as over western territory that was predominantly occupied and claimed by Indians, drawing national boundaries between Great Britain (Canada) and the United States across the Great Lakes and northwest waterways. The negotiation of this treaty in Paris neither included nor consulted indigenous leaders, whose lands—at least on paper—were diced and distributed by European and American colonial powers.17
Land lust took hold in Detroit as elsewhere. The region became a microcosm of the larger American bid to obtain huge swaths of Indian ground on the cusp of a new century defined by westward expansion. As the historian Alan Taylor has noted, U.S. leaders relied not only on territorial enlargement at the federal level through treaty provisions and massive acquisitions like the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, but also on the actions of individual Americans who sought private land purchases. There was, Taylor writes, a “power of property lines in weaving a settler society.” Along the Detroit River, this effective power of private property to extend the footprint of what would become white America was well underway at the turn of the century. William Macomb already owned Grosse Ile and was raking in proceeds from tenants on the island. Before his death he would purchase Hog Island (now Belle Isle, the beautiful island park known as the “gem” of Detroit), which had served as a commons for settlers who kept pigs there during the French period. John Askin purchased land on both the northern (American) and southern (British-Canadian) sides of the Detroit River and engaged in numerous land speculation schemes, including an attempt to purchase the entire Lower Peninsula (the “mitten”) of present-day Michigan.18
The war would end with a surfeit in slaves and shifts in land ownership that further secured the powerful position of British merchants. And for them, another blessing sailed on the horizon. Despite Americans’ wishful plans for the governance of the Northwest, the British Crown did not keep its promise to relinquish control over Great Lakes forts. Instead, the Red Coats stood their ground, defying the terms of the Treaty of Paris while claiming that Americans still owed unpaid debts.19 And the Americans, now crippled with war debt, a spent army, a citizen revolt against taxes in Massachusetts (Shays’ Rebellion), and a barely formed, untested national government, had little power to force the issue. Throughout the 1780s and most of the 1790s, Detroit and the interior Northwest were American in name only. British authorities, now officially ensconced at Fort Malden in Ontario, brazenly ran Fort Detroit. The British were even so bold as to include Detroit in a new political district in 1791—the District of Hesse, located in the province of Upper Canada, Quebec. And the British would continue the pract
ice of slavery in the posts they so blatantly held. In 1793 the Hesse district government official, Detroit military commander, and mapmaker Major David William Smith wrote to his colleague John Askin to share news of a Canadian legislative meeting in Niagara. “We have made no law to free the Slaves,” Smith exclaimed in relief. “All those who have been brought into the Province or purchased under any authority legally exercised, are Slaves to all intents & purposes, & are secured as property by a certain act of Parliament.”20
Slaves to All Intents and Purposes
Despite a spectacular American victory in the Revolutionary War, little had changed on the ground in Detroit, especially for the enslaved. French, Euro-Native, and Native residents still made up most of the population. British military officials dominated the governing structure of the town. Slaveholding merchants constituted the economic elite. African-descended free people of color (gens de couleur libre), who comprised sizeable communities in the culturally French towns of New Orleans and St. Louis, were absent in the Detroit records before 1800 and were likely only present in very small numbers. Few people claiming a declarative American identity were anywhere to be seen. And now, from the perspective of those who wished to get ahead through the mechanism of owning slaves, there were even more unfree inhabitants available to operate the town’s shops, storehouses, kitchens, industries, ships, wagons, and farms. Ste. Anne’s Church records show “Master Girardin, baker of the town” with a “Panis” named Antoine in 1786, and “Mr. Payet, Parish Priest of Detroit,” with a black enslaved woman called Catherine in 1785. British military officers also had slaves, acquired through wartime raids and recent trades within slaveholding circles. “Mr. Grand (Grant), commandant in the navy” buried an unnamed black woman in 1784 and baptized a “Panis” man, Jean Baptiste, in 1793 and another “Panis” man, Paul, in 1794. Grant had married into a prominent French Detroit family in 1774, a reliable way for British residents to increase wealth in slaves.21
In addition to individual ownership, corporatized groups of Detroiters could collectively leverage their resources in slaves, as when William St. Clair and a “Co of Detroit Merchants” sold Josiah Cutten (also known as Joseph Cotton), a black man, to Thomas Duggan, an officer in the British Indian Department. The price for Josiah Cutten was “One hundred and twenty Pounds New York Currency payable . . . in Indian Corn & Flour.” By the time that he was traded for corn, Cutten had already been sold at least once in Montreal. He would later become the property of John Askin, who pledged £50 for a half share in Cutten in 1792 while Cutten languished in prison for robbing Joseph Campau’s store. Askin insured this risky investment such that he did not owe when Cutten, a young man just in his twenties, was later executed for theft in Upper Canada.22
John Askin Estate Inventory. The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library.
While a greater supply of slaves existed in Detroit after the war, there was also a higher demand for their labor. Captain Alexander Harrow, an officer of the British navy who had previously manned the king’s ships in Great Lakes trades, owned slaves in Detroit but tried and repeatedly failed to acquire more in the 1790s.23 In 1794 he sent a 33.6 pound payment to Dr. Mitchell at Michilimackinac, the man who held Askin’s former job as commissary, for “a little Pawnese” the doctor had sent. In 1794 Harrow wrote to Mitchell about sending “the boy he mentioned of 12 or 16 years old” and added “if the Boy was a little negro the better.” As in earlier decades, a preference for difficult to acquire black boys showed in Harrow’s request. The preference was, in some ways, irrational, as Indian slaves from the same locality would be better skilled in working the waters or traveling across the region. But the blackness of an enslaved child conferred a certain status upon an owner in Detroit, showing that the person could obtain rare commodities and marking, through oppositional skin tone difference, a starker social division between the owner and the owned. Black slaves were also far less likely to be confused for free people than Indian slaves in a region peopled mainly by Indians, and were less likely to make successful escapes due to a greater distance from their original homes. In May of 1795 Harrow was seeking a “Slave man or woman, Negro or Pawnee,” indicating by word order his racial preference but stressing his willingness to buy any slave. Two months later he pressed Dr. Mitchell at Michilimackinac for “a wench for country work” and “a Slave Boy of 10 or 15 who would suit me.” In May of 1796 Harrow was expecting “the Pawnese & 2 children if settled by Mr. Robertson for me.” He hoped this Indian would prove “a good Kit[chen] wench.” In July he was also trying to get “Black Bet and 3 children to get them by all means,” and by August, Harrow’s demands rose to a fever pitch of desperation, as he was “still looking for a wench, black or Yellow, young or old.”24
Most Detroit slaveholders continued to hold just one or two slaves after the Revolution, but members of the merchant elite, their pocketbooks fattened by government-military contracts and Indian land purchases, owned several. In 1787 John Askin inventoried his slaves, listing Jupiter and Tom—both “Negro” men, George, a “Ditto [black] Boy,” Sam, a “Pawnis Blk Smythe [blacksmith],” Susannah “a Wench & 2 children,” and Mary “a Ditto Wench.” The combined value of these individuals totaled £760. The women in the inventory whose races went unmarked were valued at just £100 each, but the skilled male laborers of different races—Jupiter, a black boatman, and Sam, a Native blacksmith, were each worth £150.25 Across the span of Askin’s preserved ledger and personal papers, more than thirty enslaved people of indigenous and African ancestry appear, fleetingly, in the non-emotional mentions of acquisitions, sales, tasks, and deaths. Even John Askin’s daughter, Catherine or “Kitty” Askin, had a slave of her own. A young mixed-race Ottawa and Scot woman herself, Kitty Askin possessed a female “Panis” named Cecile.26 The outlines of Cecile’s personal history are unknown, omitted from the record that has preserved minute detail about the color and fabric of Kitty Askin’s blue satin wedding gown. And as was the case decades earlier under French rule, Kitty Askin was not alone as an indigenous woman with slaveholdings in Detroit. The most flamboyant Native American woman in town, Sally Ainse, was a savvy trader and slave-owner.
Merchant Slaveholders and Misplaced Missionaries
Sally (or Sarah) Ainse, an Oneida woman from Pennsylvania, had ventured into the business of trade back east alongside her husband, the French-Native trader and interpreter Andrew Montour. A “remarkably tall and elegant” woman who dressed in “English mode with a long gown and hair flowing behind,” Sally Ainse moved to Detroit during the Revolutionary War after a separation from her husband. There she found ample opportunity to establish her own networks for trade. Ainse acquired a prime lot within the fort next to Ste. Anne’s Church, where she had a wood frame home, kept livestock, and produced flour, corn, and cider for the market. Ainse owned three slaves in 1779 and one female slave in 1782, having likely sold part of her human property to others in the interim. Since Ainse had a previous business relationship with John Askin from a period when they both lived in Michilimackinac, and since she had extensive kinship ties through her former husband in the area, Detroit was a fitting place for the reestablishment of her female-run trading venture.27 Her clothing in the Anglo style was an indication that Ainse adopted as well as flaunted the accoutrements of cultural intermixture. Ainse, like the French and British traders in town, was caught up in the “skin trade” of dual meaning catapulted by the capitalist enterprise of European exploration, colonization, and slavery. A brief notation in John Askin’s account book for 1781 notes that “Sarah Anis” (Ainse) received “1 smoaked skin from Thebeau for a boy at Mackina.” This exchange of a Native child for a finished animal pelt that transpired between an Indian woman and white man captures in elliptical snapshot form the intricate nature of slavery in the Great Lakes.28 American Indians participated in this practice as both perpetrators and victims, while navigating changes, challenges, and chances wrought by the meeting of diverse peoples, the advance of European
settlement, and the unseemly ravages of war. Indeed, one of Ainse’s indigenous neighbors in Detroit was the Shawnee leader and British military ally Blue Jacket, who, according to a white woman taken captive by a different Shawnee warrior in the war, had married “a half French woman of Detroit” and lived there “in great style, having curtained beds and silver spoons” and “Negro slaves” to serve tea.29
Sally Ainse, also privileged with tea and slaves, prospered as a businesswoman in Detroit, living at times with a white man named John Wilson, yet acting as an independent trader. She received boatloads of goods and held accounts with various merchants, including her old associate John Askin and William Macomb. At one point the grand sum of her accounts reached over £2,000.30 The well-being of the bondspeople owned by Ainse is, in contrast, impossible to determine. They are noted by number, and not by name, in the Detroit city census that lists their “elegant” Oneida mistress’s property.
Perhaps Sally Ainse ventured out to visit the Moravian missionaries to diversify her business affairs in Detroit. She had proven herself to be an ambitious and capable entrepreneur, and she was no stranger to the Moravian faith. Ainse had hosted missionaries from that church back in Pennsylvania when she shared a household with her former husband, Andrew Montour. She also had family connections to the Moravians of Upper Canada through her ex-husband and to the Moravians of Ohio as well as Detroit through her brother. The Moravians and their German ways would therefore have been recognizable to her, and the Delaware members of the Moravian congregation even more familiar. In addition to being Oneida, Ainse claimed an identity as Shawnee, an Ohio woodlands nation culturally close to the Delawares.31 Sally Ainse’s ability to identify a growing market for her trade goods may have been what previously led her from Michilimackinac to Detroit in the middle of a war. And the Moravians did need all manner of things. They had been forced to rebuild a settlement and seed a farmstead from scratch after their relocation from Ohio. While they had the benefit of Ojibwe lands and wooden “boards” for building that Detroit officials had negotiated for their use, the Moravians required a constant infusion of supplies and cash from town. Indian men of the congregation crafted bark canoes that they sold at the fort to provide “themselves clothes for the winter.” Indian women fashioned baskets and brooms, which they likewise sold to townspeople or traded for apples. In order to sustain families in this new environment, Moravian community members gathered wild cherries and whortleberries, dug wild potatoes, and hunted deer and bears. This nascent Protestant community outside of town represented a promising market for Detroit traders like Ainse, some of whom owned acreage near the mission on either side of the Huron River but, according to Reverend David Zeisberger, had “never seen it,” as this rural area near Lake St. Clair was considered “the bush” by Detroit urbanites, who rarely ventured so far out into “Indian land.”32