Dawn of Detroit

by Tiya Miles

  During the early stages of my research, I found, as well, that scholarship on African American history in Detroit during the colonial and early national periods was nearly as slim as the literature on slavery in the city. A University of Michigan doctoral dissertation and later articles by Norman McRae on “Blacks in Detroit” (1982), as well as books by David Katzman (1975) and Reginald Larrie (1981), included chapters on the pre-nineteenth-century era of black history in the city. Isabella Swan and Mark McPherson, both local Michigan historians, had written brief (in the case of Swan) and exploratory (in the case of McPherson) biographies of Elizabeth Denison Forth that were essential to this subject matter; both included crucial primary source transcriptions at the end of their books. But overall, as the colonial historian Christian Crouch has concurred in her nuanced papers on Detroit as “the Black City,” it was as though blacks were imagined as having just appeared on the Detroit scene during the Great Migration of African Americans from the South and were associated only with Motor City manufacturing, the Motown musical sound, and mid-twentieth-century peaks of social unrest, otherwise known as the riots of 1943 and 1967.4 While I was in the midst of developing this project, a pivotal edited collection, years in the making, was released by Wayne State University Press. That book, A Fluid Frontier, edited by Canadian historian Karolyn Smardz Frost and American literary scholar Veta Smith Tucker, focused on the valiant history of the Underground Railroad in Detroit but also wrestled with the unpleasant fact of slaveholding in the Detroit River region, particularly in the introduction and a chapter focused on the Denison family. In 2011, the Canadian historian Gregory Wigmore published his article “Before the Railroad: From Slavery to Freedom in the Canadian-American Borderland” in a Journal of American History special issue on borderlands. A significant piece heralding and indeed modeling a broader discussion that recognizes the northern border as equal in historical importance and social texture as the southern border (with Mexico), Wigmore’s work, like earlier publications by McRae and Cooper, emphasized the role of the Detroit River as a permeable border that enslaved people crossed in dual directions. Wigmore skillfully used the theme of river traffic to indicate a pre-history of slave escapes “before the [underground] railroad” as well as a broader context of international political machinations. There is, perhaps, a subtle sticking point between historians such as Wigmore and interdisciplinary scholars such as Veta Tucker over how to carbon-date the activities of the Underground Railroad. Tucker suggests in her opening chapter to A Fluid Frontier that every escape in the region can be counted within Underground Railroad history, while Wigmore sets up a strict before-after structure in the language of his piece.5 It should be noted that the National Park Service’s essential and admirable Network to Freedom program also takes a liberal view when determining what to count within the Underground Railroad framework and when to start counting. The historian Manisha Sinha, in her recent sweeping interracial study of the transnational abolition movement, asserts that the history of abolition begins when the first person resisted slavery. This argument is resoundingly convincing; however, the history of abolition (the multifaceted struggle to end enslavement across the Atlantic world) and the history of the Underground Railroad or Railway (organized networks of activists committed to aiding enslaved people’s passage to freedom in the United States and Canada) do not fully overlap. On this question, I lean toward the view implicitly advanced by scholars Eric Foner and Stephen Kantrowitz, who describe the concerted organization of antislavery networks as a marker of the formation of the movement in the late 1820s and 1830s. It is relevant, though, as well as revealing for Underground Railroad scholarship, that research on Detroit indicates the existence of such networks in the very early 1800s in references to connected individuals who encouraged escapes as well as to the presence of Negro Town as a base camp for resisters.6

  Alongside the small but now steadily growing number of publications on slavery and early black history in Detroit, there have been several dissertations, manuscripts in progress, and new books produced by a generation of historical thinkers who are exposing the economic importance, political ambiguity, and cultural complexity of Detroit as a place situated betwixt and between colonial France and Great Britain, Great Britain and the United States, and multiple indigenous nations. In 2001, map historian and curator Brian Leigh Dunnigan released an extensive cartographical study, Frontier Metropolis, which reproduced and contextualized maps and images to reconstruct the city’s past and serves as a major reference guide for current studies. Dunnigan’s interpretation emphasized the international and urban character of this remote frontier settlement across one and a half centuries. Catherine Cangany’s Frontier Seaport (2014), in implicit conversation with Dunnigan’s interpretive graphic collection, emphasizes Detroit’s port town character. Cangany’s is the first in a series of full-length New Detroit History monographs that seek to move historical literature on the city beyond the scholarship of early twentieth-century antiquarian historians and political historians such as Silas Farmer and Clarence Burton, whose chief interests were in collecting data about the city in order to champion its progress in a rising industrial age.7 Cangany brings an enlightening Atlantic studies perspective to her analysis of early American Detroit, which she describes as a maritime trading town with economic and cultural ties to urban centers on the East Coast as well as in Europe. Cangany’s focus on economic exchange and local politics leads her to notice the presence of enslaved people. Forthcoming histories by Karen Marrero, Andrew Sturtevant, and Kyle Mays will frame Detroit as an explicitly indigenous location where Native American and mixed-race Indian people lived in a nuanced set of relations with European and American settlers and, to a certain extent, African Americans. What I hope this book, The Dawn of Detroit, adds to the mix is an explicit and concentrated focus on enslaved people’s lives that necessitates seeing African American and Native American history in Detroit as interrelated rather than separate streams of experience.

  My work joins with all of these aforementioned texts, and surely others, in the collaborative intellectual project of picturing early Detroit in a way that draws on the conceptual revelations of ethnic studies, women’s and gender studies, and studies of the Atlantic world, the movement of trade and capital, and the intermingling of cultures. Somehow, as the reading public has internalized narratives about American national and regional pasts, we have forgotten that Detroit is ancient, that Detroit is indigenous, and that Detroit has a long-standing black presence. We have misplaced the knowledge that most of the Midwest was French, and we attribute anything fascinating in Francophone-American history to New Orleans, or maybe to St. Louis. We have never deeply considered the impact of the reality that slavery existed even in the Midwest and, as Afua Cooper so boldly stated it nearly two decades ago, in Canada where a “mythology” of a black “haven” holds sway.8 Scholars, while aware of these nuances, have only begun to probe them and to actively present them for public consideration. In our current transnational world where all entrenched human dilemmas are simultaneously local and global, a renewal of studies of Detroit and the U.S.-Canadian borderlands helps return us to a sense of the critical importance of the Great Lakes region to North American histories of extractive and settler colonialism, slavery, racial formation, cultural complexity, and the refusal of subjugated peoples to readily submit to domination.9

  Remembering the Black Militia

  In the small number of studies that assess slavery in Detroit, or early black history in the city, the story of the black militia often rises to the fore. This book has been no exception, for that saga holds within it an explanatory power that captures the unstable racial dynamics produced by Detroit’s borderland character. Today Detroit’s black militia is commemorated on a plaque in the Detroit Historical Museum that details the biography of its leader, Peter Denison, as well as in literature produced by Ranger Shawna Mazur of the River Raisin National Battlefield in Monroe (the present-day location of French Tow
n) and through historical reenactment at the Battlefield.10 These are necessary and enlightening interventions into local histories and memories that all too often overlook African American contributions to the state’s early past. But even as we remember the historic occurrence of black men forming and leading an American military unit at the dawn of the nineteenth century, we must take care to recall and question the reasons why this special unit was authorized by Michigan authorities in the first place. William Hull imagined the black militia as a defensive force, positioned to fight primarily against Native Americans on whose lands Michigan Territory was located. Black men’s seeming willingness to protect the United States raised their esteem in the view of some territorial officials and potentially set them at odds with indigenous people.

  In addition to coming away with a lopsided interpretation that valorizes black agency and leaves in place a notion of Native Americans as enemies of the state, it is easy to part historical tracks at this juncture of the story of the black militia, to see Native American history moving in one direction that positions Indian people outside the United States, while seeing African American history moving in an opposing direction that positions black people as (co-opted) insiders. But the picture of what life looked like in early Detroit—what survival for subjugated groups looked like—was never so clearly divided along these kinds of racial lines. People of indigenous and African descent were enslaved both in that town and along each bank of the river. They ran away together, as in the case of Jenney (a mixed-race black woman) and Joseph Quinn (a young Native man) in 1807. They formed families together, as in the case of Abraham and Marie Louise Ford, an enslaved black man and his free Ojibwe-French wife, whose daughter was born in the midst of war in 1813. African Americans and Native Americans may even have been members of the black militia together, given the nature of slavery in the region, the tendency for Afro-Native people to be defined as “negro” in historical records, and the unit’s makeup of runaway slaves from Canada. Of course, in addition to forming close connections, Native Americans and African Americans also faced off, across domestic spaces in which one was the owner, the other owned, and across lines of battle in the Revolutionary War and War of 1812. One thing these populations always shared with one another, as well as with settlers of the young American nation that sought but failed to define as well as confine them, was a fierce love of the dignity and autonomy embedded in the principle of freedom.

  Borderlands and Frontiers

  I have never quite imagined myself as a borderlands scholar, but as a place that birthed surprising events shaped by its location on multiple lines of differentiation and difference, Detroit compels its students to think in these expansive interpretive terms. In framing the parameters of this book in the introduction, I describe Detroit as a “frontier-borderland” environment. With the use of this language, I am calling on at least two streams of historical study: Native American histories of the Great Lakes and Middle West and African American histories of slavery. Histories of the Great Lakes, particularly those that focus on Native people in the region, engage with the notion of borderlands as spaces of cultural encounter.11 The classic example of this scholarship is Richard White’s The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, which captured the multilayered complexities of cross-cultural accommodation. White’s concept of a “middle ground,” defined as a “place in between: in between cultures, peoples, and in between empires and the nonstate world of villages,” was an arena where indigenous peoples and Europeans encountered and negotiated with one another by necessity.12 He argued that a social and political middle ground, a “mutually intelligible world,” formed through a series of misunderstandings between Indians and Europeans who were struggling to compromise through the end of the War of 1812. White’s interpretation of inter-group dynamics in the Great Lakes influenced numerous studies to follow, some of which critiqued his argument, all of which built on his work.13 While I appreciate White’s concept, I am inspired by the notion of “the Coast of the Strait” (described in the introduction of this book) to perceive these social relations differently.

  Rather than seeing a ground that various historical actors traversed to eventually meet in the middle in a place like Detroit, a metaphor that suggests terra firma beneath all of the historical actors’ feet, I imagine Detroiters moving across more than one type of surface as they warily encountered one another: water as well as land. If free Europeans can be said to occupy one kind of cultural ground, and free Native Americans can be said to occupy an alternative kind of cultural ground, where do we place people who fit into neither of these categories? Where do we locate the enslaved? I will suggest that the unfree occupy a precarious position more akin to a shoreline, with one foot on water, the other on land. Located on an unpredictable metaphorical coast where the water and land converged, enslaved people encountered free people of various ethnic backgrounds from a differential position of insecurity. Instead of the “middle ground,” a Midwestern landscape peopled by those who were free, we can imagine a coastline dominating early Detroit. This coast was a waterscape in the Great Lakes interior where enslaved people—Native Americans as well as Afro-Americans—strove to negotiate from a groundless position of material and legal instability.14

  I suppose I differ from many other historians of Native America in the social groups that I hold in view as I scan the Midwestern terrain. I want to insist on the visibility of an overlooked world—a black and indigenous world of bondspeople—shaped by their daily strategies of survival as well as the cultural heritages of their various homelands. This world of the unfree that surely formed in servant’s quarters of merchant homes, in farm fields and fur trade shops, on riverbanks and riverboats, was not devised strictly along the lines of race, clan, or tribe; it was a shared social space of the struggling subjugated.15 With great care, colonial and early Americanists who study the Midwest are beginning to map this world. Jennifer Stinson offers a moving and analytically penetrating study of lead mining districts in Wisconsin and Illinois in the 1820s and 1830s that connects black slavery with Native land dispossession and an expanding culture of white masculinity and gentility that was supported by both. Christian Crouch is tracing the history of black Detroit through successive imperial regimes and analyzing black men’s adaptations of indigenous terrain and strategies in the Midwest and Northeast. And in his forthcoming second study of indigenous peoples in the Great Lakes, Michael Witgen is endeavoring to formulate a capacious and exacting theoretical frame that historicizes the racialization of Indians in the age of U.S. expansion and interprets what he calls the “political economy of plunder” that links black and Native trajectories.16

  In addition to charting complex cultural and political relations between European colonies and indigenous communities, historians of Native America have wrestled with connotations of the term “frontier,” rightly contesting the customary meaning of the word derived from historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s 1894 thesis of westward expansion.17 In Turner’s work and in American culture more generally, the word “frontier” has long suggested a line of difference between advancing white “civilization” and Native American “savagery,” where cross-cultural confrontation ultimately gives way to the perfection of the American character and expansion of the colonial enterprise captured by the idea of “manifest destiny.” However, in studies of the history of slavery, particularly work by Ira Berlin, frontier locations have been described as places on the edge of slavery’s westward movement.18 These are locations where populations were relatively sparse, where lands were not fully settled by whites, and where practices of plantation slavery had not yet been systematized and fixed into social and legal practice. As legal historian Lea VanderVelde has so clearly described it: “Frontier slaves were sought for the needs of westward expansion,” as “lands were available for settlement in great supply, but labor could not be hired.” Because of the need for slave-owners to rely on their bondspeople differently i
n these rugged locations, frontier environments often left greater room for slaves to negotiate their relationships with masters. The frontier farm in 1820s Missouri, for instance, is a spot where one might expect to see an enslaved man clearing a field alongside his owner. Detroit was just such a place, and hence I have retained the language of “frontier” throughout this book, though with a degree of restraint.19

  Some historians of Native America and the West also see a utility in the use of the contested term “frontier.” William Cronon employs this word sparingly in his environmental history of Chicago because of its ability to convey a macro-level historical relationship between cities and rural areas understood as frontiers in the nineteenth century.20 In his article on ethnic mixing in the Missouri River region titled “More Motley Than Mackinaw,” John Mack Faragher employs the notions of “frontiers of inclusion” and “frontiers of exclusion.”21 He argues that prior to the surge in Anglo-American population numbers and prior to Missouri statehood in 1821, French and Native American residents lived and worked together there, cooperating across lines of difference. With an increased American presence came greater racial differentiation and less political support for Indian land claims. Faragher sees the texture of frontier relations as shifting over time and degrading with an increased Anglo-American influence. While Faragher’s emphasis is on change over time, I see an application for his analysis across time as well as across social spaces in the locale of Detroit. Similarly to what transpired in Missouri, free Native people saw their standing in Detroit decline with the diminishment of French power and the imposition of British and then American authority. For free indigenous people, Detroit moved from being something like a “frontier of inclusion” in the French period to becoming a “frontier of exclusion” in the British and American periods. But at the same time, there were always frontiers of inclusion and exclusion operating simultaneously in Detroit. While free Indians were included in French community and social life in noteworthy ways, unfree Indians—Native bondspeople—were excluded. The notion of frontiers of inclusion and exclusion, when viewed in place as well as across time, helps to illuminate social relations in Detroit in a way that keeps the presence of enslaved people of color visible.