by Tiya Miles
The harvest produced by family farms, especially wheat and orchard crops, fed the town and brought returns in local exchange. So farmers would have been present in this streetscape too, doing business within the fort, although their homes were mainly situated outside the enclosure walls. French farmers and craftsmen in the town would have worn shirts in brilliant shades, trousers with belts or sashes, and Indian-style moccasins. The women in these families that worked so intensively with their hands out of doors would have dressed in knee-length gowns, petticoats to the ankles, and straw hats for sun protection.6 Farming women, like merchant women, applied themselves both inside and outside. They kept house, tended kitchen gardens, prepared food, made household items, and raised children in a settlement with no schools. Prominent merchants were often also farmers, commanding large tracts of land derived from Cadillac’s early claims or acquired, unlawfully, in purchases from indigenous groups. The New Yorker would surely have noticed, too, Father Bonaventure, the local priest draped in stern black robes. Charged with the moral well-being of residents in a town with only one church, the father kept the community’s sacred rituals: marriages, baptisms, funeral services, regular masses, and holiday celebrations in honor of the saints.7
Any one of these members of Detroit society, from longtime French merchants, farmers, and priests to newcomers from Great Britain, could be the owner of another Detroit resident, that is, the owner of a slave. This would have come as no surprise to a sharp-eyed merchant from New York, as that colony was becoming a primary location from which Detroit slaves were sourced. Black people arrived via boat and on foot through the trading networks that also circulated animal pelts. The connection between slaves and skins in Detroit and other Great Lakes markets was so close, so uncanny, that a French Canadian attorney general had once proposed manipulating slaves’ need for clothing as a means to process furs for market.
It was Ruette d’Auteuil who seized upon the notion, in 1689, that the African slaves imported to New France could wear beaver fur as apparel, thereby transforming the rough but valuable animal skins into a prized variety of processed fur. Softened and tempered by long-term wear in which contact with the natural oils of human skin rubbed out the roughest hairs, leaving behind the soft underfur that felted so well into headwear, “coat beaver” or “fat beaver,” as it was sometimes called, commanded luxury prices. Ruette d’Auteuil figured that black slaves could be put to work at building “all sorts of manufactures” in French colonial North America while dressed in the prickly skins of another captured species. The black men’s bodies would finish the furs while at the same time erecting the infrastructure of the colony, producing extra surplus value by way of the sweat of their stolen labors.8 While this plan was never enacted in New France, in part because of the easy availability of Indian slaves, the vision behind it reveals an eerie alignment between the fur trade and the slave trade, capturing the ideological intersection of these two seemingly separate exploitative enterprises. The beaver and the black man, both, were reduced to natural resources in the eyes of capitalist body brokers.
We tend to associate slavery with cotton in the commercial crop heyday of the southern “cotton kingdom,” but in this northern interior space, slavery was yoked to the fur industry. The cycles and routes of the fur trade, as well as its vessels—Indian canoes, French batteaux, and British schooners—were the cycles, routes, and vehicles of the slave trade in the place we now call Michigan. If the outlines of a triangular trade can be sketched in these thick, forested lands, it existed between upstate New York, southern Michigan, and the northern straits of Mackinac. Along the Detroit River and at trading posts linked by Lakes Erie, Ontario, and Huron, merchants bought and sold peltry as well as people, shaping a skin trade of dual nature. The dark underside of fur trade imperialism was not only the rise in conflict among various Native groups and the near destruction of beaver and the lush riverine habitat that the meticulous animal maintained, but also the consumption of human beings in an insatiable for-profit enterprise.
Bound for Detroit
Detroit’s strategic location between Lakes Erie and Huron, as well as between the eastern port cities and western Indian nations (such as the Foxes, Dakotas, and Lakotas), made it a prize in the eyes of European imperialists. The ongoing purpose of the fort was to secure and control a flow of goods between indigenous hunters, white traders, and global markets that would shore up the economic primacy of the European empire that claimed it, formerly France, and, at this moment in our chronicle, Britain. When, between 1757 and 1760, France and Great Britain waged a war over the fates of their North American colonies, Detroit was one of the most valuable chips in play. France lost this Seven Years’ War (or French and Indian War, as the British called it), forcing French King Louis XV to relinquish all of that country’s posts in the Great Lakes region. The once wide-ranging French-claimed territory in North America, a “corridor” stemming from the St. Lawrence River Valley of Canada, through the Upper Great Lakes and southern Illinois country, southwestward into the Missouri River region of Louisiana, was rudely sliced in two. The English took swift command of the Great Lakes posts, including Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, though the limits to their actual authority were extreme in a country surrounded by Indians. After a small cadre of British commanders trekked from the East to settle inside the old French fort, they purchased dwelling places from local residents, some of whom relocated to homesteads beyond the walls.9
French villagers who remained at Detroit were permitted to keep their property after first swearing allegiance to the new Crown that dominated the region. This property could include unfree blacks and Indians. As spelled out in Article 47 of the Capitulation of Montreal following the war: “The Negroes and Panis [Indians] of both sexes shall remain in their quality of slaves in the possession of the French and Canadians to whom they belong; they shall be free to keep them in their service in the colony or to sell them; and they may also continue to bring them up in the Roman Religion.”10 With the promise of French property protections firmly in place and the residents placated, if still wary, the British endeavored to turn Detroit into a central command post for their military operations in the Indians’ west.
At Detroit, civilian government had no foothold. In this militaristic and mercantile town, British officers held sway in a tenuous truce with wealthy French merchants, whose economic and social influence was long-standing and deep-seated. In 1760, Detroit was a village on edge, a place on the edge—of empires and interest groups. Dangerous and unpredictable, a space of extreme risk and ample opportunity, Detroit drew people—and conflict—like a magnet. White, red, or black; enslaved, indentured, or free, new people were bound for Detroit in the aftermath of the French and Indian War, and when they arrived, they twined their fates with that of the city.
Even under formal British jurisdiction, Detroit remained French and Indian in character. Within the walls of the fort and alongside the sloping shoreline, nearly one thousand people went about their daily lives, keeping hundreds of homes and farms in as good a working order as could be expected in a place where supplies might arrive or might not, depending upon the season and the flowing or frozen state of the river. When the populations of nearby Native villages are included in the count, greater Detroit residents numbered around two thousand.11 These habitants were French in the main, as well as mixed-race French and Indian, with a substantial number of Native people regularly visiting the fort from their villages just beyond town. French-speaking people of African descent resided at the fort in small numbers, but very few were free. Detroit residents traded furs and sundry goods with one another, attended mass, rites of passage, and celebrations at Ste. Anne’s Catholic Church, ran exuberant foot races, and threw festive dances and sledding parties in an atmosphere characterized by a lively communal life.
But while the fur trade flourished, bringing wealth and social stability to European colonists in Detroit, enslaved women toiled behind those festive scenes, keeping the
homes and gardens of others, processing and preparing food, caring for their mistresses’ children, making clothing and household linens, cleaning private and public spaces, and providing sexual services according to the demands of their masters. Enslaved men in Detroit were likewise taxed by arduous labor, plying the boats that kept the system of long-distance trade running across the formidable lakes, hauling goods, applying the skills of various crafts, building structures and containers, and working the land obtained by their owners.
Free French and mixed-race habitants, soon joined by British soldiers and a smattering of British merchants, enjoyed a position of relative safety afforded by town walls and armed patrols. Most French residents made peace with the new political reality, accepting British authority and clinging fast to the things that produced and secured their wealth: healthy trade relationships with Native people, land, and slaves. The picketed walls of Fort Detroit shielded these privileged residents from the threat of attack that could originate from any direction in an era of ongoing imperial warfare: from Indian villages close to the fort, Native communities far afield, or even the vanquished French military that had receded to the jointly occupied French and Indian Illinois territory. But for those individuals who were not free, the palisade may have symbolized physical confinement within the fort and containment within the status of “slave,” even as it promised protection from unknown threats outside the common walls.
Detroit counted 33 slaves among 483 residents in the year 1750.12 By 1760, that number had increased to 62 slaves as the arriving British officers brought their black bondspeople along with them.13
This Great, Disastrous Catastrophe
Perhaps James Sterling should have known what trouble loomed. He was, after all, a merchant doing steady trade with the Indians who would soon conspire to attack the fort at Detroit. Born in Ireland, Sterling had lived in North America since the 1750s, serving in Pennsylvania during the French and Indian War and working as a commissary at various British forts. He had relocated to Detroit in 1761 to stand as the western agent of a trading firm with the very long name of Livingston, Rutherford, Duncan, Coventry & Syme. Charged with overseeing the movement of goods between traders in New York and traders in the west, Sterling was not keen at first on his relocation from the populous east.14 In the fall of 1762 he disdainfully described his new town as “this place of Exile (as I may justly term it).” But business proved good for Sterling, an ambitious bachelor with an eye out for the main chance even in exile. He developed a steady exchange with nearby Native hunters and added a degree of Indian language facility to his proficiency in English and French.15
Sterling’s correspondence made clear that his thriving business depended on the work of enslaved blacks, especially black men whose muscles became the mode of movement for trade goods. In 1760, in advance of setting up shop in Detroit, Sterling attempted to acquire black slaves from merchants Phyn and Ellice in upstate New York. A letter from the company’s owners informed Sterling: “we have tried all in our power to procure the wenches and negro lads, but it’s impossible to get any near your terms. No green Negroes are now brought into this Province. We can purchase negroes from eighty pounds to ninety pounds, and wenches from sixty pounds to seventy pounds. If such will be acceptable, advise, and you shall have them in the spring.”16 Sterling’s inquiry about the availability of slaves in advance of founding his shop in Detroit reveals his conviction that blacks in bondage were necessary to his western venture. And at the same time that Sterling sought black slaves from New York, upstate New Yorkers were holding black as well as Indian slaves. Isabella Graham, the spouse of a British military doctor stationed at Fort Niagara, wrote in 1769 that her husband “bought me an Indian girl and has since purchased another.” This meant that Isabella Graham had “another one to cloak,” she wearily yet proudly explained to her parents in a letter. Graham therefore increased her clothing wish-list to include several items of “coarse” material “for each of them” and sent the list to her parents in Britain by way of a ship bound for Detroit. Lamenting the isolation promised by the impending winter weather, Graham’s spirits lifted at the thought of “sending one of the Savages thru the roads to York in winter” to collect her return correspondence.17
Back in Detroit, over the course of five years, James Sterling mentions several black slaves in his unpaid employ or in the employ of his trading partners. In 1761, Sterling is pleased with a new and important purchase, writing to a ship captain and business associate: “I have bought a Negro here for whom I am to give £75—he speaks French, English and a little Indian language here, seems to be a good lad and I believe will suit very well.” In the same missive, Sterling noted to the captain that “your Negro man Charles” was accompanying a group to Niagara. Sterling allowed to another associate, Mr. Collbeck, that the “negro Jack” could be kept in Niagara “during the winter to take care of [Collbeck’s] oxen.”18 When a slave of Sterling’s ran away, Sterling was concerned that he had been “taken up by a Frenchman.” Relieved to later recover his human property, Sterling had the man “secured” by force.19
James Sterling used black men like railroad cars in a pre-industrial transit system that connected sellers, buyers, and goods, and he did not hesitate to protect his investment in this human infrastructure of the fur trade. These men of African descent would carry furs to the east in warm weather, winter over with Sterling’s partners who used their labor while the waterways were impassable, and then return to Detroit with goods for Sterling’s shop in the springtime. Sometimes the “goods” that black men helped to move might include other enslaved people. Like the beaver bodies they transported, these men were viewed by slaver-traders as little more than fur-bearing animals.
With his talented unpaid laborers transporting wares across the waters and creating goodwill in the business circles that benefited from the borrowed use of their labor in the cold season, Sterling was able to focus on the nitty-gritty details of commercial transactions on the ground in Detroit. And so he should have intuited, perhaps, that conflict was brewing in the summer of 1762, when many of his Native trading partners began to ask for weapons. That season, Sterling took orders for “Three Thousand Weight of the best & hardest Corn’d Powder” and “all the Scalping Knives” that his distant business associates could acquire.20 Sterling was unable to get his hands on that much weaponry; neither did he record any sense of foreboding at the sheer volume of the requests. But one year later, Sterling would find himself in the thick of a battle that had been brewing since the British assumption of control in the Upper Country in 1760. Fighting beside trained officers of the British military, he would command the Detroit militia in Pontiac’s impending war.21
Pontiac’s Rebellion, also known as Pontiac’s Conspiracy and Pontiac’s War, is one of the most dramatic and, indeed, celebrated, moments in the annals of Detroit history. It is so famous an event that in addition to the numerous books that have been written about it, pageants have been performed around it, and places (Pontiac, Michigan) as well as things (the Pontiac car and Pontiac Silverdome Stadium) named for its intrepid leader.22 Pontiac, the son of an Ottawa man and Ojibwe woman, was a skilled orator and warrior who sought to inspire an all-out war against the British Empire, which had spread its reach into his Great Lakes homeland. A French collaborator who had sided with that country in the French and Indian War, Pontiac aimed to gather Ottawa, Ojibwe, Huron, Seneca, Delaware, Shawnee, Miami, and French combatants—some of whom had had group rivalries in the past—to wage war against the British and undercut their newly won military and hence commercial victory in the region. Spurred by the vision of Delaware prophet Neolin, who pictured a world free of white influence in which Native sacred power could be restored, Pontiac planned his attack for months, gathering and sometimes pressuring Indian allies to join him.23
For Pontiac, frustration at the shift from French to British rule swelled into irreconcilable anger. Native people in the northern regions had learned to coexist with t
he French, who had set about cultivating relationships since their earliest explorations.24 The French object in North America had traditionally been to derive wealth through the manipulation of trade as well as to convert the Indians in order to strengthen the Catholic Church. Unlike the British, who came to establish Protestant towns in New England and profit-making plantations in the South, all of which required massive tracts of land, the French focus had been on controlling trade and extracting natural resources (principally fish and beaver).25 This meant that French colonists did not arrive in the Upper Country with an eye toward developing sizeable family-friendly settlements. The first French forays into the Great Lakes were made by military men, Recollet and Jesuit missionaries, and traders. Detroit was in some ways an exception to the French rule in its attention to keeping family units intact (bringing officers with their wives) and practicing settled agriculture, though even Detroit was a far cry from the land-intensive intrusion of a Boston or Jamestown. Entering the North American scene with a relatively light but nonetheless self-serving footprint, the French needed to quickly build strong alliances with Native people who knew the environment and geopolitical status quo. Over several generations of the French colonial presence, some French residents and various groups of Indians had formed mutually intelligible aims, bicultural families, and shared habits of life. But the British were a different breed. Not only did they hold Native people at a greater social distance than had the French, but they also approached Indian diplomacy in markedly contrasting ways.26
While French explorers, voyageurs, and traders had smartly adopted indigenous customs, intermarried with Native women, and bestowed Indian trading partners and their communities with generous gifts to establish goodwill and grease the wheels of trade, the British took a different tack. British commanders at Detroit gave far fewer gifts to the Indians, thus refusing to engage in a cultural ritual of good faith and social connection that undergirded economic alliances. British military commanders also refused to regularly meet with Native leaders, treating them with a level of disrespect that was unprecedented in the former French territory. Finally, British officials blocked the dispersal of rum to Indians and reduced the trade value of beaver skins. Frustrated with the dismissive treatment of British leaders and propelled forward in his view by Neolin’s vision of a return to ancestral ways, Pontiac went on the attack, seeking to put the British down and to help restore French rule at the Great Lakes European posts.27
