by Tiya Miles
At a series of conferences with leaders of various tribes, Pontiac made his case against the British, whom he deemed “liars” and “dogs clothed in red.”28 Together with his allies, Pontiac adopted a bold plan: he would orchestrate a reconnaissance mission in which he and his fellows would perform a disingenuous “peace-pipe” dance for British officers inside Fort Detroit; meanwhile, others in the scouting party would surreptitiously assess the number of enemy soldiers and guns. He also called for warriors to attack British citizens wherever they found them, to strike the settlers randomly in so many places that they would be overwhelmed. Pontiac’s own part in this great battle would be to lead a contingent of warriors in an assault on Detroit. His goal: to isolate the British commanders inside the fort, cut off their food supply, compel them to surrender, and push them back across the Allegheny Mountains to their former eastern posts.29 Pontiac expected that the French military would abet his multipronged assault, leading to a victory that would ultimately return to the French territories lost in the Seven Years’ War and return to the Native tribes more agreeable trading partners.
Pontiac and his supporters planned their attack for early May of 1763, but the British commander in the fort, Major Henry Gladwin, had received a warning about the plot from a disaffected Ottawa leader. The British subsequently increased their sentries and gathered their arms, forcing Pontiac to regroup on what he had intended to be the first day of the siege. His men bided their time for a few days and then split ranks, executing a surprise attack on a family farm behind the fort as well as on residents of Hog Island (present-day Belle Isle), the Detroit River islet treated as common land where the French had allowed their pigs to graze.30 Leaving a trail of bodies behind on Hog Island and taking three white children captive, Pontiac and his allies pummeled the fort walls with gunfire.
It was the ninth of May. Springtime, a most beautiful season in the Great Lakes, had morphed into a time of crisis, as the fearsome smell of gunpowder in the air mixed with the heady scent of pear and apple tree blossoms. Unable to penetrate the wooden pickets of the fort, Pontiac’s six or seven hundred warriors patrolled the riverbank to the east and the woods behind the settlement, seeking to block the delivery of provisions and reinforcements that would come to Detroit from the northward fur trade post of Michilimackinac or from British Canada via the river. Merchants, farmers, and those they held as slaves cowered behind the wooden gates as Native forces penned them in, laying siege to the town.31
The assault on Detroit continued unabated. At the end of a failed peace meeting in the home of a French habitant on May 10, Pontiac took hostage two leading British officers, Donald Campbell and George McDougall. He threatened to hold them unless Major Gladwin surrendered the fort, relinquished all arms and ammunition, and departed for the east. When Gladwin refused, Pontiac softened his offer, saying the British could take their property with them but insisting that they leave behind a certain “Negroe boy” who served as a “Valet de Chambre” to a British officer. This unnamed African American boy would be retained for Pontiac’s exclusive use.32 Pontiac’s request for a slave, as reported in the journal of Detroit merchant John Porteous, a New York trader who would soon come to work for James Sterling, as well as in the journal of Lieutenant James McDonald, who was stationed at Detroit, is a telling moment in the midst of this battle that bespeaks the entrenchment of human bondage among Europeans as well as Native people in the region. Pontiac’s desire for a black boy in particular indicated that young black male slaves carried a special kind of status in the Upper Country. Though bondspeople of African descent had been circulating in the urban areas of New France since the 1600s and trickling into the rural Great Lakes by the middle 1700s, they were harder to come by than Native slaves and twice as expensive.33 Pontiac likely saw the boy not only as a practical asset but also as a symbol of his personal leadership status. This boy would have been war booty for the Ottawa leader, a valuable prize and a visible trophy. Gladwin did not relent, however.
Meanwhile, inside the walls of the fort, British officers used slaves at their disposal to strengthen their hand. On the first day of the siege an enslaved “Panis” (Native) man formed part of a scouting party to assess whether a ship could make it past Pontiac’s warriors on the river. All in the party, except for the man and a resident teenaged boy, were killed by their enemies. The unnamed Indian slave was captured by Native warriors, to be held again as a captive or traded to others. Later in June, another enslaved Native man reported to Major Gladwin that he had sighted a supply boat drawing near on the Detroit River.34 This information was essential for the sustenance of those within the fort. These two indigenous men are among the few enslaved Detroiters mentioned in primary accounts of the siege, but dozens of other unfree people in the town were also witnesses and victims. While Pontiac’s contingent was unable to bring Detroit to its knees, neither was Gladwin able to free Detroit from the onslaught. A stalemate followed. As the prolonged assault continued, an unfree man belonging to one of the town’s largest slaveholders, Mr. Beaubien, was suspected of joining Pontiac’s warriors and faced arrest by the British.
By June, nearly 850 warriors were amassed beyond the walls of the fort at Detroit. Across the Great Lakes, Ottawa, Ojibwe, and Huron warriors were bringing down other British forts like so many dominoes. The fort at Sandusky, Ohio, fell, along with the fort at Miami, Ohio, and the fort up north at Michilimackinac.35 As word of the defeated forts traveled back to Detroit, the anxiety of the people trapped inside surely increased. Now it was summer on the strait, humid and stifling. The fortified town of Detroit sizzled inside its pickets, steaming as river water rose into vapor, adding to the thickness of tension in the air. Those trapped within the fort expected to be fallen upon at any moment by the Indians outside, even as their commander, Major Gladwin, refused to give in to Pontiac’s demands. The walls of the fort had been built to keep danger out, but for weeks in the spring and summer of 1763, these barricades locked danger in, containing even those Detroiters who were accustomed to their freedoms.
Pontiac’s major obstacle as the siege continued was his inability to breach the defensive schooner that Gladwin had planted on the river right alongside the town. Neither could Pontiac realize the once possible aim of starving the British into submission, as they had used the purported peace meeting in the home of a French resident as cover for collecting all of the edibles in the fort and amassed a store that could last them for weeks. The British soldiers had also cleared away trees and brush around the town, reducing cover for the Native fighters that shot their weapons into the pickets. The French military support that Pontiac hoped for never arrived, since the French commander in Illinois hesitated to violate the Treaty of Paris signed between his nation and Great Britain.36
Pontiac’s allied fighters withered in number as the conflict waged on with no decisive victory at Detroit. Just weeks into the siege, bands of Potawatomi and Huron warriors sought meetings with Gladwin and agreed to his terms to end their part in the conflict, damaging the strength of Pontiac’s Indian alliance beyond repair. By July of 1763 merchant-militiaman James Sterling could disclose to his business partner in New York that “the Seige [sic] continues here as formerly, tho’ we are not so much harassed as at the beginning, having burn’d & destroy’d all the houses, Fences, gardens & c. that were within [800] yards of the fort; not only so, but our garrison is much stronger than it was & the Enemy weaker at present, tho’ there are vast numbers of the Northern Nations expected every day.”37
The gathered force of allied warriors, though great, was unable to overcome Fort Detroit’s defenses and soon received word from the French at Illinois encouraging them to retreat. In October of 1763, Pontiac lifted the siege.38 That same month, James Sterling’s mind turned toward vengeance. He wrote to his brother: “we will repay the white and black savages for their rascally behavior.” By “white savages,” Sterling referred to the small minority of French residents at Detroit who had lent active support to the
warriors; by “black savages” he meant the Indians themselves, reiterating a longtime English cultural belief in the association between blackness and evil, and hinting, perhaps, at an elision between the racial categories “red” and “black” in the mind of a man whose society owned members of both groups as slaves.39
Sterling’s anger, wrapped in ethnocentric language, was warranted from his perspective. The war had taken a great toll on the British, lasting nearly a year and a half and costing “the lives of an estimated two thousand Anglo-American settlers and four hundred British soldiers.”40 Out of thirteen British posts attacked between 1763 and 1765, only four remained standing at the end of Pontiac’s War. Detroit, a gem in the crown of the British West, was one of them.41 Pontiac, for his part, was dissatisfied despite the damage he and his allies had managed to inflict on the British. After all, the British were still there. For the next two years, and to the consternation of the British, Pontiac traveled to various Native gatherings spreading his discontent and voicing the notion that war might be rekindled.
British military leaders agreed with James Sterling that vengeance should be theirs and that Indian warriors must be crushed. Major General Thomas Gage, commander of the British forces in North America at the time, ordered retaliatory assaults on tribes allied with Pontiac, even though the Huron leader, Teata, the Ottawa leader, Manitou, and the Ojibwe leader, Wasson, sought a peace with the British.42 After pressing surrender through military action, Colonel John Bradstreet, commander of one of the two retaliatory British armies, entered into a series of informal peace treaties with Native groups in Ohio and then in Detroit. Finally, at a meeting in Detroit in July of 1765, Pontiac himself formally relented. Yet the British would not soon forget his actions. The ultimately failed assault that a nineteenth-century Ottawa writer would later call “this great, disastrous catastrophe” had taken many lives on both sides and convinced the British that they would never be fully secure as long as they trod on indigenous ground.43 The response of British colonial officials, such as Superintendent of Northern Indian Affairs Sir William Johnson, was to cook up plans to “Settle and Enlarge our Frontier and in time become an over Match for them [the Indians] in the interior part of the country.”44 With rebellion quelled, at least for the time being, Johnson hoped to populate and expand their North American empire. Multiplying the number of British settlers until the indigenous residents were outnumbered, Johnson felt, would be the only means of forestalling future threats.
As Pontiac’s Rebellion stuttered to a messy end, scores of enslaved people were still being forcibly held in Detroit.45 They were the property of French Canadians who had built the settlement, of mixed-race French and indigenous families who controlled a large portion of the fur trade, and, increasingly, of British soldiers who had arrived after 1760 to administer the post. They were also, rarely, the property of Native traders who lived inside the fort.46 Detroit survived, with most of its residents free to run their own affairs under the aegis of the ruling British power, while others—a black and Indian enslaved minority—were just as trapped as they had been before the siege began.
But if Pontiac and his allied forces had ousted the British and returned French authority to western posts, would enslaved people have fared any better than they ultimately did beneath the Union Jack? By the time of Pontiac’s Rebellion, 1,500 enslaved people were living and working in the territory of New France.47 The evidence of two hundred years of slavery in Quebec indicates that little would have improved for them had Pontiac succeeded. Like the British, the French in Canada kept, used, and sometimes abused slaves of African and indigenous ancestry. To unfree people—Indians as well as blacks—the French were enemies and captors.
Captives in Canada
The history of slavery in New France, or present-day Canada, has only been confronted in the past half century.48 Canada imagines itself—and is imagined by Americans—as a safe zone for blacks who fled there to escape lifelong bondage via the secret network known as the Underground Railroad. But contrary to this belief, New France was a society with slaves for close to two hundred years. French Canadian merchants, government officials, tradesmen, and farmers incorporated slavery into the workings of everyday life, depended upon the labor of slaves, and legalized their reduction of people to property.
The first African-born person held as a slave had arrived in the St. Lawrence River Valley in 1628 or 1629. A French trader based in Quebec purchased this young boy, likely from Madagascar or Guinea, from an English pirate.49 Nearly a century passed before more captive Africans began to trickle into the colony. Meanwhile, indigenous captives, mostly women and children, were slowly falling into the hands of the French, who received them as gifts from indigenous allies. By the 1670s, French Canadians were not only accepting slaves as presents but were purchasing Indian slaves outright on their own initiative. Members of various and often distant tribes—the Kansa, Iowa, Arkansas, Natchez, Shawnee, Cahokia, Sioux, Assiniboine, Pani, Pawnee, Fish, Ojibwe, Fox, Menominee, Mascouten, Potawatomi, Ottawa, Iroquois, Mohican, Inuit, and other groups—spanning from the Mississippi River Valley to the south, to the Missouri River at the northern plains, found themselves owned by Frenchmen via capture or sale by members of other indigenous groups.50
Despite their practice of slavery, the French did not see indigenous people as a separate caste of human being marked for bondage due to racial difference. In this way, their ownership of Native slaves differed initially from their ownership of African slaves, whom they viewed as occupying a fixed inferior status that was racially derived.51 Neither were the French indiscriminate about the Indians they were willing to hold. They had formed close economic and political ties with some Native groups, such as the Hurons and Ottawas, and did not wish to jeopardize these relationships. But boundaries blur in the avaricious traffic in human bodies. Although French colonists intended to acquire slaves from Indian groups with whom they were in conflict (enemies) or with whom they had no connection (strangers), the number of tribes named in the long list above reveals that people from allied groups were also taken.52 Indigenous slaves could be challenging to hold, however, because they were often located fairly near home territory to which they might escape. This was far from the case for the smaller number of African slaves who had been transported thousands of miles from their homeland to labor in North America. With the colonies of New England serving as a persuasive example of the ways that African slave labor could be successfully employed in cold northern climes, more French Canadians began to seek access to black bodies just as eagerly as they had harvested beaver carcasses.
In 1688, leading officials in New France, including the governor, requested the king’s permission to import African-descended slaves. Permission was granted and, in 1701, augmented by an authorization by Louis XIV for New France colonists “to own slaves . . . in full proprietorship.”53 Although no slave ship actually landed in New France at the auspices of the king due to a concern about the financial viability of Africans surviving the frigid weather, a limited number of black slaves could be obtained from French territory in the Caribbean islands and, later, Louisiana, or from the British colonies as spoils of war or smuggling. In the two hundred years between 1632 and 1834, 1,443 enslaved blacks appear in French records. Indigenous slaves outnumbered blacks almost two to one in New France, reaching an estimated total of 2,700 over the time period that French Canadians owned people. Of 4,185 total slaves in the territory (some with unmarked racial categorization), 874 resided in the Great Lakes area of the present-day American Upper Midwest.54
French slavery was governed by a set of rules called the Code Noir, which strove to align the practices of owning human beings with the ethics of Catholicism, France’s state religion. Adopted in 1685 in the French Caribbean colonies where lucrative sugar plantations dominated, the Code Noir was adapted for use in Louisiana in 1724 and applied loosely to the northern colony of New France.55 The Code Noir allowed masters to physically punish slaves but discourage
d excessive brutality.56 It discouraged owners from separating families through sale and legislated free Sundays for slaves to honor the Sabbath. In the Great Lakes, as in the Caribbean and Louisiana, slaveholders did not completely abide by the tenets of the Code Noir, which was not uniformly enforced, especially in distant settlements.57 But French slaveholders, who often took their Catholic faith seriously, were aware of the expectations inscribed within the code. Many had their slaves baptized. Enslaved people could be married in the church and have those unions legitimized as sacrosanct; the church also recognized “natural marriages,” or informal intimate unions, between slaves.58 The children of slaves were baptized under the auspices of their parents’ owners and assigned godparents within the church. The French practice of slavery therefore provided a small measure of legal protection for families and a vehicle for social inclusion in the form of religious participation.
Colonists in New France used the unusual term “Panis” to designate Indian slaves, a word that may have several derivations. Many Indian slaves were not originally from the Great Lakes region but instead had been captured farther west, beyond the Missouri River. Members of the western Pawnee nation made up a notable number of Indian captives around the lakes, as this group was a target of slave raids carried out by Missouri and Little Osage bands in order to produce captives to sell to French traders. In addition, Ottawas may have captured and integrated Pawnee people. The late nineteenth-century Ottawa interpreter and writer Andrew Blackbird described his own family background as being rooted in the plains. His ancestors had been taken captive by Ottawa warriors who raided as far west as the Rocky Mountains, and then had been incorporated into the tribe through adoption and intermarriage. Blackbird described these distant ancestors, known to the Ottawas as “the Undergrounds,” because they built “their habitations in the ground by making holes large enough for dwelling purposes.” Pawnees of the Great Plains loosely fit this description, as they lived in earth lodges built into the high bluffs of riverbeds. For these reasons, a term that sounded close to the name of the Pawnee tribe—“Panis”—came to stand in for Indian slaves as a category and a caste. What is more, a number of smaller Indian groups whose members were vulnerable to capture by Illinois raiding parties had tribal names beginning with the letters “Pan,” supporting the theory put forward by historian Brett Rushforth that the partial names of a series of tribes who suffered great losses to slave raids led to the composite word “Panis.”59
