by Tiya Miles
Meanwhile, the “new owners,” or American officers, to whom Zeisberger referred now commanded Detroit. Zeisberger would have described the “old owners” as British officers, but there is a second, more accurate meaning of that phrase. The “old owners” were also Detroit’s French and British merchant elite who now faced a concrete changing of the political guard but held a core notion in common with the provisions of the Jay Treaty. Their status as “owners” of people in a slave society would continue to be safeguarded, and now even more emphatically, into the American era. The Jay Treaty, which defined the rights of Detroit’s prior residents of European descent, guaranteed: “All Settlers and Traders, within the Precincts of Jurisdiction of the said Posts, shall continue to enjoy, unmolested, all their property of every kind, and shall be protected therein.”54 Now it was not only French slaveholders whose rights to their slaves would be formally honored; British slaveholders could claim the same protections. And any of these Europeans could shift their loyalties to the United States and gain recognition as American territorial “citizens” under the Jay Treaty. They had only to maintain residency for a year or to swear an oath of allegiance if they preferred.55 The Jay Treaty opened the gate to American belonging for longtime Detroiters and broadly sanctioned their continued possession of Native and African-descended slaves. In a painful irony for enslaved people owned by French Canadian old settlers, France had abolished slavery in its colonies in 1794.56 Together, the fundamental legal documents of the territory—the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and Jay Treaty of 1794—functioned in a way that allowed Detroit to become a hub for slaveholders and a prison for captive people decades into the nineteenth century. As Christopher Phillips, a historian of the borderland Midwest and self-identified descendant of slaveholders there, has put it, “slavery and white supremacy were interwoven into the fabric of the entire western region.”57
William Macomb Account Book (c. 1796). The Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. A list of enslaved people with their individual monetary values is included in this bound record of Macomb family accounts.
Preserved property records of Detroit merchants demonstrate the robust continuation of slavery. In 1787, when John Askin inventoried his human chattel in a ledger book along with his other accounts, he enumerated eight persons: three men, two boys, two women, and two children of unspecified gender. Half of these individuals were identified as “Negro”; both of the women and a “Pawnis” blacksmith were most certainly Native. In 1796, when the executors of William Macomb’s estate estimated his property holdings in the wake of his death, they listed twenty-six slaves: eleven men, seven women, and ten children. Charlotte was the wife of Jerry and mother of two. Bet (or “Black Bet,” as Captain Harrow called her in his bid for purchase) had three children. Betta, listed alone without a family, was nine years old; Phillis, also listed alone, was seven. Most, if not all, of these individuals were African American. The racial breakdown of the souls counted among the assets of two of the most prominent British traders, Askin and Macomb, revealed a shift in Detroit’s enslaved population. Before the war, indigenous slaves had vastly outnumbered those of African descent, who made up a tiny portion of the captive population. During the war, raiders into southern settlements seized African Americans who then became the property of traders, merchants, officers, and farmers. In the postwar years, the number of captive people reached an apex in Detroit. City census records from 1773 listed eighty-five enslaved people; in 1782 that number had jumped to 180. By 1796, 298 enslaved people lived in Detroit. The registry of Ste. Anne’s Church adds precious detail to these raw census numbers. In the decade of the 1780s, ninety-seven enslaved people appeared as principal entrants in the priests’ record book; sixty-eight of these were Native American, and twenty-six were African American. In the 1790s, Ste. Anne’s priests noted eighty-five enslaved members; fifty-six were Native, while twenty-four were black. In short, over the three decades since James Sterling had been the first British slaveholder to appear in the Ste. Anne’s registry with black slaves, the church’s African American population had increased nearly eight-fold.58 British settlers’ desire for black slaves and their access to New York markets, together with wartime raiding to the South, gradually shifted the color of Detroit’s unfree class. The enslaved population was now approximately two-thirds Native and one-third African American. As the settlement moved into its “first American century,” slavery persisted as a more evenly divided biracial phenomenon, shaded black as well as red.59
Theft, Fight, and Flight
After the Revolutionary War, enslaved people in Detroit carried on much as they had in prior decades—fighting for dignity, liberty, and a decent quality of life, trying to beat the odds in a frontier community that presented openings as well as barriers. In 1792 a “Panis slave” named Francois stood accused of stealing “two bed covers, two shirts, and some other things” from a house, the mode of rebellion taken by black bondspeople Ann Wyley and Josiah Cutten in previous years. Francois, who lived in “a hut in the rear of the house of Baptiste Meloche,” armed himself “with a knife” after the incident. When the homeowner, Michael Houde, pushed into Francois’s “hut” looking for evidence of the crime, he promptly withdrew upon seeing the weapon. Afraid to confront Francois directly, Houde took the matter to court. Hearing the case against Francois was none other than John Askin, who was enjoying a new appointment as “one of His Majesty’s justices of the peace for the District of Hesse” along with new buildings that he had conveniently acquired on the Huron River after the Moravians’ departure.60
Besides stealing from wealthy merchants, unfree people attempted escapes from and to Detroit in the 1790s. On a snowy autumn morning in 1794, an enslaved man fled Detroit and made his way to the Moravian mission in Ontario. The Moravians did not aid the runaway, who was captured by “Mr. Parke” (of the prominent Meldrum and Park trading firm in Detroit) and then returned by Park to the town center.61 In 1798 John Askin lost a slave to escape. His daughter Madelaine Askin attempted to aid in the recovery of the man and wrote to her “dear Papa” in French: “I gave notice to several people that if they see your negro, to arrest him and take him to you, and I told them what reward you would give.” Madelaine reported that she had secured the aid of other settlers, who would help to capture the runaway “with pleasure.” Sampson, a black man owned by the slave-hungry Captain Alexander Harrow, fled in February of 1797. Sampson’s escape plagued Harrow for over a year, and Harrow was not quite sure if he wanted the difficult Sampson back. He determined in March of 1797: “I wish Sampson could be sold for £50 rather than have any more trouble with him.” By the summer of 1798, Sampson was working “in the service of Mr. Wells Attorney-at-Law” in Cincinnati. Harrow drew up a bill of sale for Sampson to Wells for “100 Dollars” and tried to hedge by getting Joel Williams of Cincinnati to purchase Sampson if Wells would not. In March of 1799, Harrow had still received nothing for Sampson, and he had not managed to have Sampson sent back to Detroit. Sampson’s trail in Harrow’s record ends here. Perhaps Harrow eventually collected funds for Sampson; likely, he did not. To engineer his escape, Sampson ran south to Ohio through the swamps rather than toward the legendary North Star. During Sampson’s lifetime and that of other slaves in Detroit prior to the turn of the nineteenth century, Upper Canada was as much slave territory as the United States, which meant fleeing either north or south held equal promise and risk.62
Before Sampson seized his freedom, plaguing his frustrated owner who dared not enter Indian country to track him, a fugitive from Kentucky took the reverse of Sampson’s course. This man fled north into Detroit, where he formed a partnership with a Wyandot hunter and entered the fur trade between Detroit and Ohio. Unnamed in the record, this black trader represented an infinitesimal free black population in eighteenth-century Detroit. Another free man may have been the “coal maker” in town described as “Will the Negro” in John Askin’s ledger that recorded a debt Will owed.63 Perhaps this was Wil
liam Lee, the man who had cleared acreage to purchase Esther and her son from Captain Henry Bird during the war. If so, and if William acquired Esther to free her, they may have become one of Detroit’s scarce free black families.
But many more enslaved people, both black and Native, remained in the town and its satellite communities, failing to find their longed-for freedom in the aftermath of the war. A significant number of Detroit’s still-captive bondspeople worked on the farms and river islands of William Macomb, which included: a “farm near the fort . . . on the Detroit River” a “farm at the Grand Marrais,” “Hog Island,” a “farm on the south east side of [the] Detroit river,” three houses “in the fort,” “lands in the Ohio,” and “Indian grants” at “Grosse Isle, Stony Island & other small islands,” and lands “on the north of the river.” Before his death in April of 1796, Macomb ensured that his “moveable estate . . . Slaves, Cattle, Household furniture, Books, Plate, Linens, Carriages, and all [his] utensils of Husbandry” would be duly accounted for. He appointed as executors of his estate merchants from New York and Detroit and named his wife, Sarah, followed by their eight children, as heirs. The items listed in Macomb’s itemized account of “moveable goods” would be passed down or auctioned off for the proceeds. In September of 1796, the executors began to liquidate by shedding human chattel. They sold Antoine to F. Billettes, transported Ben and Guy to New York, sold Bet and her “three boys,” Sam, Isaac, and Charles, for £135, and sold the “Negro girl Betta” for “fifty.”64
Settling the Country in the Lakes
William Macomb may have been Detroit’s wealthiest resident upon his death in 1796, but he would not be among those to lead the town into its first American century. That task fell to men like James May, a slaveholder; Solomon Sibley, a non-slaveholder; and Elijah Brush, a man with two “indentured” slaves. Born in Birmingham, England, in 1756, the nineteen-year-old James May had journeyed to Detroit in 1778, where he married a French woman, Rose St. Cosme, and began to engage in the chief business of the frontier: trade.65 A man of massive stature, fine tastes, and “a strong virile intellect,” May had achieved solid middle-class merchant status by the time that William Macomb died. May further improved that status when he turned up among the crowd at the Macomb family estate auction. On that hot August day, John Askin bought rabbits; Jonathan Nelson bought a fox house, a mare, and a colt; Matthew Dolson and Jacob Flower bought cattle and a horse; and Francis Billettes bought the black man, Antoine, “payable monthly on 5 months.” It was James May, however, who made the largest haul. At a time when coins and bills were scarce and most economic transactions were made through a barter and debt system kept track of by local merchants, May paid 252 in “cash” on the spot and still owed 1,269 for the things he bought from Sarah Macomb. Because of the size of May’s purchase, his sundry items were not detailed in the Macomb family ledger book like Askin’s rabbits or Nelson’s fox house, but the purchase probably included unfree people whose lives were devastated by the death of the trader who had formerly owned them. For men, women, and children in bondage, the passing of a master meant certain change: often sale and separation from loved ones. And James May, like many of Detroit’s leading residents, dealt in slaves as both an owner and purveyor. In the 1790s, May owned a black woman named Jenny, acquired from a man named Grauchin “in payment of a debt,” as well as Jenny’s sister Chloe, and an unnamed “Negro boy.”66 May sold John Anderson “a negro woman” in exchange for “200 good raccoon skins + 50 more if he is satisfied with her work.” And since Detroit merchants served as bankers for their customers, keeping logs of complex accounts, debts, and exchanges, among May’s business records are several transactions that he tracked for other Detroit slaveholders, including John Askin, who owed May for “a Negro Man named Pompey sold you,” William Hands, who owed May for “making a pr of shoe packs” (moccasin-like boots) for a “Pawney Girl,” and James Abbott, who owed May for “1 oak plank taken by your negro last fall.”67 While some Detroit merchants were struggling in the postwar period when furs decreased in availability and value, May was enterprising enough to continue his upward climb by acquiring more property, leasing what he already owned, and becoming indispensable to the new American government.
Lieutenant Edmund Henn, A View of Detroit. July 25th, 1794. E.H. Courtesy of the Burton Historical Collection, Detroit Public Library. This image, rare in its lively depiction of the high level of activity on the Detroit River and its shores prior to 1800, appears to show people of color in the canoe in the foreground.
Chief among James May’s calculated moves was the strategic use of his schooner the Swan. In 1796, the year the American military assumed control in Detroit, May leased his ship to the U.S. government to transport soldiers to the fort, making the Swan “the first vessel in the lake region to fly the stars and stripes.” The next year, May followed the proven European settler pattern of getting hold of cheap Indian land. With two partners, he purchased “several thousands of acres” in Macomb County from six Ojibwe “chiefs” for $50, clothing, and corn.68 While May was doing well under the occupying government, he lived in an unpredictable place still characterized as western and wild by most Americans in this era, a place where the population was small and culturally heterogeneous, the nearest city (Cincinnati, Ohio) was three hundred miles away, and the raw forces of weather and water could disrupt lives as readily as fluctuating commercial markets.
In the fall of 1801, James May learned what it meant to lose in a contest with the great inland seas. May’s schooner Harlequin had set out in late July with its captain, Joseph May, at the helm. Two months later, the ship had not reached any port and James May feared “that her and the Crew” had wrecked. Among the crew lost at sea were three sailors, including May’s brother Joseph, and three passengers. “The stroke,” May wrote to his colleague John Askin, “is a very severe one for me, the effects of which I shall feel for a long time; perhaps the rest of my days.”69 Askin could commiserate with May. Askin had lost two ships of his own to storms and rough waters back in 1798 and had expressed the agony that ensued when “madame bad luck took a passage” on one’s vessels.70 For May and Askin, the financial losses went beyond damaged ships and included human property never to be recovered. One of May’s sailors was an enslaved man, whose death, May feared, would have a disastrous domino effect. “The loss of the Negro man,” May confided to Askin, “will probably be the cause of my losing the negro woman, who ever since the misfortune happened, has been delirious and is now very ill, in bed.” May reached out to his friend for help in the form of a slave order, writing: “Being now deprived of two of the best servants, in this country, my sittuation [sic] is very distressing, unless you will condescend to let your Boy George, remain with me until I can have time to look about for a servant, his Mother is very anxious to have him stay with her, & says it will be the only comfort she has in this world now she has lost her Husband, to have her son with her.”71
The tragedy of the shipwrecked Harlequin unveils an extraordinary, if blurry, picture of an enslaved family’s circumstances in early American Detroit. James May owned the black father and mother of this family, while John Askin owned the couple’s son, George. Although they lived in the same town, this family was physically separated. George’s parents did not have the luxury of raising and caring for him. George’s mother, a domestic servant in Askin’s home, was crushed by the loss of a loved one at sea. This was a feeling she would have shared with other women attached to unfree men who plied the dangerous lakes not by choice and sometimes lost limb or life in the process. A man owned by William Macomb had injured a foot jumping between two vessels, a sloop and a canoe. John Askin’s bondsman, Toon, had died at sea while working Askin’s trading fleet. Other enslaved men had died in shipwrecks, clung to trees rooted in bare rock along the storm-swept lakeshores, and frozen to death while delivering letters in the harsh northern winter weather.72
The wife of James May’s drowned sailor, named either Jenny or Chl
oe (May does not take the time to specify which of his enslaved women he means), was valuable enough to her owner in a town where slave labor was a sought-after commodity that she had a built-in bargaining chip. James May was willing to buy the mother’s son to assuage her pain, cut short her mourning, and get her promptly back to work. It is notable that this black family’s crisis dominates May’s letter to Askin rather than May’s own familial loss, the death of his brother Joseph. May revealed to Askin that he could not promise “Money down” on the black boy, but would “endeavor to give you the worth of him some way or other.” But despite his feelings of camaraderie with May, business was business. Askin did not make the sale, preferring instead to keep little George among his own property holdings.73
John Askin had been living well since the war but was nevertheless anxious about his financial status. He watched the roller-coastering price of animal furs as beaver became scarce, values fell, prices rose slightly (for deer skins but not the more plentiful raccoon skins), and fell again.74 He chafed at the American government’s imposition of duties on trade goods. By 1800, Askin was carrying uncomfortable debts and bemoaning the commercial opportunities in Detroit, woefully penning in his letters: “this Country is Over-done” and “Ruin, Detroit is not far from you.”75 Discouraged, he shifted into semi-retirement and contemplated a move that would mean leaving behind his Detroit landholdings.
James May was not so pessimistic, even after the wreck of his ship Harlequin. He doubled down in Detroit, identifying with the fledgling American nationality that John Askin was loath to embrace. May became a justice of the common pleas court of the Northwest Territory and in 1801 accepted an appointment as Wayne County’s militia captain. A forward thinker, he obtained a ferry license to transport passengers across the Detroit River—the newly established border between the United States and Canada. He also kept the accounts of Detroit’s only printer and continued to trade in furs and goods.76 May did well in those turbulent years when soldiers, territorial appointees, and incoming settlers from New England transformed Detroit into an American-run place, at least, by all outward appearances. His granddaughter recalled that the family sipped from “solid silver wine cups.” May himself remembered Detroit’s early American years as a grand string of parties. “The citizens all lived like one family,” he fondly reminisced. “They had assemblies for dancing and social intercourse, and the ladies never went without their silks. As a rule assemblies were once a week, and sometimes once a fortnight. Dining parties were frequent, and they drank their wine freely.”77 It would have been black women like Jenny or Chloe who dressed white ladies in rustling silks, tended to guests at these balls, and laundered linens after scrubbing dance hall floors. And while enslaved women lived in close quarters with their owners in what was a densely packed urban environment, they may have differed with May’s portrayal of Detroit residents as one big, festive family.
