Slavery in Detroit revolved around the fur trade. “Trading in the pelts of beavers and trading in the bodies of persons became contiguous endeavors in Detroit,” Miles writes, “forming an intersecting market in skins that takes on the cast of the macabre.” Some slaveholder-merchants also stole territories from Native people. Miles probes this “intertwined theft” of bodies and land.

Image

She presents African-American and Native American histories as “interrelated rather than separate streams of experience,” and explores the connections as well as the conflicts between these groups.

Miles confronts a dilemma in her effort to illuminate the lives of Detroit’s enslaved people. Their own words are “nearly nonexistent.” The archives hold no cache of interviews with ex-slaves from Michigan. So Miles has relied on the wills, letters and account ledgers of slaveholders. The result is an “oftentimes broken account of important events that stitches together historical interpretation, context and causes, while patching in intuitive descriptions of people moving through a fraught place.” Miles’s use of “intuitive descriptions” can seem overly speculative in a few instances. But on the whole, her book powerfully reconstructs the experiences of Detroit’s slaves. The dearth of archival sources makes her achievement all the more impressive.

Miles tells the story of Ann Wyley, an enslaved woman of African descent. In 1774, Wyley, together with a French Canadian servant, stole furs from Wyley’s owners. Wyley and her accomplice were both convicted in 1776 and sentenced to death. But the justice of the peace could find no willing executioners for the Frenchman, and so he offered Wyley a grisly deal: Wyley would play the part of hangwoman in exchange for her own life — and, according to one source Miles consulted, her freedom as well. Wyley carried out the deed months before the new nation declared its independence.

During the transition from British to American control, Detroit seemed a “mind-boggling morass of murky rules.” The Northwest Ordinance, which stated that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude” shall exist in the territory, was adopted in 1787 but did not take effect until 1796 — with the American occupation. By that point, Detroit’s enslaved population had reached a peak of 298 people. Slaveholders insisted that the ordinance applied only to incoming residents. Furthermore, the Jay Treaty protected British property rights in Michigan and permitted the continued possession of slaves. Yet the Northwest Ordinance could embolden those in bondage. They escaped to Canada — though Miles shows that Canada was not always a bastion of liberty — and some even sued for their freedom.