The Dawn of Detroit

Starred review from August 7, 2017
Miles (Tales from the Haunted South), professor of history at the University of Michigan, illuminates an “alternative origin story” of this much-studied city, which was “born of the forced captivity of indigenous and African people.” Detroit prospered from trade in animal skins rather than plantation agriculture, but it was black men who played a dominant role in the transportation of these furs across New France; meanwhile, indigenous women became a sexual resource plundered by French colonists. Miles gracefully recounts Detroit’s first century as it passed from French to British rule. The transition so antagonized local indigenes that in 1763 the Ottawa leader Pontiac launched a rebellion that took the British colonial military months to suppress. Miles emphasizes that even had the Ottawa succeeded, the situation of Detroit’s 1,500 slaves might not have improved. Neither the British nor the fledgling U.S. brought them release, and as nonplantation states turned against chattel slavery, Detroit’s whites and some Native American inhabitants continued to engage in the domestic slave trade. Despite slowly expanding rights, people of color could hope at best for a “hard-won and consistently compromised freedom.” Miles places Detroit’s history in a more expansive frame than its 20th-century boom and decline, emphasizing racial inequalities far in advance of the Great Migration.

Starred review from August 1, 2017

Historian Miles (Tales from the Haunted South) has written a book that will reorient the focus of early slavery in North America Westward to include Detroit as central to any understanding of the tangled relations of French, English, Euro-Americans, Indians, and Africans on the frontier from the 18th to early 19th century. She maintains that slavery was integral to the making of Detroit, as whites relied on enslaved blacks and Native Americans to sustain the city's fur trade and commercial nexus, protect settlements during war, and work nearby lands as settlers expanded their reach in the region. All the while, enslaved blacks resisted their bondage, forging new identities and alliances as they moved or fled back and forth from Detroit to British Canada. Detroit further embodied the contradictions of a nation professing liberty but sanctioning slavery, even where it supposedly was prohibited, as in Michigan under the Northwest Ordinance. Miles concludes that recognizing Detroit as a place of "theft" of human bodies and land is part of a long, sustained history of exploitation that helps define the character of the city to this day. VERDICT A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2017

Historian Miles (Tales from the Haunted South) has written a book that will reorient the focus of early slavery in North America Westward to include Detroit as central to any understanding of the tangled relations of French, English, Euro-Americans, Indians, and Africans on the frontier from the 18th to early 19th century. She maintains that slavery was integral to the making of Detroit, as whites relied on enslaved blacks and Native Americans to sustain the city's fur trade and commercial nexus, protect settlements during war, and work nearby lands as settlers expanded their reach in the region. All the while, enslaved blacks resisted their bondage, forging new identities and alliances as they moved or fled back and forth from Detroit to British Canada. Detroit further embodied the contradictions of a nation professing liberty but sanctioning slavery, even where it supposedly was prohibited, as in Michigan under the Northwest Ordinance. Miles concludes that recognizing Detroit as a place of "theft" of human bodies and land is part of a long, sustained history of exploitation that helps define the character of the city to this day. VERDICT A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.--Randall M. Miller, St. Joseph's Univ., Philadelphia

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 15, 2017
A history of the Michigan metropolis as a center of the Northern slave trade. "We tend to associate slavery with cotton in the commercial crop heyday of the southern 'cotton kingdom, '" writes MacArthur Fellow Miles (American Culture/Univ. of Michigan; The Cherokee Rose, 2015, etc.), "but in the northern interior space, slavery was yoked to the fur industry." In this connection, slavery enfolded Native Americans, putting individuals in thrall and binding communities in a network of trade obligations. When recently ascendant Americans imposed the Treaty of Detroit in 1807, they cleared several such well-entrenched communities both to create military defenses and to enhance the "processes of surveillance and recapture for American slaveholders" whose property--in this case African-Americans--tended to disappear into Native realms before the advent of the Underground Railroad. African-Americans were also bought and sold in Detroit, Miles writes, though this story is little known and unrecorded by any memorial. Whether those African-Americans were in personal service or worked as trappers or freighters, whether they were claimed by French Canadians, British, or American owners, they were just as unfree as if in New Orleans. Drawing on archival records and a thin scholarly literature, Miles pieces together a story in which African-Americans were used "like railroad cars in a pre-industrial transit system that connected sellers, buyers, and goods." At times, the narrative takes turns that push it away from general readers into the hands of postmodern-inclined academics: "There is perhaps one space in the American-Canadian borderlands in which a radical alterity to colonial and racialized complexity existed." But for the most part, the author's account is accessible to anyone with an interest in local history as well as the larger history of world systems in the time of the Seven Years War and beyond. A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.

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Starred review from September 1, 2017
Miles' account of the founding and rise of Detroit is an outstanding contribution that seeks to integrate the entirety of U.S. history, admirable and ugly, to offer a more holistic understanding of the country. Recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation genius grant and decorated cross-disciplinary professor at the University of Michigan, Miles presents the reality of slavery's foundational role in the City of the Straits. Northern cities, she argues, do not merit their reputations as safe havens for slaves fleeing the south. Native Americans and African Americans were forced to provide essential skills, namely hunting ability and transport labor, in the animal-pelt-driven economy that allowed Euro-Americans to grow roots in Detroit. Miles sets a standard for thoroughness. With scant historical documentation available, she details personal accounts of the lives of the unfree and the political ideologies and actions that affected them. Major events and historical figures from 1760 to 1815 are examined in relation to their consequences for Detroit's enslaved in developments including Pontiac's siege, the American Revolution, the great fire of 1805, the Michigan Territorial Court, black militiamen in the War of 1812, and the lives of Peter and Hannah Denison and their daughter, Elizabeth.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)