Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Bondage and Freedom in the City of the Straits

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.