He advocated: Phillips P. Moulton, ed., The Journal and Major Essays of John Woolman (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1989).
many Quakers had concluded: Kendi, Stamped, 88; Brian Temple, Philadelphia Quakers and the Antislavery Movement (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014).
“Who can now find”: Benjamin Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries (Boston: Kneeland, 1755), 9.
“The number of purely”: Ibid., 10.
1754–1759: Blackness and Indigeneity
dispossession of millions: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 2.
“British were the conquerors”: Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), chap. 5, esp. 256.
to justify taking their land: For a visualization, see Claudio Saunt’s interactive map of Indigenous land loss over time: “Invasion of America,” usg.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=eb6ca76e008543a89349ff2517db47e6.
central characters: Jean O’Brien, Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians Out of Existence in New England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), xiv.
savagery and civilization: Michael Witgen, An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New World Shaped Early North America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 38.
the combined power: Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 99.
Georgia’s enslaved population: Betty Wood, “Slavery in Colonial Georgia,” New Georgia Encyclopedia, June 3, 2019, www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/slavery-colonial-georgia.
“To live in Virginia”: “Reverend Peter Fontaine’s Defense of Slavery in Virginia” (1757), Africans in America, www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part2/2h6t.html.
Paul Cuffe: Lamont D. Thomas, Rise to Be a People: A Biography of Paul Cuffe (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 3–9.
1759–1764: One Black Boy
“a Negroe boy”: John Porteous Letter Book, 1767–1769, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. The brackets in this quotation indicate the uncertainty about this officer’s last name, which is difficult to decipher in the record. This reference to the African American boy in Porteous’s letter book is discussed briefly in Tiya Miles, The Dawn of Detroit: A Chronicle of Slavery and Freedom in the City of the Straits (New York: New Press, 2017), 35.
defenders of the land: I am borrowing the term defenders from Lisa Brooks, who consistently uses it instead of the more commonplace and ideologically laden warriors to describe Native men and women during King Philip’s War. See Lisa Brooks, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018). See also Jon William Parmenter, “Pontiac’s War: Forging New Links in the Anglo-Iroquois Covenant Chain, 1758–1766,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 4 (1997): 617–54, 627–29. For more on Pontiac’s War, especially regarding the spiritual aspects of Native resistance and Neolin’s role, see Gregory Evans Dowd, War Under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 3, 86, 90. For a new analysis of gender and the representation of women in histories of Pontiac’s War, see Karen L. Marrero, Detroit’s Hidden Channels: The Power of French-Indigenous Families in the Eighteenth Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2020), chap. 6.
a certain “Negroe boy”: Richard Middleton, Pontiac’s War: Its Causes, Course, and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2007), 72.
visible status symbol: Pontiac sought a Black servant as a status symbol decades before the most prominent Native American slaveholders in the South—the Cherokees and Choctaws—installed Black servants in their homes and adopted plantation agriculture in part to display “civilizational” status and wealth. For more on Black slavery in southern Indian nations, see Celia Naylor, African Cherokees in Indian Territory (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008); Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (2005; reprint, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010); and Christina Snyder, Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).
approximately sixty-five others: Donna Valley Russell, ed., Michigan Censuses 1710–1830: Under the French, British, and Americans (Detroit: Detroit Society for Genealogical Research, 1982), 121. The 1762 British census of Detroit counted five enslaved people with no designation of race. The 1865 census did not include numbers for enslaved people.
network of merchant elites: Norman McRae, “Blacks in Detroit, 1736–1833: The Search for Freedom and Community and Its Implications for Educators” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1982), 55; James Sterling Letter Book, 1761–1765, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Miles, Dawn of Detroit, 30–31; Marrero, Detroit’s Hidden Channels, 150–55.
state prison in Jackson: “Jackson: Prison System,” Michigan History, michiganhistory.leadr.msu.edu/jackson-an-introduction/jackson-prisonsystem; Michigan State Industries, “History of Michigan Industries,” www.michigan.gov/msi/0,9277,7-383-89195---,00.html; “Michigan’s Prison Museum at the State Prison of Southern Michigan,” Cell Block 7, www.cellblock7.org/; Howard B. Gill, “The Prison Labor Problem,” American Academy of Political and Social Science 157, no. 1 (1931): 83–101, 84, 93; Blake McKelvey, “Prison Labor Problem: 1875–1900,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 25, no. 2 (1934): 254–70.
largest incarcerated group: “Michigan Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative, www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/MI.html (based on 2010 data).
Racialized sentencing policies: Melanca Clark, “How Michigan Can Reduce Its Prison Population,” Detroit Free Press, August 31, 2018. Clark’s figures are supported by “Michigan Profile,” Prison Policy Initiative.
expansion of convict labor: Heather Thompson and Matthew Lassiter to author, July 17 and August 3, 2019; Heather Ann Thompson, “Unmaking the Motor City in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” Journal of Law and Society 15 (2013): 41–61, esp. 47, 48, 49, 50 (“vicious cycle”), 54, 55; and Elizabeth Hinton, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 191–202.