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

by Tiya Miles

Overview

Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize 
Winner of the American Book Award 
Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award 
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize 
Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) 

Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize 
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize 
Finalist for the Cundill History Prize

A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection

“If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.”
—New York Times Book Review

“[Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.”
—Washington Post

“[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.”
—Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education

“A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.”
—Publisher Weekly (starred)

“A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.”
—Kirkus Reviews

From the MacArthur genius grant winner, a beautifully written and revelatory look at the slave origins of a major northern American city

Most Americans believe that slavery was a creature of the South, and that Northern states and territories provided stops on the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada. In this paradigm-shifting book, celebrated historian Tiya Miles reveals that slavery was at the heart of the Midwest’s iconic city: Detroit.

In this richly researched and eye-opening book, Miles has pieced together the experience of the unfree—both native and African American—in the frontier outpost of Detroit, a place wildly remote yet at the center of national and international conflict. Skillfully assembling fragments of a distant historical record, Miles introduces new historical figures and unearths struggles that remained hidden from view until now. The result is fascinating history, little explored and eloquently told, of the limits of freedom in early America, one that adds new layers of complexity to the story of a place that exerts a strong fascination in the media and among public intellectuals, artists, and activists.

A book that opens the door on a completely hidden past, The Dawn of Detroit is a powerful and elegantly written history, one that completely changes our understanding of slavery’s American legacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620974810
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	03/05/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	350,171
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Tiya Miles is the recipient of a 2011 MacArthur Foundation "genius grant," and is an award-winning historian and former chair of the Department of Afroamerican and African studies at the University of Michigan. She lives in Ann Arbor.

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Dawn of Detroit:
Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize 
Winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Legacy Award (Nonfiction) 
Winner of the American Book Award
Winner of the Merle Curti Social History Award 
Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize 
Finalist for the John Hope Franklin Prize 
Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize 
Longlisted for the Cundill History Prize
A New York Times Editor’s Choice selection
A Michigan Notable Book of 2018
A Booklist Editors’ Choice Title for 2017

“Beautifully written and rigorously researched. . . . Throughout this riveting text, personal and family stories illustrate and advance a narrative that rewrites our understanding of slavery in the making of the United States.”
—2018 Frederick Douglass Book Prize Jury

“If many Americans imagine slavery essentially as a system in which black men toiled on cotton plantations, Miles upends that stereotype several times over.”
—New York Times Book Review

“In her new, groundbreaking history. . . [Miles] has compiled documentation that does for Detroit what the Works Progress Administration and the Federal Writers’ Project slave narratives did for other regions, primarily the South.”
—The Washington Post

“[Tiya Miles] is among the best when it comes to blending artful storytelling with an unwavering sense of social justice.”
—Martha S. Jones in The Chronicle of Higher Education

“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.”
—Booklist (starred)

“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. A necessary work of powerful, probing scholarship.”
—Publisher Weekly (starred)

“A book likely to stand at the head of further research into the problem of Native and African-American slavery in the north country.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“In this exemplary history that shows how slavery made early Detroit, Professor Tiya Miles demonstrates that Malcolm X (whose activist father was lynched in Michigan) was right when he insisted that all of the United States is south of the Mason-Dixon Line. Out of careful research, supple prose, deeply humane generosity to her historical subjects, and a knack for uncovering gripping family narratives, Miles has crafted a work from which any reader can learn new things. There is no finer writer among historians than Tiya Miles.”
—Edward Baptist, professor, department of history, Cornell University, and author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism

“'There is currently no historical marker acknowledging slavery in Detroit— revealing that people were bought, sold, and held as property . . .' Tiya Miles tell us in her rich account, detailing Native American and African American slavery in that city and the surrounding countryside. The Dawn of Detroit is a brilliant telling of chattel bondage's long and twisted history and the evolution of race relations in the . . . City on the Straits.”
—Ira Berlin, Distinguished UniversityProfessor, University of Maryland, and author of Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America

“Extracting seemingly lost lives from sparse records to recover the humanity of people regarded as property, Tiya Miles exposes the tenacity of slavery and forced labor, both black and Indian, in multiethnic and multicultural Detroit during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is an often ugly—but also a revealing and surprising—story. She creates a pointillist account of a complicated borderland.”
—Richard White, Margaret Byrne Professor of American History, Stanford University, and author of The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815

“The Dawn of Detroit once again demonstrates that Tiya Miles is the rarest sort of historian: a brilliant and humane observer who can build an account of the terrifying difference of the past out of a series of observations that have the plain familiarity of family history.”
—Walter Johnson, Winthrop Professor of History, Harvard University, and author of Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market

Praise for Tiya Miles:
“[Tiya Miles] has reframed and reinterpreted the history of our diverse nation.”
—The MacArthur Foundation

Praise for Tiya Miles’s previous work:
“A meticulously researched and elegantly written book that is accessible to nonacademic readers as well as scholars.”
—Public Historian

“Display[s] pitch-perfect sensibility that weaves profound human empathy with piercing scholarly critique.”
—James F. Brooks, author of Captives and Cousins

“Imagery portrayed within each story. . . will keep readers on the edge of their seats in anticipation of the next sentence, waiting to hear how each narrative plays out.”
—Choice

From the Publisher

★ 08/07/2017
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. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 08/01/2017
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

Library Journal

2017-08-06
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.

Kirkus Reviews