Abstract: Established on Menominee homelands in Green Bay, Cadle Mission (1829–41) was one of dozens of schools that aimed to assimilate Native American children in the early nineteenth century. Officials hoped Protestant missions would Americanize the Upper Midwest, turning Native people toward the United States and away from their fur-trading allies. Michigan’s Territorial Council empowered its missionaries with an 1827 bill allowing them to bind Native children to their schools as indentured servants. This legislation possesses few parallels in the history of Native schooling, but it underscores the centrality of racialized labor control to the assimilatory project. That system faced a severe test in December 1833, when Richard F. Cadle ordered the whipping of eleven boys boarding at his mission. Cadle justified this “cruel and unusual punishment” on the grounds of the children’s supposed indentured status, but Menominee children and parents rejected his authority. Although the school was backed by U.S. officials in Green Bay, the incident culminated in its closure, demonstrating that the Menominees and their mixed-ancestry allies retained influence in the region longer than historians have previously recognized. It also shows that children were central to struggles between the United States and Native nations during the removal era.
Abstract: South Carolina’s colonizers exploited the labor and knowledge of enslaved Africans to raise cattle, clear forests, drain swamps, and plant rice. But historians have overlooked one key element in that Lowcountry saga. Black workers also created numerous navigable canals, or “cuts,” to enable safe, rapid river transportation. These narrow connecting channels made possible six shipping corridors linking remote plantations to the emerging port of Charleston. This transport network moved the colony beyond subsistence, enabling a profitable export economy. To construct these cuts, planners coopted muddy “haulovers” long used by Indigenous travelers dragging dugout canoes between adjacent rivers. After 1690, when officials ordered the excavation of channels to link meandering Lowcountry streams, unfree work crews began to convert Indigenous portage footpaths into navigable transit routes. By 1720, isolated gangs of conscripted Black workers had shaped a viable inland transport network, mapped here for the first time. As planters moved heavy cargoes to market by boat without having to risk longer, more dangerous ocean-facing routes, their profits rose and additional cuts were ordered. But savvy Africans used these waterways to escape to Spanish Florida, and in 1739 harsh conditions on one Stono River public works project sparked the largest rebellion of enslaved people in colonial North America.
Abstract: Using legal records written by officials of the Spanish and British Empires, this article examines the 1780 trial of Mary Glass, a free woman of color accused of murdering a young white indentured servant named Emilia Davis. Both Glass and Davis lived near Baton Rouge in the British colony of West Florida, which was invaded in February 1778 by an American raiding party that burned and looted the homes of loyalists. In the aftermath of the raid, Davis was placed in the home of Mary Glass, where she remained until her death in December 1779. By that time, Baton Rouge had been conquered by Spain, and the new Spanish commandant of the region began an investigation into Davis’s death in February 1780, an investigation that led to Glass’s trial, conviction, and execution. Comprised of hundreds of documents in Spanish, French, and English, the records of the Glass trial reveal in harrowing detail the violence that Glass inflicted on Davis. Declaring that “Emilia was her slave and that she had a right to do with her as She pleased,” Glass not only emulated the behavior of white enslavers but invoked the language of the American Revolution to justify her actions.
Abstract: In the summer of 1766, a group of Wappinger and Mohican diplomats sailed to London. There, they petitioned the crown to support their land claims against some of New York's wealthiest landlords, who had amassed vast estates on the basis of fraudulent Native titles. These Native diplomats crafted a powerful narrative about their place in the British Empire and had a real impact on British imperial policymakers. The Wappingers' and Mohicans' trip was financed by settlers, who had enlisted Indigenous support in their own contests with New York landlords. In the 1760s, some landlords intensified their approach to market-oriented agriculture, replacing customary lease terms with shorter leases and money rents in an effort to consolidate, rationalize, and "improve" their estates. Tenant farmers responded first with nonviolent resistance, and then with armed insurgency. Only by looking at the tactics and motivations of tenants and Native people side by side can we see the full stakes of this moment for both groups. Just as settlers deployed Native land claims to advance their interests, Native people used settlers' grievances as a potent political tool. At the same time, a shared vision of empire, as well as their own interests, united settlers and Native nations against New York landlords.
