On Friday, July 10, 1840, William Maxwell walked into H. J. Morrison’s store at the southeast corner of Main and Second Streets in Platteville, Wisconsin Territory, and purchased a pair of pants and a bar of soap. Maxwell, a Black man, worked as a lead miner at one of Platteville’s mining ranges. He was one of thousands of lead miners working in the upper Mississippi River valley’s lead region, which encompasses modern-day southwest Wisconsin, northwest Illinois, and northeast Iowa. Maxwell’s origins are unknown, but he must have had a connection with John H. Rountree, an influential white Platteville businessman, for Maxwell was living with the Rountree family that summer. In his spare time, Maxwell prospected for lead on Rountree’s property west of town. If he discovered a vein of lead there, he could—as a free man—apply to Rountree to lease the land in order to start his own lead ore range and go into business for himself.1
Five blocks west of Morrison’s store, at the northwest corner of Main and Chestnut Streets, two Black girls, each around ten years old, lived at the house of James Mitchell, a white Methodist deacon. Alice and the other girl, whose name is not known, were illegally enslaved by Mitchell, though this was not widely known in Platteville. The records of an 1840 court case, in which Mitchell sued for $300 “indebted unto him,” reveal that the two girls were made to labor for him in the lead industry and that he collected their pay. James forced “his servants,” as he called them during the court case, to work at Platteville’s Coates & Vineyard lead smelting furnace, in close proximity to a roaring fire and hot molten lead.2 In addition, the two girls were made to help his wife, Lititia, with their three children, all under five. A boarder at the Mitchells’ house during this time remembered that James “used [the girls] hardly” and “that they frequently (or usually) had to sleep on the floor or hearth with nothing except some old garments to put under them or cover them, and that they never went to school or Sunday school, nor meeting, unless to take care of the child for Mrs. M[itchell].” Henry Christopher, a Black teenager listed in the census records as “free,” also lived in the household.3
Free, indentured, and enslaved Black individuals had been working in the region’s lead industry since the beginning of what has come to be known as the lead era, stretching from the 1820s to the 1840s. In 1822, Colonel James Johnson brought eight men, four of whom were Black, to work his lead ranges near Galena, Illinois. Enslaving or forcibly indenturing people in the lead region was in direct violation of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory.4 One prominent enslaver was Henry Dodge, future governor of Wisconsin Territory, who compelled five people he enslaved to move with him from Missouri to Wisconsin in 1827 and forced them to work at his lead smelting furnace near Dodgeville. Though he promised to emancipate them after a few years of work, he did not officially manumit them until eleven years had passed, in April 1838, two years after he became governor of Wisconsin Territory.5 While these five enslaved people were listed by their first names on their manumission papers, they had, according to other documents, assumed surnames—going by the names of Thomas Dodge, James Gardner, Leah Jones, Joseph Dublin, and John Tobias Dodge—even before gaining their freedom.6 That Henry Dodge listed them only by first name suggests a fundamental difference in how he viewed them and how they may have viewed themselves.
Whether by coincidence or by design, Governor Dodge manumitted these five individuals before the 1838–1839 session of the territorial legislature, during which a more robust antislavery law was passed. Once this law went into effect, anyone caught forcing an individual “to service against his will” faced either a maximum of two years in a county jail or a maximum fine of $1,000.7
By 1840, at least eighteen people still remained illegally enslaved in the southwest Wisconsin counties of Crawford, Grant, and Iowa. Potosi resident Mary Boardman noted This public sentiment, however, was on the verge of being challenged. Through the careful documentation of enslaved individuals by census takers, antislavery agitation by an abolitionist from England, and civil lawsuits brought by Black plaintiffs to recover their property, not only was slavery challenged and made more socially unacceptable in the lead region during this era but important progress was also made toward racial equality under the law.
