Residents of “Wisconsin” in the Revolutionary War with Mary Elise Antoine

Join Mary Antoine for this special America 250 event on the Wisconsin residents who fought in the Revolutionary War

Michel Charles de Langlade and his family had been living at la Baye for less than ten years when British soldiers and colonists exchanged musket fire on Lexington green. Within a year, Michel and the Native nations of the western Great Lakes-upper Mississippi region, with whom he and other Canadians traded, were drawn into the conflict to determine whether Great Britain’s North American colonies would gain independence from the rule of Parliament and King George.

From the Continental Army’s invasion of Canada in 1775 to Great Britain’s plan in 1780 to capture St. Louis and regain the Illinois County, residents of what is now Wisconsin participated in the Thirteen Colonies’ war for independence.

Mary Elise Antoine will explain how Canadians and Native people of the western Great Lakes-upper Mississippi region were part of the American Revolution, who participated and why they fought, the results of the battles in which they fought, and the effect of the war in what is now Wisconsin.

Mary Elise Antoine, author of Enslaved, Indentured, Free: Five Black Women on the Upper Mississippi, 1800-1850 and The War of 1812 in Wisconsin: The Battle for Prairie du Chien, is the former curator of Villa Louis. Her research focuses on the material culture and mix and confrontation of cultures on the upper Mississippi prior to Wisconsin statehood.