by John Bailey
Praise for The Lost German Slave Girl:
“Bailey brings a lawyer’s eye to the court records and creates a courtroom drama from the raw data. … He deals deftly with his often-inscrutable heroine. … Bailey is a glib and readable writer, and he offers a page-turner of a story.
—The Times-Picayune (New Orleans)
“Bailey limns in engrossing detail the complex investigations, strategies and legal arguments.”
— The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“John Bailey tells her engrossing story … with polish and verve, weaving history and mystery neatly together. Along the way, he gives readers a thorough tour of early New Orleans, where raffishness and aristocracy coexisted by mutually ignoring each other. … He has crafted a compelling tale of one woman’s complexlife story and … given readers a revealing look at one of the darker periods of American history.”
— The Miami Herald
“The Lost German Slave Girl is a marvelous page-turner with unique and fascinating insights into the institution of slavery in the pre-Civil War South intertwined with a heartbreaking story of misfortune.”
—Winston Groom, author of Forrest Gump and 1942
“Bailey … does a fine job of resurrecting the ambience and cultural atmosphere of New Orleans in the 1840s. … An eye-opener to the racism that’s so deeply embedded in the fabric of American society.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“[Bailey] weaves a deft and captivating plot with astonishing detail culled from historical and archival records. Highly recommended.”
— Library Journal
“Bailey … relishes telling this remarkable story as the courtroom drama it was, peppering it with fascinating tidbits of Louisiana history and elegant explanations of the law. He fleshes out every angle, every character, and pinpoints the legal pitfalls and triumphs with equal zeal.”
— Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“An immensely readable courtroom drama for readers who like their history to be serious, but also compelling and entertaining.”
— Book News
“Bailey adroitly uses transcripts and newspaper coverage of this case … to illustrate the ironies and idiocies of slavery from a unique perspective.” —NJ.com “Fascinating history … an exhaustive account … His tale reads like a whodunit mystery novel, full of courtroom drama, twists and turns, shocking surprises, and disappointment. Be warned: this book may be impossible to put down until Sally’s fate is revealed. A”
— On-the-Town
“A rare achievement—a book that is both important and spellbinding. Important because John Bailey takes us another step closer to the mad and evil heart of slavery, which twisted every household, every courtroom and every community it got hold of. Spellbinding because Bailey re-creates a young nation, a bawdy city and a stirring struggle for a young girl’s freedom with grace and page-turning drive.” —David Von Drehle, author of Triangle: The Fire that Changed America
“[This] marvelously vivid account of the legal maneuverings, of the successive court trials where Sally’s fortunes continually seesawed, reads like a splendid thriller. … An accomplished writer, [Bailey] provides engaging pen-sketches of the chaos, exhilaration, and many horrors of life in New Orleans. … What Bailey himself makes of all this is left—in the manner of the best thriller writers—until the very last page.”
— The Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum
“John Bailey’s stupendous book, based on a true story … is a splendid reconstruction.… It’s a wonderful read.”
— Australian Country Style
“A living, breathing morality tale delivering timeless messages about freedom, truth, and justice … One person is carefully spared critical exposure, however— the woman at the human heart of this story, Salomé-or-Sally. That’s until the last page of the book. Then Bailey finally breaks the suspense, delivering his own unforgettable verdict.”
— Australian
THE LOST GERMAN SLAVE GIRL
Also by John Bailey
The White Divers of Broome: The True Story of a Fatal Experiment
THE LOST GERMAN SLAVE GIRL
* * *
The extraordinary true story of Sally Miller and her fight for freedom in Old New Orleans
* * *
JOHN BAILEY
Copyright © 2003 by John Bailey
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
First published in 2003 in Australia by
Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited, Sydney, Australia
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, John, 1944 Dec. 15-
The lost German slave girl: the extraordinary true story of the slave Sally Miller and her fight for freedom / John Bailey.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.).
ISBN-10: 0-8021-4229-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-4229-0
1. Mèiler, Salomâ, b. ca. 1809. 2. Mèiler, Salomâ, b. ca. 1809—Trials, litigation, etc. 3. Slaves—Louisiana—New Orleans—Biography. 4. Women, White—Louisiana— New Orleans—Biography. 5. German Americans—Louisiana—New Orleans— Biography. 6. Trials—Louisiana—New Orleans. 7. Slaves—Emancipation— Louisiana—New Orleans. 8. Slavery—Social aspects—Louisiana—New Orleans— History—19th century. 9. New Orleans (La.)—Race relations. 10. New Orleans
(La.)—Biography. I. Title.
F379.N553M553 2004
305.8’9687295’076335—dc22
2004050264
Front cover image: The Match Girl, 1834 (oil on canvas) by George Whiting Flagg (1816-97). Reproduced with the permission of The New York Historical Society and The Bridgeman Art Library.
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
07 08 09 10 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
To Camryn
CONTENTS
Author’s Note
1 Mary Miller
2 The Children of Slaves
3 The Year Without Summer
4 New Orleans
5 Sally Miller
6 John Fitz Miller
7 Bridget Wilson
8 Salomé Müller
9 The First District Judicial Court of New Orleans
10 The Defense
11 Judgment
12 The Appeal
13 A Presumption in Favor of Liberty
14 The Children of Salomé Müller
15 Polly Moore
16 Nullity
17 The Woman Who Remembered Nothing
Endnotes
AUTHOR’S NOTE
… the slave is bound to risk his safety in the service of his master, cannot decline any service, still less leave the service, but is wholly absolutely, and unreservedly under the absolute control, nay caprice of his master.
Judge Albert Duffel of Louisiana, 18601
Every book has its moment of conception.
For this book, it occurred in the quiet corner of a law library on a university campus in Louisiana. I was undertaking research on the laws of American slavery. My plan was to write a modes
t volume explaining in nonlegalistic terms the petty regulations and day-to-day controls on slaves in the days before the Civil War (1861–65). I hoped to answer the question of whether slaves were without rights or legal protections. For example, were there any limits to the ferocity of discipline? Could slaves be murdered at will by their masters? Could slave men be castrated to make them more docile? Could women be raped with impunity? Did masters have an untrammeled right to sell children apart from their mother? Were slaves allowed to marry whomever they liked? In fact, did slave marriage exist at all? Could slaves save money and buy themselves into freedom? If a white overseer fathered a child by a slave woman, did that child belong to the mother, the father, or the plantation owner? Was it a crime to teach slaves to read and write?
To a citizen of the twenty-first century these sound like bizarre questions, but not to the citizens of the slave-owning South. They were issues of constant and critical concern to ordinary people as they went about their daily business of owning other human beings. To my surprise I discovered that there were hundreds of laws and rules about slavery in the statute books. Legislators, lawyers, judges, and priests gave the regulation of slave life and the responsibilities of ownership close and detailed attention. I was even more surprised to discover that there were thousands of cases on slavery in the volumes of America’s law reports. I found judgments touching upon almost every conceivable aspect of slavery. Even litigation concerning a mortgage reveals much when the mortgaged property is a ten-year-old girl. The judgments told of blood-curdling brutality, iron discipline, and a judicial hardness of heart. But they also told of compassion, clemency, and a high regard for justice. It was a checkerboard of darkness and light. I read the decisions of judges who flexed the law to free slaves, and of those who bent the law to ensure that slaves could never be free. I read of cases where judges speedily dispatched slaves to the hanging tree, but I also read of judges who went to uncommon lengths to ensure that slaves received a fair trial—even in emotionally charged cases such as the rape of a white woman or the murder of a master.
My plan to write a book on slave law unraveled when, one day, as I struggled to bring some semblance of order to my unruly and ever-expanding manuscript, I opened a volume of the Louisiana law reports for 1845.2 On page 339 I met Sally Miller, the Lost German Slave Girl. I was immediately enthralled by her story. By the end of the day I had shoved my notes on lawyers, judges and politicians into my bag and, opening a fresh page in my diary, had begun to jot down ideas for an entirely different project—this one, on the saga of Sally Miller’s bid for freedom.
The story of the Lost German Slave Girl was undoubtedly one of the most extraordinary cases in slave litigation. When she was discovered in 1843 she was working in a squalid cabaret near the New Orleans waterfront, the property of one Louis Belmonti. A succession of German immigrants living in the city came forward to say that they knew her as Salomé Müller, a white child, born in the village of Langensoultzbach in the lower Rhine. They swore in court that her father was a shoemaker and recalled the time he had migrated with his family to the United States twenty-five years earlier. They told the judge that the last time Salomé had been seen, it was as darkness gathered on a day in April 1818 when she stood on a jetty on the edge of a swampy wilderness in St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana.
Litigation about the identity of Sally Miller ran in the Louisiana courts for years. What commenced as a petition for freedom developed into a trial about the honor of a wealthy Southern gentleman accused of the heinous misdeed of enslaving a helpless white girl. As claims and counterclaims were made, and mutual accusations of fraud, lies, and simpleminded gullibility were leveled, Sally Miller’s fate became a cause célèbre and was discussed at length by river men in the taverns, traders in the markets, idlers in the coffeehouses, and matrons in the parlors of the highborn. People strained for a glimpse of her whenever she walked abroad so that they too could pass judgment on whether African or German blood flowed in her veins.
For me, the appeal of writing about Sally Miller was that I could use her story to illustrate many of the issues I had been attempting to cover in my book on slave law—in particular, how judges decided issues according to principles of property when that property was human, and how it was possible for white-looking people to be regarded as slaves.
One difficulty of relating the tale of the Lost German Slave Girl is that controversy and dispute attended it from beginning to end. The warring sides disagreed about almost everything. Ultimately, the telling of any story depends on the storyteller: it is the writer who makes the choice about what to select, what to reject, and what to emphasize. The balance between truth and rhetoric is in his or her hands. The approach I have taken is to let both sides speak for themselves, as they did, vehemently and emotionally, a century and a half ago. In some instances I have created conversations and scenes, and have woven a sense of the times and the reality of slavery into the narrative. Where the court records are incomplete I have made assumptions about the progress of the litigation and the tactics of the parties; however, the story I relate is true in all its basic elements and the law is as accurate as I can make it.
Occasionally I use specialist or archaic terms. The meaning of most of these terms is obvious but some, like chameleons, take their sense from their uniquely Creole surroundings.
The term Creole itself is an example—it hasn’t only altered its meaning over time, it has branched into submeanings that fight with the original. Initially it meant a person of European parentage born in a Spanish or French colony, and in Louisiana, it generally came to mean the French living there prior to its acquisition by the United States in 1803. Over the years, the term extended to the slaves owned by the Creoles, to their music, their cooking, their dialect, and so on. Nowadays it means anything derived from that unique medley of French, Spanish, and African American cultures that today makes a visit to Louisiana such a heady experience. During the period I am writing about (1818–50), the group most likely to rejoice in being called Creole were members of the French slavocracy, and, in a pinch, they might have tolerated the word being used (as an adjective) to describe their mulatto children, or the horses they raced, or the cattle they raised, or the food they ate. Creoles at that time were mostly wealthy, cultured, and (according to the Americans) exceedingly arrogant.
There was no love lost between the Americans and the Creoles. According to the Creoles, the Américains were typically slick, grasping merchants or Yankee bankers interested in nothing more than money. In return, the Americans called the Creoles, Johnny Crapaud. Both looked down upon the noisy, drunken, quarrelsome keelboat and flatboat men who sailed down the Mississippi River—these were called Kaintocks, although they were just as likely to come from Tennessee, Mississippi, or Ohio, as Kentucky.
The uninitiated sometimes use the word Creole, when they really mean Cajun. Cajuns are also of French origin. The British hounded them out of Nova Scotia (then called Acadie) in the 1750s because of their unreliable loyalty to the Crown—they were, after all, French, and Catholic to boot. Many eventually settled in Louisiana along a stretch of the Mississippi afterward called the Acadian Coast and in the bayou country of the western parishes. They became famous for their spicy food and toe-tapping music.
The French influence remains strong in New Orleans, despite the passing of the years. Faubourg, the French word for “suburb,” is still used, and the most famous faubourg in New Orleans is the Vieux Carré, literally “Old Square.” It is now known as the French Quarter, although most of the much-admired colonial architecture is in fact Spanish. During the decades of my story the area was sometimes known as the Vieux Carré and sometimes as the French Quarter, and I use both terms interchangeably.
A bayou (the Choctaw Indian word for “creek”) is a watercourse linking a river, lake, or swamp. There are thousands of bayous in lowlying Louisiana, and many fit the popular image of eerie, slow-moving, dark waters, hemmed in by overhanging trees and infested wit
h alligators. Some bayous in the northern parishes of Louisiana lack the Spanish moss (a trailing, gray-colored plant of the pineapple family) and actually flow quite quickly.
A tignon is a bandana-like headscarf of brightly colored cotton. The story goes that a Spanish governor, dismayed at the unsettling allure of the free ladies of color, ordered that they keep their hair covered at all times. Taking his edict as a compliment, the ladies continued to wear the tignon, long after the law had lapsed.
A picayune was a small Spanish coin. One New Orleans newspaper was called the Daily Picayune, as a reminder of its price.
In writing this book, the following people gave me technical assistance, advice, and succor (but only my partner, Anne, all three): Dunya Bouchi, Marie E. Windell, Jim Hart, Geraldine Moore, Garry Moore, Horst Thiele, Elizabeth Maddox, Heinrich Thiele, Matthias Schwerendt, Katrin Dahme, David Allan, Elaine Lindsay, Marele Day, Karen Penning, Robyn Flemming, Noelene Tabart, and Anne Mullin. Thank you, and especially Tom Gilliatt of Pan Macmillan, whose editorial assistance and calm advice guided me through many a crisis.
John Bailey
Mullumbimby, 2003
A white person of unmixed blood cannot be a slave. … [But] a person apparently white may, nevertheless, have some African taint… sufficient to doom to slavery.
Chief Justice Robinson of Kentucky, 18353
ONE
MARY MILLER
The elevation of the white race, and the happiness of the slave, vitally depend upon maintaining the ascendancy of one and the submission of the other.
Chief Justice Watkins of the Arkansas Supreme Court, 18544
This much we know: that on a bright, spring morning in 1843, Madame Carl Rouff left her timber-framed house in Lafayette to travel across New Orleans to visit a friend who lived in the Faubourg Marigny. It was a distance of four miles, following the bend of the Mississippi as it turned abruptly on itself in its winding course to the Gulf. She caught the mule-driven omnibus along Tchoupitoulas Street to the city, a journey of an hour and a quarter, swaying gently as she watched the unloading of the keelboats, skiffs, and packets anchored alongside the levee. She had allowed herself plenty of time, so it was without urgency that she alighted and crossed the expanse of Canal Street to enter the Vieux Carré. She had only a vague idea of how the streets fit together in the narrow grid at the back of the Place d’Armes, so doggedly she followed Bourbon Street, hoping eventually to run into Esplanade Avenue, which would guide her to her destination.