The Lost German Slave Girl

by John Bailey

  The damning of Miller wasn’t an essential step in Sally Miller gaining her freedom. Sigur could have merely outlined the evidence in support of her German heritage, explained that Belmonti had purchased her from Miller, and left it at that. If Sigur had felt the necessity of explaining how Miller obtained her, he could have left open the possibility that Miller held Sally without realising she was freeborn, or that he had purchased her in good faith from another. Perhaps, behind it all, was the determination of Eva Schuber to blacken Miller’s name. To punish and humiliate him for stealing the childhood of her goddaughter. Or it may be that the tactic, the hope, was that Miller and Belmonti, horrified by the possibility of a public airing of their misdeeds, would settle out of court and acknowledge that she was a free white woman. It is possible that Belmonti may have been so cowered, but anyone who knew John Fitz Miller would have known he had never retreated from a fight in his life.

  Sigur’s petition had given her a new name. When Madame Carl rescued her she was Mary Miller. The Germans remembered her as Salomé Müller. Now she was Sally Miller. Why the change? It was, of course, the Americanization of “Salomé Müller.” Perhaps Salomé and her advisers, as they approached an American court, may have wanted to demonstrate loyalty to their adopted country by jettisoning a name so obviously foreign. Historians have frequently observed that of all the immigrant groups settling in the United States, the Germans were the least likely to remain sentimentally attached to the old country. They tended to avoid enclaves, they neglected national days, rarely held parades like the Irish and the Italians, and unlike the French and the Spanish had no hesitation in anglicizing their names. So she became Sally Miller—and the fact that she had the same surname as the man accused of taking her into slavery was dismissed as being of nothing more than an absurd coincidence.

  Though it would have been a large expense for an immigrant family, Francis and Eva Schuber could have attempted to buy Sally Miller from Belmonti. A slave in her late twenties, trained as a servant, healthy and capable of bearing children—she would have been worth five hundred dollars or more. Belmonti might well have thought he could have demanded extra from desperate relatives. Perhaps Eva could have raised the money by subscription among the German community, but would Belmonti have sold? Possibly not. Cable described Belmonti as the “wifeless keeper of a dram-shop,” and there are more than a few hints to suggest that Sally was Belmonti’s concubine. His behavior in harassing Eva Schuber for Sally’s return was suggestive of a jilted lover; however, something more substantial emerged when, during the trial to free Sally Miller, a slave broker, Mr. A. Piernas, gave testimony. Belmonti had become acquainted with Sally while she was Miller’s slave. According to Piernas, Belmonti engaged him to ask Miller if he was thinking of selling her. Sally then assisted in the negotiations by telling Miller’s mother that she knew a person who would be willing to purchase her. This was Belmonti, and the deal was then done.65

  But there was another, more cogent, reason why purchasing Sally Miller was no solution for Eva Schuber: the transfer of ownership wouldn’t have made Sally free. The result would simply have been that Eva would own her own goddaughter and, under the laws of Louisiana, it wouldn’t have been easy for Eva to release her.

  When Spain and France ruled Louisiana, there were few restrictions on manumission. The colonial administrators believed that if a master could promise his slaves eventual freedom as a reward for fidelity and service, they would be easier to control and less likely to rise in revolt. The very word “manumission” is derived from a ceremony that goes back to ancient Rome. A Roman wishing to free his slaves would hold them by the hand (manus) then release his grip, touch them with a rod on the cheek, and turn them in a circle, thus demonstrating to all those witnessing the event that his slaves were now free to go wherever they wanted. In Spanish and French Louisiana, men and women were liberated in this way to mark weddings or anniversaries in the master’s family. It was also a ceremony followed during religious services by dying masters who desired to make peace with God for the sin of owning slaves, and by men freeing their own children.

  In Spanish Louisiana, slaves could also purchase their own freedom. Remarkably, if a fair price couldn’t be agreed upon, slaves could ask the governor’s tribunal to have their price declared, and then work toward that amount by hiring themselves out at times when their owner didn’t require labor from them.

  This was the system the Americans inherited when they purchased Louisiana in 1803.66 It wasn’t to last. In a series of crimping amendments, legislators set their hearts against freeing slaves. In 1807 the right of slaves to petition for self-purchase was abolished. Under the new regime, if a master wanted to free his slaves, he had to demonstrate to a judge of the parish that they had behaved well over the preceding four years. Running away or any criminal act disentitled a slave for life. Further amendments followed. In 1830 all newly emancipated slaves had to leave the state within thirty days, and masters had to post a bond of one thousand dollars to make sure they did. Provisions intending to limit the number of young slaves being freed into the community were also passed. At one stage, no slave aged under thirty could be freed, except where they “had saved the life of his master or the master’s wife or one of his children.” Later this was amended so those slaves under thirty could be liberated if a court of the parish agreed.

  Driving this constant tinkering with the manumission laws was the fear of a color war, with blacks, free and slave, joining in a bloody massacre of the whites. To many white people in the South, the ideal society only had two racial categories: the master race and their slaves. The existence of a third class, freed persons of color, was seen as a bad example to slaves and contrary to nature, which intended all black people to be subordinate. If slavery was a positive good, as many believed, and black people were better off as slaves, those who feared a servile insurrection led by freed blacks asked why manumission was allowed. Surely it would be better to entirely stop masters from freeing their slaves. This view won out, and in March 1857, Louisiana, following a trend sweeping right across the South, passed a law totally prohibiting manumission. The ban operated retrospectively, sometimes with heartless results. A slave named Julienne and her children instituted their suit for freedom in April 1857; no matter that Julienne was relying on a promise of freedom made by her mistress in 1837, her petition was a month too late. An apologetic judge noted in his decision: “If it should hereafter become possible, the plaintiff will have a remedy. At the present she has none. The time for her to acquire freedom has not arrived.”67 Her time was to come five years later, when, in 1862, Union gunboats took New Orleans and Abraham Lincoln freed all slaves held in the Confederate states.

  In 1844, when Eva Schuber consulted Sigur, the state of the law was that if she purchased Sally Miller, and then wanted to free her, she would have to file a petition with a judge of the parish. He would then post her petition on the courthouse door for forty days. If someone objected, there would be a hearing to ensure that Sally had “behaved well at least for four years” and she could earn sufficient income to support herself. Even after satisfying the controlling examination of the state, there was more—she had to leave Louisiana forever, unless a police jury of the parish, by at least a three-fourths vote, decided that she had been well behaved for at least four years or had been involved in some exceptionally meritorious service for her master.

  This was hardly a satisfactory solution in Sally Miller’s case. Apart from the humiliation of being named on a notice posted on the courthouse door, there was no guarantee that she would be successful— after all, she was a runaway. All sorts of gawkers and opponents might turn up, John Fitz Miller included, arguing that she shouldn’t be freed, or if she was, that she shouldn’t be allowed to remain in the state.

  And then, after running that judicial gauntlet, if finally she was freed and allowed to remain in Louisiana, she wouldn’t become a white person or a citizen of the state. Her status would be that of a
free woman of color, with all the discriminatory accoutrements that entailed. Sigur’s petition was crafted to achieve something that could never be achieved by manumission: a judicial ruling that Sally Miller was white. By suing Belmonti for damages, Sigur hoped that the court would be forced to decide that she wasn’t a slave, was never a slave, and her detention was illegal. By such means, not only would Sally Miller be free, she would have been ruled by a court to be white.

  Next to her new name, Sally Miller marked the petition with a large, firm cross. It was a crime in Louisiana to teach slaves to read or write, so it would have been surprising if she had written her name in full. Indeed, so patchy was the state’s education system that more than half of the population was illiterate, whites included.

  It would be months before a court could rule on the petition and Sigur remained concerned about what might happen to Sally in the meantime. With Miller’s name about to be linked to the action, Sigur had no doubt that Miller, with his influence in the city, could easily pressure the police into seizing her, and even perhaps charging Francis and Eva Schuber with the crime of harboring a runaway slave. But Sigur had a solution and after watching Sally make her mark on the petition, he outlined it to her and Eva. On the same day that the petition was filed at the courthouse, Sally would present herself at the prison door, a hundred yards away. Sigur would then make an application with the sheriff for Sally to be released on a five-hundred-dollar bond, pending trial. Once the bond was set, Sally would no longer be a fugitive slave, a criminal charge would be unlikely, and anyone seizing her would be in breach of a court order.

  On January 24, 1844, Sigur’s not-so-simple plan was put into effect. Sally Miller, accompanied by Eva and Francis Schuber, presented herself at the calaboose, a gloomy, dank prison tucked at the side of the Cabildo on the Place d’Armes. At the same time, Sigur filed his petition for Sally’s freedom with Deputy Sheriff Lewis at the First District Court, located in the Presbytere. Sigur placed the bond documents on the counter. Sheriff Lewis left the bond where it was and picked up the petition. His eyebrows rose as he read the document. And what have Mr. Belmonti and Mr. Miller to say about this? he inquired.

  By the end of the day, Sally Miller hadn’t been released. Nor was she released the next day, or the day after that. Sigur was apologetic. He told Eva Schuber, who harassed him in his office each morning, that he couldn’t really say when she would be released. Things had become complicated.

  SIX

  JOHN FITZ MILLER

  The master may also use every art, device or stratagem to decoy the slave into his power…

  Justice Baldwin, United States Circuit Justice, 183368

  John Fitz Miller described the petition to free his ex-slave as the “darkest crisis of my life, coming unsought and unexpected.”

  It was unexpected because, although the amazing story of the German slave girl had been a topic of gossip in the city for weeks, no one was prepared to risk Miller’s legendary ill temper by mentioning the matter to him. Miller lived much of his time on his sugar plantation on the banks of Bayou Teche in Attakapas.* On his periodic visits to New Orleans he had failed to notice that there was a pause in the conversation when he joined his friends in the main bar at the St. Charles Hotel and that some of his old acquaintances seemed reserved when he spoke to them. In the end, it was left to his mother to tell him what seemingly everyone else knew. She had heard it from his ex-business partner, William Turner. A shocked Miller immediately confronted Turner and angrily accused him of spreading rumors about him. Turner shook his head sadly. Didn’t he know? How could he not know? There had even been a paragraph in the German-language newspaper, naming him. Only a day or two ago a petition for her freedom had been filed at court, and at this very moment she was under lock and key in the calaboose.

  The petition hadn’t been served on Miller because it was Belmonti, and not he, who was named as the defendant. Miller strode to the courthouse and demanded to be shown the petition. When at last the clerk of courts placed a copy in his hands, he trembled as he read what it said about him. The accusations made against him, so clearly and precisely set out, were even more appalling than anyone had dared to hint to him. “I am unwilling,” he was later to write to his supporters, “that the finger of scorn should be pointed at me as a man capable of holding in bondage a white child of tender years entitled to her freedom, for the sake of the trifling value her services could ever be to me. … I will expose to the best of my abilities, the tissue of perjury, folly and corruption of which this case was made up, and in which I was made the victim.”69

  From then on Miller regarded himself as the real defendant and Belmonti as nothing more than a name attached to his court action. He consulted his attorneys, Lockett & Micou, and demanded the right to defend himself. This could be easily done, they advised. Louisiana law allowed a buyer to sue the seller if there had been a false declaration about the quality of the thing sold. All it required was for Belmonti to join Miller as a party on the basis that when Miller had sold him Mary Miller, he had warranted that she was his property, but now it was being asserted that she was a free person and incapable of being owned by anyone.

  “For the value of the slave I care nothing,” declared Miller.70 His motivation, he claimed, was to defend not only his own honor as a gentleman, but the honor of his mother as well. Miller, a lifelong bachelor, was in his mid-sixties. He had rarely lived apart from his mother, and he realized that if people supposed he had reduced a German child to a slave, they would also suppose that his mother must have known about it. “What is far dearer to me than reputation or even life itself,” he wrote, is “to remove suspicion from a beloved mother now near ninety years of age, still in full possession of all her faculties, though sorely grieved that her long life of charity, benevolent feelings, and beneficial deeds, were not a security against the shafts of falsehood and of slander.”71

  John Fitz Miller was born into old wealth in Philadelphia in 1780, the son of John and Sarah Fitz Miller. In the period following the Louisiana Purchase, Miller, then in his twenties, left his parents’ home. He arrived in New Orleans with a chain of six healthy slaves and a determination to make his fortune. He was in the city for less than two years when his mother joined him. His father had died, and his mother, after a short, second marriage to Joseph Canby of South Carolina, had become a widow again. Both Miller and his mother, now Mrs. Sarah Canby, were independently wealthy, and Miller, latching onto the economic boom in New Orleans in those years, proceeded to make himself even wealthier.

  Massive docks were being built in the Navy Yards and Miller contracted to supply labor and lumber to the government. He then opened a block-making shop on the levee, and sometime around 1818, he purchased Withers’ sawmill and the surrounding land downriver. It was an astute investment. The city had an inexhaustible demand for timber. Wharves were being constructed for miles on both sides of the river. Hundreds of dwellings were being built, all requiring wood—for the storied mansions being erected in the American sector, for the timber-framed houses being built for the Irish and German immigrants near the waterfront, and for the shotgun houses* being built for the free coloreds in Faubourg Tremé and across the river in Algiers. Down the Mississippi came rafts of hickory, oak, willow, cherrywood, and walnut to be hauled over the levee into Miller’s sawmill. From the bayous of southern Louisiana he obtained the indestructible swamp cypress, with its fine grain that turned red as it dried. Schooners brought logs from mills scattered along the Gulf coast. He purchased rough sawn lumber from plantation owners along the Red River and dressed it with his newly purchased steam engine.

  By 1823, Miller had thirty slaves living in the grounds of his yard and working as sawyers, axmen, and wagoners. He was widely regarded as a good master, and it was a matter of pride to him that any slaves he owned were always well looked after. Down by the levee he built a dozen cabins in rows facing each other across a muddy track. Each cabin had a wooden floor, a proper griddle for cooki
ng and window flaps that opened on poles. He believed it was economic lunacy for a master to ill-treat his slaves and he was contemptuous of his neighbors who let theirs live in filth, or were stingy with food and clothing. He got his work out of them though, believing he could achieve that without being a zealot with the whip. Strict supervision was the answer. He ran his mill from first light to dark every day, save Sunday. He hired Mr. Struve as his overseer and gave him firm instructions about how many feet of wood he expected to be cut each week. If there was a shortfall, everyone from Mr. Struve downward knew about it.

  At the back of the mill, on a slight rise to catch the breeze, he built a house for himself and his mother, with elaborate stables for his horses in the rear. In 1833 he purchased a second house; this time upriver of the city, but still he hadn’t exhausted his credit with the banks, so, as an investment, he built eight two-story brick buildings in a square at Faubourg St. Mary. With property values doubling each year, what did it matter if he was paying 20 percent interest? He was rich. He was respected as an astute businessman. He entertained lavishly and drove one of the finest equipages in New Orleans.