by John Bailey
Black women had no protectors. Their husbands and fathers were emasculated by a regime of white control. As Thomas Jefferson, a principal drafter of the Declaration of Independence and the third U.S. president, confessed: a “man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances.”84Famously, Jefferson didn’t.
White women who became aware that their fathers, husbands, or brothers were visiting the slave quarters at night usually blamed the black temptresses for luring their men away. This wasn’t a time of sister solidarity, and instances where white women acted on a sense of sympathy with female slaves were difficult to find. And if a white man was ever indicted for the rape of a slave, historians haven’t found a record of it. Helen Catterall, in her five-volume study that summarised thousands of cases on slave law, didn’t find a single report of a white man being convicted of the rape of a slave.85
Nor did it make any difference if the victim was a child. No white man was ever charged with the rape of a slave child. George, a slave, was. He was accused of the rape of a female slave under ten years of age. If the girl had been white, George would have hanged, but his lawyer argued that the laws on “sexual intercourse, do not and cannot, for obvious reasons, apply to slaves; their intercourse is promiscuous.…” In a celebrated decision that provided leadership to jurists in the entire South, Judge Harris of Mississippi ruled that George had committed no offense known to the law. According to Harris, rape of a slave of any age wasn’t a crime. Harris, aware of some earlier cases which had ruled that natural or common law applied to slaves, dismissed these as being “founded mainly upon the unmeaning twaddle, in which some humane judges and law writers have indulged.”86 A year later, the Mississippi legislature responded to this decision by making it a crime for a black man to rape a black child under twelve years of age. The glaring inadequacy of this supposed reform was that it still wasn’t a crime for a white man to rape a black child, and there was no protection for black women over twelve from rapists of any skin color.
The Louisiana Civil Code left the legal position in no doubt: only white women could be the victims of rape. “It is true, the female slave is peculiarly exposed,” admitted Judge Preston of Louisiana in a judgment he wrote in 1851. “That is a misfortune; but it is so rare in the case of concubinage that seduction and temptation are not mutual….”87
This was an agreed-upon fiction formulated by male judges. The real point was that if the rape of a slave by a white man was made a crime, some of the finest and best in the land would have to face the court. To alter the law would have placed a restraining hand on white men’s lust, and this the South wasn’t prepared to do. There was nothing to stop a master from breeding children in his own image, or turning a blind eye to an employee who regarded slave wenching as a pleasant diversion on warm evenings. If racism gave birth to slavery, sexism was its handmaiden. It was a world of entrenched double standards. In all the Southern states, slaves were habitually hanged for assault or rape of white women, yet it wasn’t a common crime. White men’s assault and rape of slaves was so frequent as to be common, but criminal convictions were unknown.
Mary Wilson named her second son Madison, after the president of the United States. He was as white as any baby could be. Mr. Struve was the father, but the child was Mrs. Canby’s property.
Soon after the birth of Madison, Yellow Jim died. What of, doesn’t appear in the records. It could have been yellow fever, smallpox, cholera—all deadly diseases that flourished in New Orleans. It might have been an accident in the sawmill.
Mrs. Canby recorded that Mary’s next child was a girl, who was named Adeline. Before the birth of that child, Mary had told her mistress that the father was also Mr. Struve, but “on my remarking for the first time, when it was about five weeks old, that it was very dark, she acknowledged it to be the child of my colored waiter, a dark griffe, by the name of Jim Brigger.”
Mary now became Mary Brigger, and moved in with him. The relationship with Brigger was neither happy nor stable—caused, according to Mrs. Canby, by Mary’s flirtatious behavior.
At the beginning of 1834, after holding her for eleven years, Mrs. Canby sold Mary Brigger and her three children, Lafayette, Madison, and Adeline, back to her son. The transfer was recorded in a formal way before a notary and a witness. The change of ownership made no immediate difference to where Mary and the children lived or the domestic duties Mary performed, and possibly she was unaware it had occurred. The price was three hundred and fifty dollars, a real bargain considering that Miller had sold Mary (then a child called Bridget Wilson) to his mother for exactly that amount, and he was now getting three children as well. The four of them would be worth more like two thousand dollars. Clearly, Mrs. Canby was shifting some of her wealth to her son—probably to provide security for his investment borrowings.
Within weeks of regaining ownership of Mary and her family, Miller sent Lafayette to Cincinnati, Ohio, to work on his sister’s farm. Her husband, Nathan W. Wheeler, was in financial difficulties, and from time to time Miller had sent them money; this time he despatched Mary’s eldest child.
Children were the only valuable property slave parents could retain— but then never permanently, never with certainty. As their children became older, productive, and more valuable, it became more likely the master would want them for himself—either to work, hire, or sell. Mary Brigger was better off than most slave mothers who had a child taken away—she at least knew where her son had gone, and she periodically received news of him when Miller’s sister wrote to her brother. She could even hope that eventually he would be returned to her.
There was widespread acceptance in the South that a humane master would, as far as it was possible, avoid splitting a slave mother from her child. Ten years was regarded as the age at which children could be decently taken from their mother; however, where debts arose, or a master’s estate had to be distributed on his death, it was accepted that separation may have to occur at a younger age. In such cases, Southern opinion held that, unfortunate as separation was, a slave mother’s affection for her child was impulsive and not strongly developed, so any feeling of loss would quickly pass. A slave father’s bonds with his children were thought to hardly exist and warranted no consideration at all. Only in one slave state was there legislation against selling infants apart from their mother (prohibited under the age of ten) and that was Louisiana.* Never was a law more frequently breached. Technically, at least, Miller hadn’t broken this law, because he hadn’t sold Lafayette, only lent him—although to his mother, the effect was much the same.
Then the slaves working at Miller’s sawmill began to hear stories that the master was in trouble with his money and he might have to sell everything. They still had to get up when the sun rose and stand at the mill until sunset, but for much of the time the saws were idle and it didn’t seem to matter if they worked or not. One day a man in a stovepipe hat with a notebook in his hand walked through the yard with Miller at his side. The stranger stood staring at the slaves and wrote continuously in his book. Miller held a hand over his mouth when he spoke to the man, so they couldn’t hear what their master was saying, but they knew what was happening. Then the two men walked through the huts and looked at the women and children. Miller took the man back to the house and shut the door.
The single men went first. It was always without warning. Mr. Struve would come calling early in the morning and read out the names of those who were sold. He would follow them into their huts and watch as they placed their clothing in a bag. That done, he would usher them into a buggy and drive them away. It was over in minutes, and they were never seen again.
Then, by an unexpected turn of events, Mary Brigger was reunited with her son. Nathan Wheeler had deserted Miller’s sister and she had packed up her possessions, left Cincinnati, and come to live in New Orleans. Having no further need of Lafayette, she had returned him to her brother. Now that the mill was rarely operating, Miller had no particular us
e for the boy, and while he worked out if he should sell him, Lafayette moved into the hut with his mother and her husband, Jim Brigger. Mary hadn’t seen Lafayette in two years and she was amazed how he had grown. He was tall and wiry from laboring in the fields and as thin as a hickory stick. After two weeks, Miller announced his plans for Lafayette. It was harvesttime on the plantations in Attakapas and the cane needed cutting. Lafayette would be sent there.
Changes were also planned for those serving Mrs. Canby. She called a meeting of her domestics—Bridget (the cook) and Jim and Mary Brigger—and told them that the house in New Orleans was being shut down. She and Mr. Miller would be moving to Orange Island and she required her servants to come with her, Mary’s children included. But then the surprising news. Mary wouldn’t be coming. She was needed to stay behind and look after the house at the sawmill.
Soon after, they all departed. Although Mary remained in New Orleans, she wasn’t allowed to live in Miller’s house, or even in one of the huts in his yard. Instead, she would be lodging with a free colored woman, Madame Bertrand, in her house in Rue Des Grands Hommes. Mary knew Madame Bertrand well—she was the midwife who had delivered Lafayette. Mary was not to be left idle. Mrs. Canby gave firm instructions to her slave that she was to go to the house at the sawmill every day without fail and ensure it remained cleaned and well aired.
While in New Orleans, Mary became pregnant again. Obviously, Jim Brigger couldn’t be the father. Mrs. Canby later conducted yet another investigation into the identity of the father of one of Mary’s children. She learned that he “was a Frenchman, a shop keeper who resided near us.” This could well have been Belmonti. In fact, it probably was. The child was a boy, and Mary named him Charles.
Mrs. Canby wrote: Mary “proved so troublesome that she [Madame Bertrand] would not allow her to remain. I then sent her colored husband down for her with whom she came to the Attakapas, for the first time in her life in January 1839.” The italics are Mrs. Canby’s, intended, no doubt, to nail as a lie the assertion that it was in 1818 that she and Miller had converted Salomé Müller into their slave.
Under the escort of Jim Brigger, Mary was collected from New Orleans and taken to Miller’s plantation on the banks of Bayou Teche. When she arrived she was met with the news that Lafayette had died a day or two earlier. Mrs. Canby wrote that Mary “went over to a funeral service on [Orange Island] she had requested to be performed for him, in my own carriage, with several of her fellow servants and returned the same day with them.”88 Judging from Mrs. Canby’s words, it seems to have been a slave funeral and neither she nor Miller attended. It wouldn’t have been normal to provide a coffin for the burial of a slave. Mary Reynolds, who was a slave herself in Louisiana, once described how “when a nigger died … they buried him the same day, take a big plank and bust it with an ax in the middle ‘nough to bend it back, and put the dead nigger betwixt it.”89
Mrs. Canby didn’t explain how Lafayette died and, although the fact of his death was mentioned several times during the court case, nothing further was revealed. The work of slaves on sugar plantations was a deadly business and it wasn’t likely that the death of a child would be thought of as notable, or records kept of the cause. The Agricultural Society of Baton Rouge calculated in 1829 that on even a well-conducted sugar plantation the incidence of death among slaves was two-and-a-half percent greater than the birth rate. “The cultivation of sugar in Louisiana,” wrote Thomas Hamilton, a British traveler in 1833,“is carried on at an enormous expense of human life. At the season when the cane is cut… the fatigue is so great that nothing but the severest application of the lash can stimulate the human frame to endure it, and the sugar season is uniformly followed by a great increase of mortality among the slaves.”90 In addition to the scourge of yellow fever and other tropical diseases, the hoeing and harvesting of the cane was a dangerous business and accidents were common. The cane was cut with a sharp knife about fifteen inches long and three inches wide, and in the humid, dank climate an accidental cut to the flesh could easily turn septic. After gathering the cane, it was the job of the children to feed the stalks by hand between two giant iron rollers kept turning by a steam engine fired by cane trash. During harvesttimes the grinding of the sugar continued day and night. In the whole of the South, only on the rice plantations of Georgia, where slaves were required to stand knee deep in water for several hours each day, was the fatality rate higher.
Mrs. Canby described Mary’s conduct while in Attakapas:
… she behaved so badly and proved such a nuisance to the neighborhood; exciting her husband’s jealousy, by her abandoned conduct; they lived so unhappily, fighting and quarrelling together, that I resolved to part with both of them. Accordingly, I expressed my determination to my son, who sent her immediately down to New Orleans, where she said she wished to go, and where she knew a person who would purchase her.
This person was none other than Louis Belmonti. Mary, under threat of sale by Mrs. Canby, likely saw Belmonti as a convenient solution to her problems.
Seemingly Mrs. Canby’s decree that Mary should return to New Orleans was the equivalent of a divorce from Jim Brigger, because by the time she arrived back in the city, she no longer called herself Mary Brigger. She was now Mary Miller.
Belmonti engaged a slave broker named Piernas to act on his behalf. Belmonti was no Creole gentleman with the money to keep a concubine in one of the houses along Rampart Street, so he did the next best thing by attempting to purchase both a worker for his cabaret and a sexual slave who had probably borne his child. The negotiations proved difficult between Piernas and Miller. Although it was common knowledge that Miller was desperate for money, and perhaps in normal circumstances he would have sold the unruly Mary for a bargain price, he was aware that Belmonti wasn’t after any slave—it had to be her. Eventually Piernas and Miller set the price at one thousand dollars, ten times what Miller claimed to have given Williams for her. With that amount of money, a modest house could be built; a white laborer would have to work five years to earn as much.
Belmonti had his woman, and Charles came with her. Madison and Adeline remained behind on Miller’s sugar plantation. The contract of conveyance of Charles and Mary Miller was made part of the court proceedings. It was written in the French language. In a rather unusual clause it specified that Charles was “to stay and remain the property” of Miller but would be “in the supervision and the care of his mother until he had reached the age of ten years, or more if there was no necessity of taking him.” Miller was made responsible for Charles’s medical care, otherwise the “costs and expenses of maintenance were at the charge of Belmonti.” Mary’s age was stated as being twenty-two.91
Mary Miller proved to be as troublesome for Belmonti as she had been for Jim Brigger. A few weeks after purchasing her, she and Belmonti had a tremendous argument. Deciding he could no longer put up with her bad temper, he called on Miller and asked him to take her back. According to an affidavit, filed as part of the litigation: “Miller informed him that [Mary Miller] was in fact a white woman, who had all the rights of a free white person, and was only to be kept a slave by kindness and coaxing…. Belmonti was extremely dissatisfied with this conversation, and declared … that if he had a pistol at the time he would have shot Miller.”92
Belmonti didn’t shoot Miller; instead, he tried kindness and coaxing.
Meanwhile, Mrs. Canby didn’t go through with her threat to sell Jim Brigger. Perhaps she felt that a man of gray-haired loyalty, who had the misfortune to marry a harridan, shouldn’t be penalized on that account. In any case, when she looked more closely into the matter of ownership, it seemed that Jim belonged to her son, and not to her. Fortune smiled on Jim Brigger, because when it became clear to Miller that he could no longer avoid insolvency, he gave several of his slaves their freedom, Jim included.
Mary Miller remained with Louis Belmonti for the next five years. After being the companion of an old woman behind the fence of a sawmill for as
long as she could remember, she was now owned by the patrone of a small cabaret on the edge of the Vieux Carré and free to wander more or less wherever she wanted. Most mornings she went to the market to do the shopping. Everyone there knew her. Then she returned with her string bag of meat, eggs, and vegetables, and brought out the chairs for the day’s trading.
Then, one bright day in 1843, as she sat on the front steps of Belmonti’s cabaret with her eyes closed and the morning sun streaming onto her face, she heard a woman’s voice, whispering to her in a German accent that by rights she should be free.
EIGHT
SALOMÉ MÜLLER
… a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery.
Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court
of the United States, 185693
Wheelock S. Upton’s legal opinion greatly pleased the gentlemen backing Sally Miller. He had expressed his entire belief in the truth of the main elements of the petition. She was, to his mind, of pure German blood and everything possible must be done to free her. He and Christian Roselius stood ready to prosecute her case with all the energy and skill they could muster.
The news that Roselius would be involved was greeted with delight by Sally Miller’s supporters. He was regarded as the most learned man in the German community and someone the American courts must listen to. It is said by some Louisiana historians that Roselius was a redemptioner, but others say this wasn’t so, citing as proof that a biographical note published during his lifetime makes no such claim, and almost certainly the author would have checked his facts with Roselius. Whatever the truth, Roselius’s rise from humble immigrant beginnings to become attorney general of the state remains an extraordinary achievement. When he landed in New Orleans in 1820, after a sea journey from Bremen, Roselius was seventeen years old, spoke little English, and possessed only a rudimentary education. Soon after his arrival, he was employed as an apprentice to a printer who published the Louisiana Advertiser, and his first home in America was a bed under his master’s composition stand. Roselius was a restless genius. He soon recognized that if he was to succeed in America he had to become proficient in English, so he purchased volumes of Shakespeare and Milton and studied them at night. Within six months he had become so accomplished in English, and so adept at typesetting, that he could simultaneously read the copy and lay the characters by touch. In 1824 Roselius began to read law and marveled at the simple beauty of Louisiana’s civil law. In 1825 he persuaded his master to allow him to use the printing press to publish his own magazine, the Halcyon, covering the literary and artistic scene in New Orleans in a style similar to the English Spectator. Roselius was the editor, chief writer, and typesetter. Louisiana was a difficult market for a magazine of culture and after eighteen months the Halcyon folded. Roselius began to teach part-time at a girls’ school. There he courted the directress of the school and married her. He continued his studies of the law, and in 1828 was admitted to the bar.