The Lost German Slave Girl

by John Bailey

  Carving out a career for himself as an advocate in the Louisiana courts couldn’t have been easy for a German immigrant with few contacts. As he waited in his office for clients, he toiled to rid his English of any trace of an accent by listening to himself address an imaginary jury. Because the civil law of Louisiana was ultimately derived from Roman law, he learned Latin so that he could read the Justinian Institutes as originally written; because the Civil Code was based on the Code Napoléon, he mastered French. In later years he became renowned for his ability, in addressing juries, to easily and fluently explain his point in French to the Creoles and then in English to the Americans.

  Gradually work began to come his way. No one was more industrious in preparation, or more dogged in exploiting weaknesses in his opponent’s case. He was blunt and fearless, and had a profound knowledge of the law. His reputation spread and within a few years, he had a steady stream of clients anxious to find an advocate who would give his utmost to their cause. He was one of those rare attorneys who could not only mould a jury to his making, but also persuade judges by quoting from the ancient treasures of Roman and French jurisprudence. In 1840 he was elected to the state legislature, and the following year he was appointed attorney general. However, the elegant duplicity of Louisiana politics wasn’t to his liking, and after a term in office, he didn’t seek reelection; instead, he hastened back to his constant mistress, the law.

  On April 27, 1844, the Answer of John F. Miller to the petition of Sally Miller was filed in the First District Court of New Orleans.94 The next day the clerk of courts delivered a copy to the office of Christian Roselius. He read it through and, after a moment’s reflection, called in a messenger and told him to go to Upton’s office and ask for his attendance as soon as possible.

  Upton arrived within the hour. After reading the document, Upton handed it to his younger brother, Frank, who had come with him. Frank was another Harvard graduate, and with the encouragement of his elder brother had recently arrived in New Orleans to make a career in the law. It seemed that when one hired Wheelock S. Upton, one hired his younger brother as well. There was yet another Upton in the office they shared rooms in Exchange Place—Rufus, a cousin and a student at law—but the elder Upton thought he would be pushing Roselius’s patience if he had brought him as well.

  In the opening paragraph of the answer, Miller had denied every allegation contained in the petition, save that he had sold Sally Miller to Louis Belmonti. He explained where he had obtained the girl: “That on the 13th August 1822, one Anthony Williams, then of Mobile, left with the Respondent for sale a certain mulatress girl, then named Bridget, about 12 years of age, said Williams claiming said girl as his slave, and representing her to be a mulatress and slave for life.”

  His answer then told of selling Bridget to his mother, and eleven years later, repurchasing her, along with the three children she had borne in the meantime. In 1838, he had sold her to Belmonti. Never had he “received the plaintiff or her parents or any others as Redemptioners.” He declared that “he then believed and still believes her to be a mulatress of African descent.”

  But it was the things that Miller had left unsaid that had caught Roselius’s attention and had caused him to summon Upton. Apart from Miller’s declaration that he believed Sally was of African descent (for what that was worth), there was nothing in the answer that contradicted the fundamental claim of the petition that she was German. Roselius had feared that Miller might have located a slave woman who claimed to be Sally’s mother, or a master who would swear that he had raised her from birth. There was nothing like that. Miller’s defense started in 1822, on the day she was deposited with him by Anthony Williams. The most important questions of all remained unanswered: Where had she been before that? Where did Williams get her? And who was Williams? Apart from saying he was “then of Mobile,” there was nothing more said about him. Upton said he knew a lawyer named Breden who had lived in Mobile for the last twenty-five years and had conducted the census there. He would write to him and ask what he knew of this Anthony Williams.

  Miller’s failure to account for his slave’s whereabouts in the years before 1822 was encouraging. However, as Roselius and the Upton brothers discussed the case further, they realized that it was just as much a problem for them as it was for Miller. It meant there was no firm link between Miller and the disappearance of Salomé Müller in 1818. They couldn’t prove that Miller had taken her as his slave. About the only thing Miller had said with any authority was that he hadn’t engaged Daniel Müller and his children as redemptioners. He could, of course, be lying, but it would be a dangerous thing for him to do and would be easily checked by asking his neighbors. If he wasn’t lying, and he hadn’t taken Daniel Müller and the children as redemptioners, who had? Where had Salomé gone to in 1818? And where was the rest of the family?

  It’s the missing four years, harped Upton to Sally Miller and Eva and Francis Schuber when they met in his office for a conference a few days later. They had to be able to explain to the court where she had been between 1818 and 1822. Sally shook her head. She couldn’t help. Her first memories were of recovering from yellow fever in Nurse Crawford’s house. She could recall nothing before that.

  Upton turned to Eva Schuber.

  The last time she had seen Daniel Müller and the three children was the day they had called in on her at Madame Borgnette’s school to say farewell. She remembered how worried she had been as she watched them walk away. Daniel had promised to write as soon as he settled in with his new master, but the weeks passed and she heard nothing. Friends explained to her that the mail service in Louisiana was good if it was between towns on the Mississippi, but if it had to cross from the inland parishes it could take weeks. But the weeks turned to months, and still there was nothing. She became convinced that something dreadful had happened.

  Did you ever hear of them? Upton asked.

  Francis Schuber then told what he knew. In his butchery business in the French Quarter he regularly bought meat from German farmers who herded their cattle from Attakapas to the city markets. About a year after Daniel Müller was last seen by anyone, Francis had gotten into conversation with one of the cattlemen who told him the story of what had happened on a keelboat making the run from New Orleans along the Atchafalaya River to Attakapas. A passenger, a man who couldn’t speak English—a German, the cattleman thought—was going upstream with his young son and two daughters. One evening, just as everyone was settling down to eat, the passenger let out a gasp, stood up, clutched at his chest, and toppled over. He was dead even before he hit the timbers. Where was he buried? Francis Schuber had asked. Well, they were halfway along a windy, tea-brown river moving through swampland. What else could they do? They waited until his children were asleep, weighted his body down, and toppled him into the water.

  So, now there were three children on the keelboat, said Upton. Three young children.

  Not for long, replied Francis. Not for long. When the crew awoke the next morning, the boy had gone. It took no time to search the keelboat. He had gone. No one had heard anything. No splash, no footsteps across the deck. It seems the boy had slipped himself over the side. By this time the crew was in a blue funk. It was difficult enough to explain that one of their passengers had died, but they at least had had his ten-year-old son to explain what had happened; now all they had was two small girls looking at them in horror. They searched the man’s luggage and found a ticket naming the family’s intended destination, so they delivered the two girls there. There was no one to meet them, so they tied a label around their necks and shoved off, leaving the girls standing on a wharf on a misty river, hemmed in by giant cypress trees.

  There was a long silence as they imagined what might have happened next.

  Eva Schuber had no doubts. The two little girls, stunned by the death of their father and the suicide of their brother, alone in the world, without speaking a word of the language, were collected by Miller.

  Sally Mil
ler continued to live with the Schubers in Lafayette during the months they waited for the trial to commence. Both she and Eva were strong-willed women and conflict between the two was inevitable, especially as Eva saw it as her role to take the black ways out of her goddaughter. Everything, beginning at the most elementary, had to be relearned. Eva gave instructions to Sally on how to sit demurely, with her feet placed just so, with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. Never should her legs be open—only blacks and men sat like that. Eating was no longer a straightforward affair. There were special knives, forks and spoons for this and that, and a particular way to eat mashed potato, and another way to eat peas and never by squashing them together on a spoon. Her husband didn’t always follow these rules, but that, Eva explained, was because he was a man. Sally was no longer allowed to wear red; red was a black woman’s color. Her tignon was confiscated. Her hair was cut at shoulder length. Eva decreed that the sun must never touch her flesh. The judge must see a white-skinned woman. She had to wear gloves and hold a parasol aloft whenever she went abroad. And never again would she sign her name with a cross. Eva sat with her for hours at the kitchen table and guided her hand across a slate in a thousand repetitions of the name the litigation had given her. Sally Miller would pout. She would shout and scream her resistance, but Eva’s will prevailed.

  The weeks passed and Sally began to complain that life in Lafayette was dull. Eva encouraged her to make friends with the German women who visited, but Sally was reluctant to meet them, saying that she had nothing to say to them. She complained that they peered at her as if she were a circus animal. She grumbled that the clothes Eva chose for her were too hot. She longed for her cotton smock that allowed the breeze to flow up her legs. She missed the excitement of the waterfront, the smells of the market, the cries of the traders, the ribald calls from the sailors. She wanted to mix with black men carrying meat that dribbled blood down their shoulders, and with women selling mangoes from large flat baskets balanced on their heads.

  Sally escaped into the city whenever she could. She had a ready excuse. Upton had stressed to her how important it was to find witnesses who could say how she came into Miller’s possession. Who were the very first people she recalled meeting in her life? Who were the visitors who called for afternoon tea at Mrs. Canby’s house? Did she remember any of the men who worked for Miller or collected timber from his yard? She must speak to them all and ask if they knew how Miller had obtained her.

  Three people came to Sally’s mind and she went searching for them. One was a white man, an engineer, by the name of Fribee, who kept the machines running at the sawmill. He had befriended her when she was a youngster, and sometimes he would take her to look at the huge steam engine that drove the blades backward and forward through the timber. Another was an old Creole woman, Madame Poigneau, who used to come and chat with some of the women in the slave huts. Then there was Daphne Crawford, the woman who had nursed her when she had yellow fever.

  Sally searched first for Fribee. She asked for him in saloons, billiard halls, and waterfront inns. She asked boatmen sleeping it off on the levee. A few remembered him, although they hadn’t seen him in months. Some thought he had gone upriver.

  She then went to the house on Rampart Street where Daphne Crawford lived. When the old nurse came to the door she recognized Sally immediately. Sally told her how she wanted to be free because she was white. Daphne listened, but showed no emotion and didn’t ask her inside. Sally began to ask if Miller had ever said where she had come from, but Daphne interrupted, saying she didn’t want to help. She didn’t believe that Sally was white. She was a mulatto, just like her, and her advice to Sally was to accept who she was. Her own daughter was fairer than Sally and still she wasn’t a white person.

  Sally then went looking for Madame Poigneau. She had lived in a tumbled-down house with her ne’er-do-well husband and a brood of children a few streets back from Miller’s mill, but when Sally knocked on the door she was met by a stranger who said he had never heard of her. Despondently, Sally walked away. It was more than twenty years since she had seen Madame Poigneau. Perhaps she had died. Sally asked one of the traders at the market. As far as he could recall she had moved years ago to one of the streets at the back of the Vieux Carré. He thought for a moment, but no, he couldn’t remember where. He hadn’t seen her lately. Not for months, a year probably. She asked several more traders. They all knew Madame Poigneau, but they hadn’t seen her for some time. One trader gave Sally an address where he thought the old woman might be. Sally walked there and knocked at the entrance of a small clapboard house. The door opened and it was Madame Poigneau. She looked at Sally and, with a broad smile on her face, pulled her into a hug. Sally told her why she had come. But I had always thought you were white, replied the woman. She took her into her house, saying in a mixture of Spanish and English that she had been such a small, lost child. She could never understand what she was doing with Mrs. Canby, especially since she spoke with a German accent. Sally Miller took a sudden breath, and then asked her if she was sure about what she was saying. Yes, yes, said Madame Poigneau. I remember you. You were Bridget Wilson, and you spoke like a German.

  Eva Schuber also walked the streets of New Orleans looking for witnesses. She was seeking people who remembered Salomé Müller in Amsterdam and would identify her as Daniel Müller’s daughter. She had expected to find twenty or thirty easily—after all, hundreds of them had arrived in 1818—yet, as she began to knock on doors and ask among the German community, she was surprised at how few of them there were. They had spread across the length and breadth of America. Some had moved upriver to states farther north. A few had gone to California; many more had journeyed east to Philadelphia or New York, where they had relatives and had originally planned to go before Krahnstover had taken them south. Many had died, seemingly within a few years of arriving. Eva heard stories of cholera, drowning, vague illness, hard drinking, childbirth, madness, yellow fever. Even within her own family there weren’t many left—her mother-in-law and her sister Margaret were both dead; the other Salomé, the sister of the Müller brothers and wife of Christoph Kirchner, had completely disappeared. Christoph and Salomé’s daughter, Dorothy, had lived in New Orleans for a couple of years, married, and moved somewhere upriver, but Eva didn’t know where. Henry Müller was dead, and while she knew his children were in Mississippi, she hadn’t seen them in a long time.

  But there were also those who prospered and frequented the German Club, boasting of how easy it was to succeed in America. Eva spoke to them. Surely they remembered Daniel Müller and his wife Dorothea and their four children? There was Locksmith Müller and Shoesmith Müller. They both had children, but there was one particular child, Daniel’s daughter, a pretty, dark-haired girl—this was the one who had been held as a slave for twenty-five years and had now returned. Some asked if it was true that she’d had black men for husbands. And had children by them as well? Questions that insinuated that she was undeserving of their help, or that if she was truly German, this wouldn’t have happened. Eva would reply that it was all behind Sally now. Or, whatever had occurred, she wasn’t in any position to resist.

  Others, although sympathising, would shake their heads and say they couldn’t remember that far back. There were so many children on the boats. There was so much distress, so many starving, sick people. It was hard to remember. Some didn’t want to remember. It had taken them years to put their nightmares to rest. Sometimes Eva would persuade one or two to visit her house and look at Sally who, with sullen resentment, would pose for her visitors. It was so difficult after all these years, they would say. Eva would nod, and say she understood, and make them tea and offer raisin cake, and then escort them to the door.

  Mr. Wagner was one of these visitors to Eva’s house. Although he was from Württemberg, he had gotten to know the Müller family on board the Rudolph in the port of Helder in 1817. He drank coffee with Sally and asked her about her childhood in Germany and was sur
prised to learn that she didn’t remember anything. He took Eva aside and said he couldn’t in all conscience swear on a Bible that he recognized her. But Eva mustn’t think that he was withdrawing his support. He still believed in her and he would be quite willing to come to court and tell the judge about the mistreatment on the voyage to America and how all of them, including Daniel Müller and his children, were sold as redemptioners.