by John Bailey
That as compensation for more than twenty years of hard labor in the service and the use of John F. Miller and Sarah Canby, they shall… pay to her the sum of TWENTY THOUSAND DOLLARS. That for the wrongful and felonious deprivation of her liberty, for her cruel and unnatural bondage for all the wrong, and outrages, which during her whole life she had suffered that they shall be decreed to pay her the further sum of FIFTY THOUSAND DOLLARS, and such additional sum as an honest jury shall deem just and right.
That for the services of her two children and for the wrong to them done the said John F. Miller and Sarah Canby jointly and severally be decreed to pay your petitioner the sum of FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS.133
Upton and the German community were now on a crusade. Release of their kinswoman from bondage was the task only half completed—recovery of her children, and humiliation and punishment for those responsible, remained. Thoughts that the Supreme Court had, in effect, given Sally Miller the benefit of the doubt were glossed over. As far as her supporters were concerned, the judgment had made Sally Miller pure white and Miller a lying wretch.
The name on the petition was Salomé Müller. Sally Miller was no more. Perhaps Sally insisted on the change so that she could free herself from an association with her hated former owner and the publicity the case had brought to her. Perhaps Upton, as he approached the federal court, wanted to emphasize that she was truly German. He may have wanted to underscore that the decision of the Supreme Court of Louisiana had changed his client from a slave into a German woman.
If Salomé Müller hoped to fade into quiet obscurity, there was little chance of this occurring while she had Upton as her champion. Within weeks a pamphlet of twenty-four pages, relating the history of the Sally Miller affair, appeared on the streets of New Orleans. It bore no publisher’s imprint, nor any author’s name, yet everyone knew that it was the work of Wheelock S. Upton. It was a shameless piece of self-glorification. Roselius’s name wasn’t mentioned, his brother only once, his own many times. After describing the horrors of the immigrants’ journey from Germany to New Orleans, he told the story of the litigation, culminating in his triumphant appeal to the Louisiana Supreme Court. At every turn, he praised the bravery and determination of the German community, the skill and industry of the plaintiff’s counsel, and the deviousness of John Fitz Miller. He disparaged Miller’s explanation that he had purchased Sally Miller from Anthony Williams, and recycled the suggestion, made by Wheeler, that Miller had switched the identity of Sally Miller with that of a dead child. If that wasn’t enough to torment Miller, Upton used his pamphlet to inform the public of his client’s claim for damages against Miller and Mrs. Canby.
A few weeks later, a translation of Upton’s pamphlet appeared in the German Courier of New Orleans, and a shorter version appeared in the Daily Tropic. Upton sent a copy of the speech he made at the German ball in Lafayette to the National Anti-Slavery Standard published in New York, where it appeared on the front page. In the following months a number of journals and papers picked up the report and told the story of the Lost German Slave Girl to the nation.
Miller’s answer to the suit for damages was just as belligerent as Upton’s originating petition.
She “is not Salomé Müller, an alien of German descent,” he contended. “[S]he is Mary or Bridget, a slave, born in the State of Georgia or Alabama.” Furthermore:
[If she should] rely upon a judgment of the Supreme Court of Louisiana, the defendants plead that the said Mary or Bridget falsely and fraudulently assumed the name of Sally Miller and pretended to be a native of Germany, and she procured false testimony to establish her identity … and only by reason of such fraud and ill practices, on the part of said plaintiff and her witness, and not otherwise, was the said judgment obtained and procured.…134
And as for the plaintiff’s claim of five thousand dollars for the unjust bondage of Madison and Adeline, Miller retorted that none of her children “were of any service.” Besides, the expense of keeping the plaintiff was “fully equal” to all services rendered by her or her children.
Salomé Müller had been delivered from slavery and, as most people understood the Supreme Court decision, she had been declared white. Yet, within days of that victory, she was heading toward a trial, this time before a jury of Southern white gentlemen, seeking the freedom of her children, fame and fortune for her lawyer, and punishment for her captors.
It was to be a long and arduous venture, fraught with more difficulties than either she or Upton could have ever imagined.
FIFTEEEN
POLLY MOORE
I too have claims, I too will seek justice.…
John Fitz Miller, 1845135
She is now free. … Free by judgment of the Supreme Court, but not all the rain in “the sweet heaven,” can sweeten her into a white woman—no, not even the honor of joining hands in the same dance with her counsel and deliverer Wheelock S. Upton Esqr. at the grand ball given in honor of the triumph— “
Where he was the bravest of the brave,
She the fairest of the fair.”
So wrote John Fitz Miller, in white-hot fury, in his pamphlet A Refutation of the Slander and Falsehoods Contained in a Pamphlet Entitled Sally Miller.136 Not anonymously, but with a byline of his own name, in inch-high gothic type. Hatred beyond rationality brewed in Miller toward the people who had brought him low, and he had decided to fight back by publishing a pamphlet to counter the one written by his adversary, Wheelock S. Upton. Miller wrote of his ex-slave:
She has been metamorphosed by the “Grace of God” and the decision of the Supreme Court, with which Louisiana is now blessed, from Sally Miller, my former Slave, into Salomé Müller, a free white German Redemptioner. … I will expose to the best of my ability, the tissue of perjury, folly and corruption, of which this case was made up, and in which I was made the victim. Victim did I say? No, thank God, that was beyond their power. Counsel, witnesses and client, they were all worthy of each other, and I defy and despise them all.137
In a document thick with grandiloquent justification, selfpity, and blustering bravado, Miller lauded the decision of Buchanan (reprinted in full) and ridiculed the decision of the Supreme Court (also reprinted in full). In Miller’s eyes, the judges of the Supreme Court were “southern men with northern feelings.” The “Plaintiff’s witnesses were perjured, her counsel were dupes and asses, and the court was most effectually mystified and humbugged.” Upton was a man of “low cunning and a rapacious disposition combined.” Mrs. Schuber was a “great romancer” who was part of a “well conducted and unprincipled scheme devised … to defraud me, put money in their own pockets and gratify the bad feelings of a very bad servant.”138
Then, after writing sixteen pages of invective and sarcasm, in the closing paragraphs Miller made an astonishing claim. A claim to confound and confuse his enemies. A claim to turn everything on its head. A claim to restore his reputation and utterly destroy the plaintiff and her counsel.
He announced that he had discovered the real Salomé Müller. She was alive and married with children. She was called Mrs. Polly Moore, and she lived “twelve or fourteen miles, north of Bastrop, in the Parish of Morehouse, on the Chemani creek, near a place called Fort Wedge.”139
Miller claimed that it was Upton’s passion for publicity that had led him to discover the woman who was the real Salomé Müller:
This is another instance of how the machinations of the wicked draw down punishment on their own heads. Had the plaintiff and her counsel, Wheelock S. Upton Esq., been satisfied with the ordinary publicity which the decisions of the Supreme Court confer, the Truth might not have come to light. Mystery had still hung over these transactions and I might have gone down to my grave, with suspicion on the minds of many to darken my memory. But no, the plaintiff or her counsel thought it necessary to prepare the mind for another suit and the pamphlet was the result.140
Immediately after the shattering disappointment of the appeal, Miller had retreated to the sanct
ity of the house of Joachim Kohn in Bienville Street, New Orleans. Kohn, a commission merchant in the city, had known Miller for many years and had been a witness in the trial held before Buchanan. In times past he had dined on Miller’s generosity, and he wasn’t prepared to abandon him now, not at the time of Miller’s public shaming when he needed him most. Kohn assured his friend that people would soon forget, but Miller didn’t believe him—not in the few years he had left in his lifetime.
In the following days, as Miller read newspaper accounts of the case and of the self-seeking activities of Upton, he became even more convinced that the story of the lost German slave wouldn’t be allowed to fade away. The Daily Picayune, in reporting the outcome of the appeal, reproduced a large section of the judgment. The Daily Tropic, after exclaiming: “Truth is stranger than fiction!,” declared that it would soon issue “a complete history of this case prepared by an able member of the New Orleans Bar, and we venture to say that few publications have appeared possessing so much of singular and romantic interest as this narrative of events happening in our midst.”141 Soon after, the Daily Tropic published a feature on the celebratory ball, including Upton’s and Roselius’s speeches. Then, if anyone in New Orleans was likely to soon forget Sally Miller, Upton’s pamphlet, bearing her name on the title, appeared.
Upton’s pamphlet was passed hand to hand the length and breadth of Louisiana, and eventually a copy fell into the hands of a merchant who made frequent visits by keelboat along Bayou Bartholomew in the extreme northeast of the state. He was immediately reminded that years ago he had heard something of two orphan girls of Dutch descent being raised by farmers in Morehouse Parish. Through an intermediary, the merchant passed what little information he had about the girls on to Miller. The area he described was a wild and remote territory with a sparse population of Dutch and French woodsmen. Miller left the next day on a steamer. It was a journey of many days, up the Mississippi for several hundred miles, and then following twisting tributaries: the Red River, the Black River, the Boeuf River, and finally the Ouachita River, as it headed toward the Arkansas border. In Bastrop he spoke to people who recalled two orphan Dutch girls arriving in the county of Ouachita over twenty years ago. He was given other names. He traveled by horse collecting statements from everyone he could find who had the slightest recollection of what had happened to the girls. He asked about them in taverns, eating houses and produce stores. He was told of a middle-aged Dutch woman, the widow of John Parker, who lived near Point Pleasant. Miller journeyed to a small farmhouse on the banks of a creek. The woman, surrounded by several children, greeted him. Miller introduced himself and asked her name. She replied with a strong accent. She had remarried only last winter to David Moore, so she was now called Mrs. Polly Moore. Miller asked about her father. She said his name was Daniel Miller and he came from Germany.
News that Miller claimed to have discovered Salomé Müller, in the form of Mrs. Polly Moore, a farmer’s wife of Morehouse Parish in northeast Louisiana, spread quickly throughout New Orleans. It was yet another twist in a saga that had captivated the citizens of the city for the past couple of years. The German community dismissed the claim as more lies from a desperate man; even for Miller’s allies, the existence of a second Salomé Müller was hard to believe. Many thought that Miller had topped even his own reputation for eccentricity by inventing people in remote locations.
Miller’s claims were unable to be verified by anyone living in New Orleans—his witnesses were about as far north as one could go and still be in Louisiana—nevertheless, his pamphlet with its overblown literary style, heavy sarcasm, and scurrilous attacks on the Supreme Court made entertaining reading. Copies of it were much in demand. There was an expectation that it would be a battle royal when Salomé Müller’s damages claim came up for hearing.
The suit against Miller and Mrs. Canby showed every indication of being a mammoth and unwieldy affair. Upton estimated that his client would need to call a dozen witnesses or more, and Miller, not to be outdone, supplied a list of twenty people whom he wanted to give evidence, adding that this was by no means the entirety of them. Whereas most of Salomé’s witnesses lived in New Orleans, many on Miller’s list lived in isolated districts where transport was primitive, and several of them resided outside the state.
Miller’s lawyers overcame some of the difficulties of distance by arranging for those who knew Polly Moore to be examined by a specially appointed commissioner at a location near their homes. By late November 1845, the process had begun. Copeland S. Hunt was appointed as the commissioner, and Miller’s lawyers compiled a list of interrogatories they wanted him to ask each witness. Before Hunt set off on his journey to northeastern Louisiana, he sent Upton a copy of the interrogatories. Upton was invited to add some questions of his own, if he so desired.
Upton examined the interrogatories in his office. Miller had gathered the names of a dozen people who would presumably say that they had known Polly Moore since her arrival in Morehouse twenty-seven years earlier. The interrogatories followed a similar pattern: How had they come to know Polly Moore? What was her age? What language did she speak? What nationality did they suppose her to be? What did she say of her life? What did they know of her history? Did she have a sister and, if so, what did they know of her?
As Upton flicked through the questions he was surprised that Miller had assembled so many witnesses who would assist in his game of saying that Polly Moore was Salomé Müller. He noticed that most were farmers and merchants, but one was a lawyer, Robert McGuire, who practiced in the town of Monroe in Ouachita Parish. Another was Oliver Morgan, a judge of the parish. Upton thought it odd that a lawyer and a parish judge had joined in Miller’s foolishness. Perhaps the explanation was that there had been some sort of court proceedings involving Polly Moore that would tend to show who she was.
The last set of interrogatories was for Polly Moore herself. The inquiries of her were more specific: Did she know when and where she was born? Who were her parents? Did she have sisters or brothers? Who were they? What had happened to them? Was her name ever changed? Were her parents dead and, if so, what caused their deaths? Had she or her sister ever had marks on their thighs?
As Upton considered what to do about the interrogatories, he continued to be troubled by the number and range of witnesses Miller had obtained. But surely there was nothing to Polly Moore’s claims? There was no reason to worry. Miller’s new evidence would be soon exposed for the silliness it was. After some thought, Upton concluded that the best tactic would be to disdain to take part in this farce. He wrote across each of the documents: “No plaintiff’s interrogatories” and sent them back to Commissioner Hunt.
During the first two weeks of December 1845, after a long journey upriver, Hunt set himself up in the Monroe courthouse and made arrangements for the witnesses named in the interrogatories to appear before him. After requiring each to swear on the Bible to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Hunt dutifully asked the questions specified for him and recorded the answers. He then read his notes back to the witnesses and had them swear, then sign, to their accuracy. The statements (called depositions) were then sent to the United States Circuit Court in New Orleans.142
Meanwhile, Miller had yet another revelation with which to amaze the people of New Orleans. He claimed he could now trace the history of Bridget Wilson from her birth in Georgia to her sale by Anthony Williams to himself in 1822. He now even knew who Anthony Williams was.
Even after the jubilation of discovering the real Salomé Müller in northeast Louisiana, Miller didn’t rest. If he could find Salomé Müller, was it possible he could find Anthony Williams? Or a slavemaster named Wilson who had once owned a girl named Bridget? Immediately he set off to Alabama, accompanied by a commission merchant from New Orleans named Thomas B. Lee. The two men traveled by steamer along the inner shore of the Gulf. Once in Mobile, they asked everyone they met if they knew Williams or Wilson. They walked through the streets of the city spea
king to traders in the slave markets, farmers in the dry goods stores, clerks in the mayor’s office, and sailors along the waterfront. Eventually, someone remembered that there used to be a poor farmer named Wilson, long since departed this earth, who had run a few slaves, years ago, on a property a few miles out of town. They were directed along a track to Wilson’s house where his daughter, Mrs. Coward, now lived. Mrs. Coward welcomed them with the hospitality that had made Alabama famous. Yes, her father had owned some slaves, she said, and she clearly remembered a palecolored girl who was their servant. Her name was Bridget, and her mother was a mulatto woman named Candice, and her father was a white man.
Miller sat at Mrs. Coward’s kitchen table and copied down all she knew. She told him that when Bridget was born in 1809 the family had lived in Tatnall County, Georgia. They had moved to Leaf River, Alabama, in 1810, and Bridget came with them. Mrs. Coward’s father, John Wilson, had given Bridget, when she was aged about thirteen, to his daughter, Peggy, as a nurse for her children. Peggy (a sister of Mrs. Coward) lived in Mississippi. Peggy’s husband, Enoch Rigdon, had fallen badly into debt and Bridget was exposed to sale at a sheriff’s auction held out the front of the Perry courthouse in Mississippi. The successful bidder was Jonathon Thomas—although it was Mrs. Coward’s recollection that Thomas didn’t keep Bridget for more than a month before he sold her to his son-in-law. His name was Anthony Williams. What happened to the child after that, she didn’t know. Nor did she know where Anthony Williams could be found.
Miller wrote down the name of every person Mrs. Coward had mentioned, and in the coming months, with the unerring devotion of a gun dog, he tracked them down. But first he rushed back to New Orleans to add Mrs. Coward’s story to the pages of his pamphlet before it went to the printers.