The Lost German Slave Girl

by John Bailey

  In rebuttal, Miller’s side called Mr. L. J. Sigur, the lawyer who, four years earlier, had drafted Sally Miller’s petition for freedom. He confirmed that Mrs. Schuber had come to his office several times and that he had interviewed Sally at Mrs. Schuber’s house as well. He said that he had looked to Mrs. Schuber for payment of his fees. Micou then put it to him that, during the initial interviews, Eva had said nothing to him about the marks on Sally Miller’s legs. Sigur refused to answer the question, saying that the conversations were a matter of professional confidence between a lawyer and his client. Micou then asked Sigur if it wasn’t until after he had suggested to her “the necessity of such proof to support Sally Miller’s claim for freedom” that Eva mentioned the existence of the moles. Sigur refused to answer this question as well.

  After the closing argument, and just as the jury was about to retire, Upton stood up and asked Buchanan to explain to the jurymen the importance of the law in this case. What had emerged from the Supreme Court in the case of Salome Miller v. Louis Belmonti still applied. Even though the jury was considering whether the verdict was tainted by fraud, the law was another thing, and no one could say that the principle espoused by the Supreme Court was under challenge. The jury should be reminded that it must follow what the ultimate authority in this state had said.

  Upton handed up a statement of what he thought the judgment meant, and although it must have greatly irritated him, Buchanan, to his credit, read it out. The vital paragraph said:

  That on the law of slavery in the case of a person visibly appearing to be a white man, or an Indian, the presumption is that he is free, and it is necessary for his adversity to show that he is a slave.

  After the judge had finished reading this out, there was a long silence. It was late in the day and only three people remained in the public gallery: John Fitz Miller on one side of the room, and on the other, Salomé Müller, with her sole remaining supporter, Eva Schuber. Upton glanced across at the jury box—and saw that every one of the jurymen was looking directly at Salomé. Upton knew that Salomés only hope of freedom lay with the jury, regardless of the evidence, refusing to condemn a white-looking woman to slavery. Several of the jurymen were frowning in concern, as if not quite sure what to do. Salomé looked anxiously back at them. Upton’s hopes rose. For the first time in weeks, he felt that they might have a chance.

  Buchanan broke the moment by ordering the jury to leave the courtroom. They should follow the clerk to a place where they could retire to consider their verdict.

  Hours passed and it became dark. In quietness, the lawyers, Miller and the two women waited. There was nothing left to say to one another.

  After several hours, Buchanan returned to the bench and the jurymen filed in, not to deliver a verdict but to say that they couldn’t agree. Buchanan told the jury to give the discussions more time. He knew it was difficult and that the details were complex, and much of the evidence conflicted, but they should debate it further and come to a view on what was right. The foreman said it was not that they didn’t understand the evidence; they were just never going to reach a unanimous verdict. Buchanan, after urging them to try harder, sent them back to the jury room. They were there late into the night.

  The next day, January 7, 1848, the Daily Picayune reported:

  THE SALLY MILLER CASE.—The jury in this famous case, which has excited so much interest in the community, was yesterday discharged, not being able to agree. They stood eleven for giving her freedom and one against it. The case will now have to be gone through with again.

  It was the worst result for everyone. Miller left the court a devastated man. He had looked forward to his complete vindication by a jury of white Southern gentlemen. Instead, he faced a retrial! How could the jury not see the truth? Surely he had demonstrated that Salomé Müller was a fake? The longer the controversy dragged on, the more his reputation would be tarnished. Eventually, no matter what the outcome, the stain on his character would remain forever. For Eva Schuber it meant more delay, more expense, and more uncertainty. A retrial! All Salomé Müller prayed for was the day when she would be free to recover her children and lead a normal life. This now seemed as far away as ever. Wearily, Upton walked back to his office. He felt as if he was entrapped in litigation without end. Miller would never give up, nor would Eva Schuber, and nor would Salomé Müller. He was locked into yet another round.

  There was, however, a solution: a dangerous, unpredictable solution, it was true, but still a solution. Although the jury had been discharged, the trial wasn’t quite over, for it was possible for the parties to ask Buchanan to review the facts and make the decision the twelve men couldn’t make. There was never any doubt that Miller and his legal team would agree—after all, Buchanan had already ruled once in their favor. All the risks lay with Salomé Müller, but in Upton’s mind the alternative was too horrid to contemplate. It would mean months of delay and another trial with the uncertainty of another jury decision. And then, it had to be faced that no matter what the verdict was, one side or the other would appeal. Thus, as Upton reasoned it through, they might as well let Buchanan decide. If, as he expected, Buchanan returned Salomé Müller to slavery, she could immediately appeal to the Supreme Court.

  It wasn’t until three and a half months later that both sides agreed to submit the matter to Buchanan. He handed down his judgment on May 17, 1848. To the astonishment of everyone, he ruled that the allegations in Miller’s nullity petition had “not been satisfactorily made out.” His judgment was only a few lines in length. Presumably, Buchanan thought that because he was performing the role of a jury, and juries never gave reasons, nor should he. With that, Buchanan’s part in the story of Salomé Müller ended. Miller had lost and she remained free. But this was litigation that wouldn’t lie down, and on the very day of Buchanan’s decision, Miller’s counsel sought and obtained leave to appeal to the Supreme Court.

  The appeal was heard one year later, in May 1849, at a time when the citizens of New Orleans were more concerned that their whole city would be washed away by the Mississippi River. Heavy rains hundreds of miles to the north had raised the river to the highest level seen in two decades, and on the afternoon of May 3, seventeen miles upstream of the city, the levee burst. A thundering torrent a hundred feet wide burst into the plantation of Pierre Sauvé and within hours his estate was inundated. In the following days, water began to advance down roads toward the metropolis. Throughout May, engineers sunk wooden piles into the breach, but the river, seemingly intent on forming a new course to the Gulf through New Orleans itself, proved too strong. Relentlessly, its muddy waters flowed toward the city and by May 15, parts of Rampart Street, at the back of the French Quarter, were underwater.

  Amid this crisis, a few blocks away from where water was lapping in suburban streets, the Supreme Court, sitting dry in the Cabildo, began to hear the appeal brought by John Fitz Miller against the judgment of Buchanan. It was Miller’s last chance to clear his name, and for that he turned to Ms old savior, John Randolph Grymes.

  Grymes and Miller had reason to approach the appeal with optimism. With the assistance of lawyers Micou and Claiborne, they had written a lengthy brief and had a printer produce it in a booklet of thirty pages, ready to hand up to the judges. The story of the quite separate existences of Bridget Wilson and Salomé Müller was set out in detail and with proof. Everything was there: a summary of the testimony from the three earlier cases and reference to all the documents. Taken together it was a convincing demonstration that the slave from Georgia couldn’t possibly be the immigrant from Alsace.

  Nor would they have to face any of the judges who had heard the appeal last time. The Supreme Court of Chief Judge Martin no longer existed. In 1845 the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention had in effect decided that if Martin was determined to sit on forever, the only thing to do was to get rid of the court and start another one without him. Accordingly, in March 1846, one Supreme Court was abolished and another created in its pla
ce.* Not one of the five judges on the old court was reappointed. A new bench awaited the appellants.

  But the Supreme Court of Louisiana showed no wish to entangle itself in the Salomé Müller controversy. Grymes’s arguments and his well-reasoned proofs were not even considered. Miller was knocked out on a technicality. It had to be remembered, said the court, that Miller wasn’t originally part of this action. Belmonti was the real defendant and he appeared to have acquiesced to Buchanan’s judgment. Miller, although a warrantor, hadn’t refunded the price of the slave to Belmonti, and therefore he had no legal capacity to challenge the judgment. The appeal was dismissed.

  At least in the law reports, the last word went to Miller. The judgment concluded:

  We may at the same time state, without impropriety, that we have carefully perused the new evidence discovered by him; that it stands in the record unimpeached, and is in direct conflict with that adduced by the defendant in the former suit to prove her birth and condition. If it can be true that the defendant is of German extraction, we consider the plaintiff as exonerated from all knowledge of that fact.150

  Not that Miller gave up without a struggle. He directed his counsel to petition the Supreme Court for a new trial on the grounds that the decision it had handed down a few days earlier was wrong. Never was there a more forlorn lawsuit. It was contemptuously brushed aside.

  This was the end of the matter. Salomé Müller was free and there would be no further attempts to enslave her.

  It was an event hardly noticed by the people of New Orleans. The fate of Miller’s slave was no longer of interest. The news of the day was that the breach in the levee had been repaired. The city was safe. During the following weeks, the water receded, leaving the streets covered in inches of mud.

  SEVENTEEN

  THE WOMAN WHO REMEMBERED NOTHING

  If she be not, then nobody has told who she is.

  Judge Bullard, in Sally Miller v. Louis Belmonti (1845)151

  John Fitz Miller lived until 1857, thriving on the hatred and anger he felt toward Salomé Müller and those who had supported her. He died on his beloved Orange Island, New Iberia, having fended off to the end the persistent attempts by his creditors to wrestle it from him. He was aged seventy-seven. After his death, there was yet another attempt to seize his assets, but the Louisiana Supreme Court, in an opinion that became an authority much quoted in bankruptcy law, ruled that his considerable estate was now out of reach.152

  Miller may have appreciated the irony that the only favorable decision he ever received from the judges of the court he so detested was after his death—but then perhaps not, because a consequence was to hand his money to Nathan Wheeler, someone he detested even more.

  Roselius continued to practice law in New Orleans for another thirty years, while making time to lecture to students at the University of Louisiana, a role he performed for two decades, eventually being appointed a professor. He was one of the few voices raised against ceding from the Union at the State Convention that plunged Louisiana into the Civil War. After Union forces took the city, he was regarded by many as a traitor. He was offered the position of chief justice of the state twice, once by General Shepley during Occupation and once by Governor Wells during Reconstruction. He refused it both times, citing the failure to guarantee him judicial independence. He died in his sleep, with his affairs in order, in 1873 at the age of seventy-one. On the day of his death, he had been due to appear in court in the morning and to deliver a lecture to his students at the university in the afternoon.

  Buchanan wrote judgments reflecting public prejudice that made him seem wise—so wise, indeed, that he was elected by popular vote to the Supreme Court in 1853. There he appeared even wiser by writing judgments that bore heavily on black people.153 He sat until the Civil War came to the city in April 1862.

  The notoriety of the Sally Miller case did little to advance Wheelock S. Upton’s career, as in the eyes of many it marked him as a fool and an abolitionist. His practice suffered for it. He survived, if not particularly prospering, as a lawyer until his death, at age fifty, in Carroll-ton, a suburb of New Orleans, in 1860.

  John Randolph Grymes continued his colorful career at the New Orleans bar. He was counsel for Myra Clark Gaines in the celebrated case involving a disputed inheritance and a lost will, which ran for almost fifty years. Grymes died well before its completion, in New Orleans in 1854, aged sixty-eight.

  Litigation over the identity of Sally Miller had consumed six years of the lives of Francis and Eva Schuber. Even when it was over, it continued to weigh upon them, aware, as they were, that many derided them as being the naive victims of an ambitious slave. In the 1850s they moved to Panama, where an elite society, made wealthy by sugar, tobacco, and coffee, was as prosperous as any in the Gulf states. There they disappeared from the sight of history.

  John Lawson Lewis, the man who felt compelled to tell the truth, was elected mayor of New Orleans in 1854. During the Civil War, he was a major general, commanding the First Division of the Louisiana militia. He survived the war, to die in 1886. The obituary writer of the Monroe Bulletin wrote of him:

  The close of the war saw the gallant old General stripped of the wealth he had amassed during his busy and useful life; but he ever remained the same courtly, genial gentleman he had always been, a man among men, ever generous, brave, hospitable and typifying in his own person the high qualities of the ancient Southern chevalier.154

  What happened to Salomé Müller? Cable’s version, relying on what he was told by members of the German community forty years after the event, was that she married John Given, a riverboat pilot. “As might readily be supposed,” added Cable, “this alliance was only another misfortune to Salomé, and the pair separated.” He wrote that Salomé then went to California. Her cousin, Henry Schuber, told Cable that he had seen her in Sacramento City in 1855,“living at last a respectable and comfortable life.” Deiler, relying on similar sources, said she married a white man named Frederick King. Deiler agreed with Cable that she went to live in California.155

  According to Cable, “Salomé being free, her sons were, by law, free also.” They went to Tennessee and Kentucky and became “stable-boys to famous horses, and disappeared.” Cable quoted no authority for this belief, and it is difficult to believe. It wasn’t likely that Miller would release Salomé’s children; to the contrary, Miller would have relished a freedom petition from the children, since it would have given him yet another opportunity to have battled their mother in the courts. Since Lafayette died in about 1839, presumably Cable was referring to Madison and Charles. Cable seemed to be unaware of the existence of Adeline. When Salomé fled to the Schuber home, she left her son Charles behind in Belmonti’s cabaret and seemed happy to leave him there to be brought up by the man who was probably his father. The last time Madison and Adeline were mentioned in court documents was Upton’s ill-fated writ of habeas corpus, which was adjourned off, never to return. It is more likely that all of Salomé Müller’s children remained as slaves, owned by either Belmonti or Miller.

  Who, then, was she?

  She was Salomé Müller; she was Bridget Wilson; she was Mary Miller; she was Sally Miller; she was Sally Brigger; she was Polly Moore; she was Sally Hamilton. She was born on an unknown date; she was born in 1809; she was born in 1813; she was born in 1815. She was raised in Tatnall County, Georgia; she was raised in Langensoultzbach, Alsace. She was a mulatto; she was part Amerindian; she was pure German; she was yellow; she was white. She was a redemptioner and the servant of Grayson, Thomasson, and Gleason. She was a slave and had six owners: Wilson, Rigdon, Thomas, Williams, Miller, Canby, and Belmonti. She never married and had four slave children from four men. She was married, raised two children, and died in 1842 in the arms of her husband, Alexis Hamilton, on a farm on the Ouachita River. She went to California in 1849 and lived happily ever after.

  The tale of the Lost German Slave Girl has been a curiosity of Louisiana’s history for the past century a
nd a half, and its telling has usually been adapted to suit the writer’s particular ideological purpose. The story was first used by abolitionist to warn that slavery had so brutalized the South that even white women were at risk of being taken into bondage. During the 1890s, in Cable’s hands, it became a melodrama, with Salomé Müller as the heroine, Upton and Roselius as the gallants, and John Fitz Miller playing the role of the dastardly villain. About the same time, Deiler used the story to show how the German community had rallied to help one of its own. In 1939, a Louisiana historian, John Smith Kendall, after describing the events leading up to the first Supreme Court decision, concluded that “the people of New Orleans in those days, even the slave-holding class, seemed to have been a very humane and justice-loving people, at least as far as concerned the theory of the law, whatever may have been the practice.”156

  Historians writing after Cable and Deiler have uncritically adopted the formulae laid down by them—that Salomé Müller’s story is that of a white woman taken in slavery who overcame tremendous obstacles to eventually be released. Cable claimed to have read the court files—if he did, he was guilty of the most disgraceful suppression of information and distortion of the facts. The considerable and persuasive evidence that John Fitz Miller assembled to show that she was an imposter was either disparaged or ignored. Even worse, both he and Deiler ended the tale in 1845 after the Supreme Court victory, with Salomé Müller and her lawyers triumphing over Miller.

  Cable was a writer with an international following, adept at extracting all he could from Louisiana’s exotic and mysterious past. His aim was to write stories that would sell—and the struggle of a German woman escaping from slavery was a formula for a surefire success. He knew his market, and it was predominantly white. He knew that his audience wouldn’t want to read about a mulatto who had fooled white people, her own lawyers, and, ultimately, the highest court in the state. So he constructed the plot to suit his readers’ prejudices and ignored anything to the contrary.