Sally Miller (American slave)

Sally Miller was an American slave who was freed after a Louisiana Supreme Court case in which it was ruled that she was in fact German immigrant Salomé Müller.*cite book
author=Baily, John
title=The Lost German Slave Girl
publisher=Atlantic Monthly Press
year=2003|id=ISBN 0-87113-921-9]

Background

Around 1816, a great many impoverished Europeans sought refuge in America to avoid crop failures from the Year Without A Summer, the wars of Napoleon, and other problems.*cite book
author=Baily, John
title=The Lost German Slave Girl
publisher=Atlantic Monthly Press
year=2003|id=ISBN 0-87113-921-9] Among this flood of refugees were several families from Langensoulzbach in Alsace, on the lower Rhine, including one Daniel Müller, his wife Dorothea and their children Salomé and Dorothea. To fund the crossing, Müller signed a "redemption" or indenture agreement, bartering the services of himself and his family for some years.

Mrs. Muller died on the voyage. In March, 1818, the survivors arrived in New Orleans where their contracts were sold to John F. Miller of Attakapas Parish (now St. Martin Parish). A few weeks after the father and his children left for the plantation, his relatives who had remained at New Orleans learned that he had died; they were not able to discover what had happened to the children.

Legal fight

In 1843, the Müller's friend Madame Karl saw a woman slave in a wine-shop who, Karl soon came to believe, was Salomé grown to adulthood. The slave was the legal property of Louis Belmonti (sometimes spelled Belmonte), and was known as Sally Miller. Karl took her to the home of Salomé's cousin and godmother Mrs. Schubert, and thus began an extended legal fight over whether Sally was a slave.

Miller's German supporter hired a lawyer who sued not only Belmonte but also John F Miller, the wealthy man from whom Belmonte had purchased Sally. Belmonte was soon dropped from the case, as it was alleged he was the (relatively) innocent purchaser of a girl whom Miller had reduced to slavery upon the death of her father. Naturally, John Miller greatly resented the accusation and used his considerable power and influence to make Sally Miller's case difficult.

"The Law Reporter", in its account, says:*cite web
author=Craft, John
title=A Thousand Miles To Freedom: The Story of William and Ellen Craft
publisher=googlebooks
accessdate=July 25|accessyear=2008
url=http://books.google.com/books?id=c8eY3lQptwsC&printsec=frontcover&dq=A+Thousand+Miles+To+Freedom:+The+Story+of+William+Craft&source=gbs_summary_s&cad=0#PPA3,M1]

"As many of the German emigrants of 1818 as could be gathered together were brought to the house of Mrs. Schubert, and every one of the number who had any recollection of the little girl upon the passage, or any acquaintance with her father and mother, immediately identified the woman before them as the long-lost Salome Muller. By all these witnesses, who appeared at the trial, the identity was fully established. The family resemblance in every feature was declared to be so remarkable, that some of the witnesses did not hesitate to say that they should know her among ten thousand; that they were as certain the plaintiff was Salome Muller, the daughter of Daniel and Dorothea Muller, as of their own existence."

Among the witnesses who appeared in Court was the midwife who had assisted at the birth of Salome. She testified to the existence of certain peculiar marks upon the body of the child, which were found, exactly as described, by the surgeons who were appointed by the Court to make an examination for the purpose.

There was no trace of African descent in any feature of Salome Muller. She had long, straight, black hair, hazel eyes, thin lips, and a Roman nose. The complexion of her face and neck was as dark as that of the darkest brunette. It appears, however, that, during the twenty-five years of her servitude, she had been exposed to the sun's rays in the hot climate of Louisiana, with head and neck unsheltered, as is customary with the female slaves, while labouring in the cotton or the sugar field. Those parts of her person which had been shielded from the sun were comparatively white.

Belmonte, the pretended owner of the girl, had obtained possession of her by an act of sale from John F. Miller, the planter in whose service Salome's father died. This Miller was a man of consideration and substance, owning large sugar estates, and bearing a high reputation for honor and honesty, and for indulgent treatment of his slaves. It was testified on the trial that he had said to Belmonte, a few weeks after the sale of Salome, "that she was white, and had as much right to her freedom as any one, and was only to be retained in slavery by care and kind treatment." The broker who negotiated the sale from Miller to Belmonte, in 1838, testified in Court that he then thought, and still thought, that the girl was white.

The case was elaborately argued on both sides, but was at length decided in favor of the girl, by the Supreme Court declaring that "she was free and white, and therefore unlawfully held in bondage."

Both sides in the case argued based on racial mythology of the time. For example her lawyer argued that she could not be even a "quartronne" - ie 1/16th Negro - because "the Quartronne is idle, reckless and extravagant, this woman is industrious, careful and prudent" [http://www.powells.com/review/2005_03_21.html] .

Miller's obvious part-European ancestry was no guarantee of her free status, as many people of predominantly European ancestry were born into and held in slavery under the doctrine of partus sequitur ventrum (literally "the child follows the womb").

Aftermath

After the courts set her free, Sally Miller attempted to have her children declared free as well, on the grounds that they were the sons and daughters of a free woman. John F. Miller and his supporters continued to dispute her claim to be a Caucasian and produced new witness testimony and documentation to the effect that she was part-black and legally born into slavery. The subsequent court cases regarding her children were all failures, and her children remained slaves.

The decision to set her free was bitterly unpopular in Louisiana and the South, where the movement to abolish slavery was already considered a threat to the Southern economy and culture. The Louisiana Supreme Court that set Sally Miller free was abolished by the Louisiana State Constitutional Commission in 1846, largely because of the Court's ruling on her behalf. When the Supreme Court was re-created the following day, Chief Justice Francois Xavier Martin and his colleagues were not restored to the bench.

Books

A version of the Sally Miller story appears in George Washington Cable's "Strange True Stories of Louisiana"; some have questioned its authoritativeness since Cable's intent appears to have been to entertain, rather than to detail the legal and evidentiary aspects of the case.

John Bailey documented Sally Miller's story in his 2003 nonfiction work, "The Lost German Slave Girl". In evaluating the evidence, Bailey concludes that Sally Miller was probably not Salome, but a clever and heroic slave woman who "... seized the one chance of liberty that was ever likely to come her way, and she hung on to that chance with a tenacity I could only marvel at."

References