Francois Xavier Martin

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François Xavier Martin (March 17, 1762-11 December 1846), American jurist and author, was born in Marseilles, France, of Provençal descent.

In 1780 he went to Martinique, and before the close of the American Revolutionary War went to North Carolina, where (in New Bern) he taught French and learnt English, and set up as a printer. He studied law, and was admitted to the North Carolina bar in 1789. He published various legal books, and edited Acts of the North Carolina Assembly from 1715 to 1803 (2nd ed., 1809). He was a member of the lower house of the General Assembly in 1806-1807. In 1809 he was appointed Attorney General of the Territory of Orleans. Here, the law was in a chaotic condition, with French law before O'Reilly's rule, then a Spanish code, and in 1808 the Digest of the Civil Laws, an adaptation by James Brown and Louis Moreau de Liset of the code of Napoleon, which repealed the Spanish fueros, partidas, recompilationes, and laws of the Indies only as they conflicted with its provisions.

Martin published in 1811 and 1813 reports of cases decided by the superior court of the territory of Orleans. For th years from February, 1813 until 1815 Martin was Attorney General of the newly established state of Louisiana, and then until March, 1846 was a judge and (from 1836 to 1846) presiding judge of the Supreme Court of the state. For the period until 1830 he published reports of the decisions of the supreme court; and in 1816 he published two volumes, one French and one English, of A General Digest of the Acts of Legislatures of the Late Territory of Orleans and of the State of Louisiana.

In 1845, Martin's court issued the final ruling in the case of Sally Miller, the so-called "Lost German Slave Girl." Sally Miller was living as a slave in New Orleans when she was found by some German immigrants who believed her to be Salome Muller, a German girl who immigrated to Louisiana as a small child. Her mother died on the trip across the Atlantic and she and her father and sisters has been missing for years. The Mullers were "redemptioners" --the owners of the ship that brought them to the United States sold them into a labor contract to pay for their passage, a practice similar to indentured servitude. Members of the German-American community of Louisiana brought a lawsuit against Miller's onwer, demanding that she be legally identified as a white person and set free. A lower court ruled that Miller was legally enslaved, but Martin and the justices of the supreme court overturned this decision and set her free. Their decision was an unpopular one in a time and place where the abolitionist movement was viewed as a threat to the culture and economy of the South. As a consequence, the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention abolished the Supreme Court in March 1846, ending Martin's career as a jurist. When the court was reconstituted the following day, Martin and his fellow justices were not asked to serve. Martin died the following December. (The story of the Sally Miller case was included in George Washington Cable's book Strange True Stories of Louisiana and more recently in The Lost German Slave Girl, by John Bailey.)

The house in which Martin passed his later years still stands on Royal Street, in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It is now a boutique hotel called "The Cornstalk Hotel", named for it's distinctive cast-iron fence, which features a pattern of cornstalks and morning glories. (The fence was added by a later owner.)

Martin translated Robert J. Pothier On Obligations (1802), and wrote The History of Louisiana from the Earliest Period (2 vols. 1827-1829) and The History of North Carolina (2 vols., 1829). His holographic will in favor of his brother (written in 1841 and devising property worth nearly $400,000) was unsuccessfully contested by the state of Louisiana on the grounds that the will was void as being a legal and physical impossibility, or as being an attempted fraud on the state, as under it the state would receive a 10% tax if the property went to the heirs of Martin (as intestate) in France.

He won the name of the father of Louisiana jurisprudence and his work was of great assistance to Edward Livingston, Pierre Derbigny and Louis Moreau de Liset in the Louisiana codification of 1821-1826. Martin's eyesight had begun to fail when he was seventy, and after 1836 he could no longer write opinions with his own hand. He died in New Orleans in 1846.


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Political offices
Preceded by
James Brown		 Attorney General of Louisiana
1809–1810		 Succeeded by
Louis Moreau de Liset
Preceded by
Louis Moreau de Liset		 Attorney General of Louisiana
1815–1817		 Succeeded by
Etienne Mazureau
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