Sally Miller (American slave)

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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 Salome Muller.

The following account is taken from the slave narrative A Thousand Miles To Freedom: The Story of William and Ellen Craft, which is in the public domain: [1]

In March, 1818, three ships arrived at New Orleans, bringing several hundred German emigrants from the province of Alsace, on the lower Rhine. Among them were Daniel Muller and his two daughters, Dorothea and Salome, whose mother had died on the passage. Soon after his arrival, Muller, taking with him his two daughters, both young children, went up the river to Attakapas Parish (now St. Martin Parish), to work on the plantation of John F. Miller. A few weeks later, his relatives, who had remained at New Orleans, learned that he had died of the fever of the country. They immediately sent for the two girls; but they had disappeared, and the relatives, notwithstanding repeated and persevering inquiries and researches, could find no traces of them. They were at length given up for dead. Dorothea was never again heard of; nor was any thing known of Salome from 1818 till 1843.

In the summer of that year, Madame Karl, a German woman who had come over in the same ship with the Mullers, was passing through a street in New Orleans, and accidentally saw Salome in a wine-shop, belonging to Louis Belmonte, by whom she was held as a slave. Madame Karl recognised her at once, and carried her to the house of another German woman, Mrs. Schubert, who was Salome's cousin and godmother, and who no sooner set eyes on her than, without having any intimation that the discovery had been previously made, she unhesitatingly exclaimed, "My God! here is the long-lost Salome Muller."

The Law Reporter, in its account of this case, says:

"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" [2].

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.

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 Miller's 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.

A version of the Sally Miller story appeats in George Washington Cable's Strange True Stories of Louisiana. It is told somewhat dramatically and cannot be considered authoritative -- Cable glossed over many of 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.