In 1840s Louisiana, public attention was captured by the story of a German immigrant who had lived enslaved for over twenty years.  The articles communicate an alarm that a white person could be forced into the very same situation that many people of color were experiencing every day.  The story of Sally Miller was much more than mistaken identity, it explored how race was defined and performed, and how immigrant communities were encapsulated into a culture that made one race preeminent over all others. 

Based on information that came out during the court case and investigations thereafter, we now know more about Sally Miller than she did herself at the time.  She was born Salomé Müller in  Langensaultzback in Alsace on the Lower Rhine in 1814 to parents Daniel and Dorothea (“Sally Miller,” 1845; “Sally Miller,”2021).  Her parents were part of a group of about 1800 German immigrants from Alsace, mostly farmers and mechanics, who had contracted with a ships-master for passage to the United States.  The ship-master stole away with their money and left them stranded in Amsterdam. Unable to continue their journey without paying the ship owners for passage, they were stranded, until a contract for their transport was made on their behalf by the ‘Holland Government,’  so says the article in the Hartford Courant in 1846 (“The Case of Salome Muller,” 1846). 

Starting in 1816 tens of thousands of  Europeans, mostly German and Swiss, were leaving their countries to escape burdensome taxes, crop failures, conscription, and unemployment in the post-Napoleonic years. Upon arriving in the seaports of Rotterdam and Amsterdam many immigrants would become victims to “soul merchants” and be forced to become redemtioners, contracted to work for for free one to three years in farms and towns of the South to pay back their debt (Hasian, 2003; Sweirenga & Lammers, 1994).  Many of the 1800 Germans from the Alsace, sailing on the Johanna for New Orleans, found themselves in the same position.

In March 1818, after many deaths aboard ship during their voyage, the indenture contracts of the surviving Müllers, father, son, and two daughters, were sold to John Fitz Miller of Attakapas Parish, owner of a sugar cane plantation.  The Müller’s friends and fellow travelers did not immediately know that within weeks of their installation at the Fitz Miller plantation, Daniel and his son Jacob died of fever.  By the time family members tried to reconnect with the two girls, they had vanished (“Sally Miller,”2021). 

Sally Miller’s story was unraveled backwards for the courts after this, but I’ll try to keep it organized.  Fitz Miller, referred to as Miller in the articles, would later say in court that Sally Miller was purchased from Anthony Williams of Mobile as Bridget, a ‘mulatress.’  Miller changed her name to Mary, because he already ‘had another slave named Bridget.’    During her time at Fitz Miller’s plantation Sally Miller would be given to the Miller’s ‘colored overseer’ for a wife and would give birth to four children, Lafayette (who died about 1839), Madison, Charles and Adeline (“Sally Miller,”2021).  After  a time Fitz Miller sold her to Lewis (or Louis) Belmonti,  who owned a cabaret in a predominantly Spanish section of New Orleans.  Belmonti would recount later that he had suspected Sally Miller was white and attempted to rescind the sale,  upon which time Fitz Miller said 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 Case of Salome Muller,” 1846). 

It was working at this cabaret that she caught the eye of Madame Karl (or Carl) Rouff, one of the Müller ‘s fellow travelers on the Johanna.  Sally Miller was about thirty.  Madame Karl immediately recognized Sally Miller as the child of her friends; she  approached and questioned her about her past and parentage.  Sally Miller was called Mary at the time, and answered that she did not know or remember her family, and that she had always been enslaved.  Not long after this meeting, Madam Karl took ‘Mary’ Miller to Salomé Müller’s cousin and godmother, Eva Schuber and her husband Francis.  The Schubers also identified ‘Mary’ Miller as Salomé, the lost daughter of Daniel and Dorothea Müller   (“Sally Miller,”2021; “Sally Miller,” 1845; “The Case of Salome Muller,” 1846).  Friends and family of the Müller’s, local merchants, came together to file suit against Belmonti for the restoration of Salomé Müller’s freedom.

Many aspects of the trial focused on what Marouf Hasian Jr. called a performance of race. In a society where identification of race was paramount to maintaining legal division, it was important for the men who enslaved Miller to demonstrate how good and virtuous they were, and also how Miller’s own choices and behavior aligned more with non-white individuals. Miller had been classified by society as a ‘mulatress’ or someone of mixed race. She was described as having dark hair, hazel eyes, and being tanned from outside labor (“Sally Miller,” 1845). People of mixed race were difficult for the institutions of the antebellum South because they represented a taboo interaction of two races, and were difficult to categorize in a system based firmly in visual appearance. Still those actors who were responsible and interested in maintaining the categorization of races clung to characteristics, behavior, language, education, and culture as a way to discerning race classification (Hasian, 2003).

The “German mind is strongly excitable and imaginative with a fondness for the wonderful, marvelous, incredible and disposition and eager desire to believe the mysterious….”

–Hartford Courant (“The Case of Salome Muller,” 1846)

Sally Miller’s case also highlighted the difficulties of redemtioners entering into the antebellum South. In the classification systems of the South at the time, these immigrants were not considered ‘blacks’ or free whites. “They were the perfect example of what scholars today call “not-quite” white, the homeless and impoverished sojourners who lived just a few rungs above the black slaves” (Hasian, 2003). At various points in the newspaper coverage of the trial, the German family and friends of Sally Miller were characterized as silly and prone to flights of fancy as a way to undermine their contributions to her case.

Sally Miller and her German supporters did not win her initial court suit. Instead her supporters were instructed by the judge to buy her freedom; essentially to buy into the institutions and laws constructed to normalize the enslavement of non-whites (Hasian, 2003). And though Sally Miller was refused a retrial, she did bring her case to the Louisiana Supreme Court where she was ‘restored to liberty’ (“Sally Miller,” 1845). Once, free Sally Miller continued working with the court system in an attempt to secure freedom for her three remaining children, but she was not successful (“Sally Miller,”2021). Her story inspired authors of popular fiction post civil war, and was revisited again in the 21st century by John Bailey, who suggests that Miller was never Salomé Müller, but instead used opportunity and ingenuity to trick the courts into ending her enslavement (“Sally Miller,” 2021).

The most resounding part of Sally Miller’s story, to me, was the myriad of laws built around making slavery an acceptable condition in society, from defining those who may be enslaved to tracing ownership of supposed ‘property.’ The more I have studied copyright law, the more I’ve seen that law is firmly rooted in philosophy where structures of thought are built upon each other like blocks of a building. Removing one law will have ramification for the entire structure, but may not actually pull the whole building down. There are precedents and seemingly unrelated laws written with the same philosophical underpinnings still holding out, still casting a shadow.

References

• The Case of Salome Muller.  Hartford Courant Hartford, Connecticut  07 Feb 1846, Sat Page 2
• The Case of Salome Muller.  Hartford Courant Hartford, Connecticut  09 Feb 1846, Sat  Page 2
• Hasian,  J. . M. (2003). Performative law and the maintenance of interracial  social boundaries: assuaging antebellum fears of “white slavery” and the  case of Sally Miller/Salome Müller. Text & Performance Quarterly, 23(1), 55–86. https://doi.org/10.1080/10462930310001602048 
• Sally Miller.  Montreal Gazette. Montreal, Quebec, Canada  17 Jul 1845, Thu  Page 4
• Sally Miller (2021) Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Miller
• Swierenga, R.P. & Lammers, H. (1994).  “Odyssey of Woe” : The Journey of the Immigrant Ship April from Amsterdam to New Castle, 1817-1818.  The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography.  68(4). https://journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/download/44946/44667/0