The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans
by Carol Wilson
Summary
In 1843, the Louisiana Supreme Court heard the case of a slave named Sally Miller, who claimed to have been born a free white person in Germany. In The Two Lives of Sally Miller, Carol Wilson explores this fascinating legal case and its reflection on broader questions about race, society, and law in the antebellum South. Why did a court system known for its extreme bias against African Americans help to free a woman who was believed by many to be a black slave? Wilson explains that while the notion of white enslavement was shocking, it was easier for society to acknowledge that possibility than the alternative-an African slave who deceived whites and triumphed over the system.
Excerpt
One day in the spring of 1843, Mrs. Karl Rouff, a German immigrant, entered a café on Levee Street in New Orleans. The slave who served her looked familiar, and eventually Madame Karl, as she was known, realized with a shock that she recognized the woman. Madame Karl had last seen her more than two decades earlier when both had arrived in the city with several hundred other Germans. At that time, this woman had been a small child called Salome Muller. Salome’s mother and infant brother had not survived the voyage from Europe, and her father and older brother had died soon after arriving in Louisiana. Salome and her sister Dorothea, both under the age of six, had disappeared and had never been seen or heard from since.
Madame Karl questioned the slave, who neither recognized her customer nor recalled emigrating to the United States in 1818. She explained that she was called Sally Miller and was the property of Louis Belmonti, owner of the café. Madame Karl took Sally to the home of Eve and Francis Schuber in the nearby suburb of Lafayette. The Schubers were also German immigrants and had traveled on the same voyage with Madame Karl and the Muller family. In fact, Eve Schuber was Salome Muller’s cousin and godmother. Schuber recalled watching the stranger come up the steps, and was struck by her resemblance to the missing child and her family. She asked Madame Karl, “Is that a German woman? I know her.”
Madame Karl replied, “If you know her, who is she?”
Schuber answered, “One of the lost Millers.” (Schuber here used the anglicized Miller for Muller.) Schuber stated that the family resemblance was strong; beyond that, she recollected Salome Muller well enough to be able to recognize her “among one hundred thousand persons.” Her husband, upon seeing the woman at his house, asked his wife, “Is that one of the girls that were lost?”
Eve Schuber’s identification was especially significant: as the niece of Salome’s mother (also named Dorothea), she had been in the constant company of the Muller family on board ship. After Dorothea Muller died on the journey, fifteen-year-old Eve (nee Kropp) took over the nursing of little Salome. Her commitment to the girl’s care was such that when they landed in New Orleans, Eve asked her uncle Daniel Muller to allow her to keep Salome and raise her. Like the other members of her family, however, the little girl was indentured to an Attakapas farmer. Eve herself was also bound out, and it seems unlikely that her master would have permitted her to take responsibility for the care of a young child. Since that time, Eve had served out her indenture in the city and married fellow immigrant Francis Schuber, who had set up business as a butcher. She and her husband had remained in New Orleans…[she] did not see Salome Muller again until the day in 1843 when Madame Karl came to her house with the slave Sally.
With the support of the Schubers, Sally initiated a lawsuit in New Orleans District Court against her owner…she declared that she was a free white woman and had been held in slavery illegally for more than two decades.
Reprinted with permission of Rutgers University Press. http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Reviews
“This book is an original and provocative exploration of a purported case of mistaken identity. Wilson offers a unique look at questions of racial identity under the law in the early republic."--Timothy S. Huebner, author of The Southern Judicial Tradition: State Judges and Sectional Distinctiveness, 1790-1890
Author's Biography
Carol Wilson is an associate professor of history at Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland