The master may also use every art, device or stratagem to decoy the slave into his power…
Justice Baldwin, United States Circuit Justice, 183368
John Fitz Miller described the petition to free his ex-slave as the “darkest crisis of my life, coming unsought and unexpected.”
It was unexpected because, although the amazing story of the German slave girl had been a topic of gossip in the city for weeks, no one was prepared to risk Miller’s legendary ill temper by mentioning the matter to him. Miller lived much of his time on his sugar plantation on the banks of Bayou Teche in Attakapas.* On his periodic visits to New Orleans he had failed to notice that there was a pause in the conversation when he joined his friends in the main bar at the St. Charles Hotel and that some of his old acquaintances seemed reserved when he spoke to them. In the end, it was left to his mother to tell him what seemingly everyone else knew. She had heard it from his ex-business partner, William Turner. A shocked Miller immediately confronted Turner and angrily accused him of spreading rumors about him. Turner shook his head sadly. Didn’t he know? How could he not know? There had even been a paragraph in the German-language newspaper, naming him. Only a day or two ago a petition for her freedom had been filed at court, and at this very moment she was under lock and key in the calaboose.
The petition hadn’t been served on Miller because it was Belmonti, and not he, who was named as the defendant. Miller strode to the courthouse and demanded to be shown the petition. When at last the clerk of courts placed a copy in his hands, he trembled as he read what it said about him. The accusations made against him, so clearly and precisely set out, were even more appalling than anyone had dared to hint to him. “I am unwilling,” he was later to write to his supporters, “that the finger of scorn should be pointed at me as a man capable of holding in bondage a white child of tender years entitled to her freedom, for the sake of the trifling value her services could ever be to me. … I will expose to the best of my abilities, the tissue of perjury, folly and corruption of which this case was made up, and in which I was made the victim.”69
From then on Miller regarded himself as the real defendant and Belmonti as nothing more than a name attached to his court action. He consulted his attorneys, Lockett & Micou, and demanded the right to defend himself. This could be easily done, they advised. Louisiana law allowed a buyer to sue the seller if there had been a false declaration about the quality of the thing sold. All it required was for Belmonti to join Miller as a party on the basis that when Miller had sold him Mary Miller, he had warranted that she was his property, but now it was being asserted that she was a free person and incapable of being owned by anyone.
“For the value of the slave I care nothing,” declared Miller.70 His motivation, he claimed, was to defend not only his own honor as a gentleman, but the honor of his mother as well. Miller, a lifelong bachelor, was in his mid-sixties. He had rarely lived apart from his mother, and he realized that if people supposed he had reduced a German child to a slave, they would also suppose that his mother must have known about it. “What is far dearer to me than reputation or even life itself,” he wrote, is “to remove suspicion from a beloved mother now near ninety years of age, still in full possession of all her faculties, though sorely grieved that her long life of charity, benevolent feelings, and beneficial deeds, were not a security against the shafts of falsehood and of slander.”71
John Fitz Miller was born into old wealth in Philadelphia in 1780, the son of John and Sarah Fitz Miller. In the period following the Louisiana Purchase, Miller, then in his twenties, left his parents’ home. He arrived in New Orleans with a chain of six healthy slaves and a determination to make his fortune. He was in the city for less than two years when his mother joined him. His father had died, and his mother, after a short, second marriage to Joseph Canby of South Carolina, had become a widow again. Both Miller and his mother, now Mrs. Sarah Canby, were independently wealthy, and Miller, latching onto the economic boom in New Orleans in those years, proceeded to make himself even wealthier.
Massive docks were being built in the Navy Yards and Miller contracted to supply labor and lumber to the government. He then opened a block-making shop on the levee, and sometime around 1818, he purchased Withers’ sawmill and the surrounding land downriver. It was an astute investment. The city had an inexhaustible demand for timber. Wharves were being constructed for miles on both sides of the river. Hundreds of dwellings were being built, all requiring wood—for the storied mansions being erected in the American sector, for the timber-framed houses being built for the Irish and German immigrants near the waterfront, and for the shotgun houses* being built for the free coloreds in Faubourg Tremé and across the river in Algiers. Down the Mississippi came rafts of hickory, oak, willow, cherrywood, and walnut to be hauled over the levee into Miller’s sawmill. From the bayous of southern Louisiana he obtained the indestructible swamp cypress, with its fine grain that turned red as it dried. Schooners brought logs from mills scattered along the Gulf coast. He purchased rough sawn lumber from plantation owners along the Red River and dressed it with his newly purchased steam engine.
By 1823, Miller had thirty slaves living in the grounds of his yard and working as sawyers, axmen, and wagoners. He was widely regarded as a good master, and it was a matter of pride to him that any slaves he owned were always well looked after. Down by the levee he built a dozen cabins in rows facing each other across a muddy track. Each cabin had a wooden floor, a proper griddle for cooking and window flaps that opened on poles. He believed it was economic lunacy for a master to ill-treat his slaves and he was contemptuous of his neighbors who let theirs live in filth, or were stingy with food and clothing. He got his work out of them though, believing he could achieve that without being a zealot with the whip. Strict supervision was the answer. He ran his mill from first light to dark every day, save Sunday. He hired Mr. Struve as his overseer and gave him firm instructions about how many feet of wood he expected to be cut each week. If there was a shortfall, everyone from Mr. Struve downward knew about it.
At the back of the mill, on a slight rise to catch the breeze, he built a house for himself and his mother, with elaborate stables for his horses in the rear. In 1833 he purchased a second house; this time upriver of the city, but still he hadn’t exhausted his credit with the banks, so, as an investment, he built eight two-story brick buildings in a square at Faubourg St. Mary. With property values doubling each year, what did it matter if he was paying 20 percent interest? He was rich. He was respected as an astute businessman. He entertained lavishly and drove one of the finest equipages in New Orleans.
There was an orgy of financial speculation in the United States in the 1830s and nowhere were the excesses as startling as in Louisiana. Banks built large gothic palaces, borrowed heavily from a compliant state government, and lent to anyone who had a scheme to foist on the market. Loans were secured by mortgages on swamps, or on crops yet to be grown, or on town lots alongside railway tracks yet to be laid. Ordinary people placed their money and their trust in companies that promised to double their investment every two years.
Miller wasn’t a man to miss out. There was an old saying in Louisiana that “it took a rich cotton planter to make a poor sugar planter.” He purchased three adjoining properties in Attakapas, each one of them running down to the banks of Bayou Teche, and in their rich, deep soils he planted acres of sugarcane. He worked eighty slaves and operated a sugar mill and a rum distillery. He purchased an island, cleared its woodlands, and planted six thousand orange trees, so that thereafter it became known as Orange Island. There, on one of its bluffs, he built a house with a view overlooking the silvery surface of Lake Peigneur.
Miller laid out a racecourse on Orange Island, and with a number of local gentlemen, formed the Attakapas Jockey Club. With his mother by his side, he hosted frequent dinners and parties. He entered into the political life of his community and for a period represented the southern ward of St. Martin’s Parish.
But for all his generosity and public spirit, Miller was never a popular man, and certainly never a man of the people. He didn’t wear his wealth graciously. His hospitality was showy, and the price of eating at his table was to accept his prickly nature. He took offense easily and wasn’t averse to threatening his neighbors with legal action. Once he got into an argument with the owner of adjoining lands and sued him for two thousand dollars, alleging that the man had pulled down fences and turned livestock onto his pastures. In response his neighbor said that Miller had ordered his slaves to use dogs to kill twenty head of his cattle. The jury found for Miller, but then to show its disdain at his behavior awarded him a contemptuous one dollar in damages.72
The Panic of 1837 was one of those cyclical catastrophes that occur every few decades to remind the citizens of the United States that wealth isn’t created by mass investment in paper promises. The end came quickly, although the signs had been there for a good year beforehand. National imports far outreached exports, and nervous financial houses in England began to tighten credit. For several seasons while bidders were scrambling to buy cotton on the New Orleans Exchange, its value was toppling in Europe. Late in 1836, prices on all commodity goods began to fall, and the slide continued in the New Year. Then, almost overnight, the value of bonds collapsed, and the bottom fell out of the New Orleans real estate market. In May 1837, every bank in New Orleans, save one, suspended payment. There was a brief recovery, but in 1839 the economy plunged into a deeper depression, and this time all banks in the city halted specie payments. The railway edging toward Nashville stopped dead in its tracks. The speculator who built the Banks Arcade in Gravier Street went bankrupt, and the City Exchange Building, with its planned French interiors, was hurriedly downscaled to half its original size. Finally, the state of Louisiana itself repudiated on its debts.
With a rapidity that stunned him, Miller went down with the market. For the first time in his experience, unsold lumber piled up in the grounds of his sawmill. He clutched a sheaf of worthless bonds. He owed more to the banks than he could possibly pay. Not that his guests on Orange Island noticed any difference. He still boasted the best table in the parish, and his thoroughbreds continued to triumph at meetings of the Attakapas Jockey Club.
For the next three years, Miller devoted his life to staving off bankruptcy. He moved money from one account to another, he borrowed from friends, he begged at bankers’ doors, and he juggled amounts due on promissory notes. Creditors wearied of getting money out of Miller. His first, and last, response was to take offense, and if pressed further, to litigate. He regarded letters of demand as a personal attack on his honor and every refusal to give him more time to pay, as an insult. He hired expensive lawyers to raise flimsy defenses and to take every technical point they could think of. Gradually the persistence of his creditors wore him down. He was forced to sell his houses in Lafayette and move back to the sawmill—but still he kept his properties in Attakapas. He transferred assets to his mother. Eventually, however, the day of reckoning came. In February 1841, he was summoned to appear at the Fifth District Court of New Orleans, where, in grim silence, he suffered the ignominy of being declared a bankrupt.73
However, to the amazement of his friends and the dismay of his creditors, Miller seemed as wealthy as ever, and his mother even richer. He continued to entertain and to run his horses, and he built a fine town house for himself and his mother in New Iberia, just a few miles away from his plantations. Then, in October 1842, in a miracle of financial manipulation, he was discharged from bankruptcy. Not that his creditors accepted this. They suspected chicanery, writs were issued, and a second round of legal action began.
Sally Miller remained imprisoned. Eva Schuber came with food and fresh clothes every day. Sigur, who accompanied Eva on one visit, peered at Sally through the bars and told her how hard he was working for her release and that it shouldn’t be much longer. The problem was that Miller had become involved and he was proving difficult. Sally sat bolt upright on a wooden bed and scowled at them both, but said little. The only illumination came from a single barred window, the size of a handkerchief, located high on the wall. Several other prisoners who lodged in the cell with Sally listened with interest to what was being said. It would only be for a few more days, Sigur promised, as he left.
The wardens practiced no racial or social discrimination in storing the human misery in the calaboose of the Cabildo. Runaway slaves, debtors, those awaiting execution, petty criminals, prostitutes, and lunatics were all lodged together in cells described by the Louisiana Courier in the early 1800s as “a series of very low, humid, and infectious vaults.”74
For the prisoners, it was a time of sitting and waiting, the only diversion being when a black person was brought in, placed in the stocks, given a flogging by the wardens, and then released. The wardens’ task arose because citizens of the city who were squeamish about whipping their slaves could send them along to the calaboose with a note saying how many lashes they deserved, and an envelope containing the twenty-five-cent whipping fee.
Sigur continued to wrangle with Miller’s attorneys. As far as Miller was concerned, Sally deserved to be locked up—if for no other reason than to demonstrate to the people of New Orleans that she rightfully belonged in a cell for runaways. His attorneys contemptuously dismissed the suggestion that a bond of five hundred dollars was sufficient. She was worth much more than that, and now that Mrs. Schuber had corrupted her into thinking she was white, why wouldn’t she flee to the North at the first opportunity? How easy it would be for her, with her pale skin, to catch a steamer to freedom. The bond would have to be substantial indeed.
After hearing their demands, Sigur took the journey to the Schubers’ house. They want someone to go surety for a thousand dollars, he told Francis and Eva. They looked at him in astonishment. How could they ever get someone to risk so much? It was more than Francis would earn in three years. She can’t be worth a thousand dollars, he said. Sigur wasn’t sure. He could ask a judge to set a lower amount, but that would bring all sorts of uncertainties. Miller’s lawyers might ask for two thousand; they might argue that she shouldn’t be released at all.
Eva set off again to do the rounds of the German business houses. Mr. Wagner listened as she told him how a German woman was now in a damp prison with mad people, criminals, and slaves. He remembered the Müller family, didn’t he? The five months they spent together on that ship in Helder? He would help, wouldn’t he? He reached under the counter, pulled out his cash box, and dropped a stream of gold coins into her hand. She visited Mr. Eimer, then Mr. DeLarue and Mr. Frendenthal. They all said they would assist. Theodore Grabau, an apothecary in the city, gave her several notes, then said that if she needed further help, she should come back. Eventually, she had a thousand dollars in money and pledges. Francis Schuber went to the sheriff’s office with Sigur and was entered on the court file as the bondsman.
On February 1, 1844, after a week in the calaboose, Sally Miller was released.
In the following days, a number of German businessmen who had donated to Eva’s cause were called to a meeting in Mr. Eimer’s house. It was time to stand together, he told them. One of their own had fallen into the hands of a slaver and she had to be rescued. It would be to the eternal shame of the German community if she didn’t have their support. By the end of the evening they formed a committee to ensure that the lawsuit received the financial backing it required. As well as Mr. Eimer, the gentlemen participating were Messrs Grabau, DeLarue, Miesegaes, Rodewald, Curtius, Serda, Fischer, and Frendenthal, all of them owning businesses in the city. The involvement of these men in the affairs of Sally Miller marked the end of Sigur’s association with the case. There was nothing in the court documents explaining why Sigur ceased to act, but no doubt the German gentlemen thought there was reason enough after Sigur had allowed Sally to be held in one of the foulest dungeons imaginable for a week. This was in addition to his disturbing habit of asking quibbling questions about why she could remember nothing of her parents. As far as Sally Miller’s backers were concerned, any lawyer representing her must have total faith. A new attorney with constant certitude had to be found.
The man they approached was Wheelock Samuel Upton. He was an unusual choice. He wasn’t of the first rank of lawyers in the state, nor of German descent. Upton was born into a distinguished New England family that could trace its ancestry back to a John Upton who arrived in Massachusetts in 1638. Wheelock Upton’s father, Samuel Upton, pursued interests in shipping, originally in Salem, and later in Bangor and Boston. Of Samuel Upton’s five children, one became a politician, three became lawyers, and his daughter became an expert in foreign languages. Wheelock Upton, the oldest of Samuel’s children, was born in 1811. He graduated from Harvard in 1832 and upon becoming aware that in New Orleans a young attorney might have clients, he headed there determined to make a name for himself. He cowrote a commentary on the Civil Code of the State of Louisiana in 1838, which he expected would establish him as a topnotch attorney, but it didn’t seem to have the desired effect. But then, Upton did little to endear himself to his Southern clients. Ever regarded as a Northerner, he had an abrasive personality, and was apt to embroider his addresses to the court with passages from Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. It was an approach that rarely moved New Orleans’s juries. He was fond of saying that his family had a long tradition of defending liberty and freedom of speech, quoting in support the instance of his ancestor, John Upton, who had stood against the hysteria of the Salem witchcraft trials of 1692. From this, Southerners suspected that he was a secret abolitionist.
The gentlemen from the German community attended at Upton’s rooms and, after handing him a folder of papers, asked him to acquaint himself with the facts of the case and prepare a report for them. Later that day, Upton examined what the men had left for him. He looked at the petition of freedom and the bond papers, then picked up the twenty or so pages of notes taken by Sigur of his conferences with Sally Miller and Eva Schuber. After reading for half an hour, with the papers still in his hands, he leaned back in his chair. Slowly the potential of what he held began to dawn on him. A man could spend a lifetime in the law and never come across a case like this. This, he decided, would be the trial to make his career.
In the following weeks Upton interviewed Sally Miller at length, both in his office and during several visits to Eva Schuber’s house. Although he had no reason to doubt her truthfulness, his questions produced no resolution of the puzzling blanks in her life. She remembered nothing about her life in Germany, or her parents, or her sister and brothers, or any of the people who now swore they recognized her. She knew nothing of her family’s journey to America. The horrors on board the Juffer Johanna, when half the passengers died, meant nothing to her. Her earliest recollections were of being owned by Miller at his sawmill. Upton asked her how old she was when Miller bought her. She didn’t know. He asked her about her earliest memories, but they were always of Miller. He had treated her kindly, she said, but always as a slave. His questions, modestly phrased, about her relationship with Belmonti were deftly misunderstood. She told him she was Mrs. Canby’s maid for several years, and when she was very young, she had almost died from yellow fever. She appeared anxious to help, yet nothing of substance ever emerged from his questions. She remembered no German words. When Upton closed his eyes and listened to her, she sounded like any other black servant.
Brash and ambitious Upton may have been, but he was astute enough to know when he was getting out of his depth. He had heard that Miller had engaged John Randolph Grymes and there was no more formidable opponent at the Louisiana bar. It was bound to be a difficult and lengthy case. Upton realized that he needed to be led by a more senior attorney.
With his satchel of papers, Upton walked to Christian Roselius’s office in Customhouse Street. Roselius had only recently retired as the state’s attorney general and he was building up his practice again. Upton had chosen Roselius not only because he was one of the state’s most experienced lawyers, but also because he was German by birth. Roselius received Upton in a room heavy with learning. Books were shelved from floor to ceiling and more were heaped in piles on the carpet. Yellowing papers sat on the window shelf, obscuring the light. A musty smell filled the air. Roselius motioned for Upton to be seated, then putting down a law report he had been reading, looked enquiringly at his visitor. Upton asked if he might assume that he had heard of Salomé Müller. Yes, of course, how could he not? There had been nothing else spoken of in the German community for weeks. Upton explained that she was now his client. He placed the petition in Roselius’s hands. Roselius read it quickly, then placed it on his desk. He picked up Sigur’s notes and flicked through them. He then sat quietly for a moment, nodding in time with his thoughts. It is a sad day, isn’t it, when the South can no longer tell the difference between a white person and a slave? He sighed, then pushed the papers back across the desk toward Upton. Don’t you agree? Upton said he did.
It’s bound to be a nasty little case, with Miller involved, added Roselius. Upton made no comment. Roselius grunted. You know, I wonder if our colleague Mr. Sigur has missed the point in all this. Surely before a court the most important thing will be whether she looks like a white woman or a slave? Is there any sign of the black in her? That’s the real question, isn’t it?