… a perpetual and impassable barrier was intended to be erected between the white race and the one which they had reduced to slavery.
Chief Justice Roger Taney of the Supreme Court
of the United States, 185693
Wheelock S. Upton’s legal opinion greatly pleased the gentlemen backing Sally Miller. He had expressed his entire belief in the truth of the main elements of the petition. She was, to his mind, of pure German blood and everything possible must be done to free her. He and Christian Roselius stood ready to prosecute her case with all the energy and skill they could muster.
The news that Roselius would be involved was greeted with delight by Sally Miller’s supporters. He was regarded as the most learned man in the German community and someone the American courts must listen to. It is said by some Louisiana historians that Roselius was a redemptioner, but others say this wasn’t so, citing as proof that a biographical note published during his lifetime makes no such claim, and almost certainly the author would have checked his facts with Roselius. Whatever the truth, Roselius’s rise from humble immigrant beginnings to become attorney general of the state remains an extraordinary achievement. When he landed in New Orleans in 1820, after a sea journey from Bremen, Roselius was seventeen years old, spoke little English, and possessed only a rudimentary education. Soon after his arrival, he was employed as an apprentice to a printer who published the Louisiana Advertiser, and his first home in America was a bed under his master’s composition stand. Roselius was a restless genius. He soon recognized that if he was to succeed in America he had to become proficient in English, so he purchased volumes of Shakespeare and Milton and studied them at night. Within six months he had become so accomplished in English, and so adept at typesetting, that he could simultaneously read the copy and lay the characters by touch. In 1824 Roselius began to read law and marveled at the simple beauty of Louisiana’s civil law. In 1825 he persuaded his master to allow him to use the printing press to publish his own magazine, the Halcyon, covering the literary and artistic scene in New Orleans in a style similar to the English Spectator. Roselius was the editor, chief writer, and typesetter. Louisiana was a difficult market for a magazine of culture and after eighteen months the Halcyon folded. Roselius began to teach part-time at a girls’ school. There he courted the directress of the school and married her. He continued his studies of the law, and in 1828 was admitted to the bar.
Carving out a career for himself as an advocate in the Louisiana courts couldn’t have been easy for a German immigrant with few contacts. As he waited in his office for clients, he toiled to rid his English of any trace of an accent by listening to himself address an imaginary jury. Because the civil law of Louisiana was ultimately derived from Roman law, he learned Latin so that he could read the Justinian Institutes as originally written; because the Civil Code was based on the Code Napoléon, he mastered French. In later years he became renowned for his ability, in addressing juries, to easily and fluently explain his point in French to the Creoles and then in English to the Americans.
Gradually work began to come his way. No one was more industrious in preparation, or more dogged in exploiting weaknesses in his opponent’s case. He was blunt and fearless, and had a profound knowledge of the law. His reputation spread and within a few years, he had a steady stream of clients anxious to find an advocate who would give his utmost to their cause. He was one of those rare attorneys who could not only mould a jury to his making, but also persuade judges by quoting from the ancient treasures of Roman and French jurisprudence. In 1840 he was elected to the state legislature, and the following year he was appointed attorney general. However, the elegant duplicity of Louisiana politics wasn’t to his liking, and after a term in office, he didn’t seek reelection; instead, he hastened back to his constant mistress, the law.
On April 27, 1844, the Answer of John F. Miller to the petition of Sally Miller was filed in the First District Court of New Orleans.94 The next day the clerk of courts delivered a copy to the office of Christian Roselius. He read it through and, after a moment’s reflection, called in a messenger and told him to go to Upton’s office and ask for his attendance as soon as possible.
Upton arrived within the hour. After reading the document, Upton handed it to his younger brother, Frank, who had come with him. Frank was another Harvard graduate, and with the encouragement of his elder brother had recently arrived in New Orleans to make a career in the law. It seemed that when one hired Wheelock S. Upton, one hired his younger brother as well. There was yet another Upton in the office they shared rooms in Exchange Place—Rufus, a cousin and a student at law—but the elder Upton thought he would be pushing Roselius’s patience if he had brought him as well.
In the opening paragraph of the answer, Miller had denied every allegation contained in the petition, save that he had sold Sally Miller to Louis Belmonti. He explained where he had obtained the girl: “That on the 13th August 1822, one Anthony Williams, then of Mobile, left with the Respondent for sale a certain mulatress girl, then named Bridget, about 12 years of age, said Williams claiming said girl as his slave, and representing her to be a mulatress and slave for life.”
His answer then told of selling Bridget to his mother, and eleven years later, repurchasing her, along with the three children she had borne in the meantime. In 1838, he had sold her to Belmonti. Never had he “received the plaintiff or her parents or any others as Redemptioners.” He declared that “he then believed and still believes her to be a mulatress of African descent.”
But it was the things that Miller had left unsaid that had caught Roselius’s attention and had caused him to summon Upton. Apart from Miller’s declaration that he believed Sally was of African descent (for what that was worth), there was nothing in the answer that contradicted the fundamental claim of the petition that she was German. Roselius had feared that Miller might have located a slave woman who claimed to be Sally’s mother, or a master who would swear that he had raised her from birth. There was nothing like that. Miller’s defense started in 1822, on the day she was deposited with him by Anthony Williams. The most important questions of all remained unanswered: Where had she been before that? Where did Williams get her? And who was Williams? Apart from saying he was “then of Mobile,” there was nothing more said about him. Upton said he knew a lawyer named Breden who had lived in Mobile for the last twenty-five years and had conducted the census there. He would write to him and ask what he knew of this Anthony Williams.
Miller’s failure to account for his slave’s whereabouts in the years before 1822 was encouraging. However, as Roselius and the Upton brothers discussed the case further, they realized that it was just as much a problem for them as it was for Miller. It meant there was no firm link between Miller and the disappearance of Salomé Müller in 1818. They couldn’t prove that Miller had taken her as his slave. About the only thing Miller had said with any authority was that he hadn’t engaged Daniel Müller and his children as redemptioners. He could, of course, be lying, but it would be a dangerous thing for him to do and would be easily checked by asking his neighbors. If he wasn’t lying, and he hadn’t taken Daniel Müller and the children as redemptioners, who had? Where had Salomé gone to in 1818? And where was the rest of the family?
It’s the missing four years, harped Upton to Sally Miller and Eva and Francis Schuber when they met in his office for a conference a few days later. They had to be able to explain to the court where she had been between 1818 and 1822. Sally shook her head. She couldn’t help. Her first memories were of recovering from yellow fever in Nurse Crawford’s house. She could recall nothing before that.
Upton turned to Eva Schuber.
The last time she had seen Daniel Müller and the three children was the day they had called in on her at Madame Borgnette’s school to say farewell. She remembered how worried she had been as she watched them walk away. Daniel had promised to write as soon as he settled in with his new master, but the weeks passed and she heard nothing. Friends explained to her that the mail service in Louisiana was good if it was between towns on the Mississippi, but if it had to cross from the inland parishes it could take weeks. But the weeks turned to months, and still there was nothing. She became convinced that something dreadful had happened.
Did you ever hear of them? Upton asked.
Francis Schuber then told what he knew. In his butchery business in the French Quarter he regularly bought meat from German farmers who herded their cattle from Attakapas to the city markets. About a year after Daniel Müller was last seen by anyone, Francis had gotten into conversation with one of the cattlemen who told him the story of what had happened on a keelboat making the run from New Orleans along the Atchafalaya River to Attakapas. A passenger, a man who couldn’t speak English—a German, the cattleman thought—was going upstream with his young son and two daughters. One evening, just as everyone was settling down to eat, the passenger let out a gasp, stood up, clutched at his chest, and toppled over. He was dead even before he hit the timbers. Where was he buried? Francis Schuber had asked. Well, they were halfway along a windy, tea-brown river moving through swampland. What else could they do? They waited until his children were asleep, weighted his body down, and toppled him into the water.
So, now there were three children on the keelboat, said Upton. Three young children.
Not for long, replied Francis. Not for long. When the crew awoke the next morning, the boy had gone. It took no time to search the keelboat. He had gone. No one had heard anything. No splash, no footsteps across the deck. It seems the boy had slipped himself over the side. By this time the crew was in a blue funk. It was difficult enough to explain that one of their passengers had died, but they at least had had his ten-year-old son to explain what had happened; now all they had was two small girls looking at them in horror. They searched the man’s luggage and found a ticket naming the family’s intended destination, so they delivered the two girls there. There was no one to meet them, so they tied a label around their necks and shoved off, leaving the girls standing on a wharf on a misty river, hemmed in by giant cypress trees.
There was a long silence as they imagined what might have happened next.
Eva Schuber had no doubts. The two little girls, stunned by the death of their father and the suicide of their brother, alone in the world, without speaking a word of the language, were collected by Miller.
Sally Miller continued to live with the Schubers in Lafayette during the months they waited for the trial to commence. Both she and Eva were strong-willed women and conflict between the two was inevitable, especially as Eva saw it as her role to take the black ways out of her goddaughter. Everything, beginning at the most elementary, had to be relearned. Eva gave instructions to Sally on how to sit demurely, with her feet placed just so, with her back straight and her hands folded in her lap. Never should her legs be open—only blacks and men sat like that. Eating was no longer a straightforward affair. There were special knives, forks and spoons for this and that, and a particular way to eat mashed potato, and another way to eat peas and never by squashing them together on a spoon. Her husband didn’t always follow these rules, but that, Eva explained, was because he was a man. Sally was no longer allowed to wear red; red was a black woman’s color. Her tignon was confiscated. Her hair was cut at shoulder length. Eva decreed that the sun must never touch her flesh. The judge must see a white-skinned woman. She had to wear gloves and hold a parasol aloft whenever she went abroad. And never again would she sign her name with a cross. Eva sat with her for hours at the kitchen table and guided her hand across a slate in a thousand repetitions of the name the litigation had given her. Sally Miller would pout. She would shout and scream her resistance, but Eva’s will prevailed.
The weeks passed and Sally began to complain that life in Lafayette was dull. Eva encouraged her to make friends with the German women who visited, but Sally was reluctant to meet them, saying that she had nothing to say to them. She complained that they peered at her as if she were a circus animal. She grumbled that the clothes Eva chose for her were too hot. She longed for her cotton smock that allowed the breeze to flow up her legs. She missed the excitement of the waterfront, the smells of the market, the cries of the traders, the ribald calls from the sailors. She wanted to mix with black men carrying meat that dribbled blood down their shoulders, and with women selling mangoes from large flat baskets balanced on their heads.
Sally escaped into the city whenever she could. She had a ready excuse. Upton had stressed to her how important it was to find witnesses who could say how she came into Miller’s possession. Who were the very first people she recalled meeting in her life? Who were the visitors who called for afternoon tea at Mrs. Canby’s house? Did she remember any of the men who worked for Miller or collected timber from his yard? She must speak to them all and ask if they knew how Miller had obtained her.
Three people came to Sally’s mind and she went searching for them. One was a white man, an engineer, by the name of Fribee, who kept the machines running at the sawmill. He had befriended her when she was a youngster, and sometimes he would take her to look at the huge steam engine that drove the blades backward and forward through the timber. Another was an old Creole woman, Madame Poigneau, who used to come and chat with some of the women in the slave huts. Then there was Daphne Crawford, the woman who had nursed her when she had yellow fever.
Sally searched first for Fribee. She asked for him in saloons, billiard halls, and waterfront inns. She asked boatmen sleeping it off on the levee. A few remembered him, although they hadn’t seen him in months. Some thought he had gone upriver.
She then went to the house on Rampart Street where Daphne Crawford lived. When the old nurse came to the door she recognized Sally immediately. Sally told her how she wanted to be free because she was white. Daphne listened, but showed no emotion and didn’t ask her inside. Sally began to ask if Miller had ever said where she had come from, but Daphne interrupted, saying she didn’t want to help. She didn’t believe that Sally was white. She was a mulatto, just like her, and her advice to Sally was to accept who she was. Her own daughter was fairer than Sally and still she wasn’t a white person.
Sally then went looking for Madame Poigneau. She had lived in a tumbled-down house with her ne’er-do-well husband and a brood of children a few streets back from Miller’s mill, but when Sally knocked on the door she was met by a stranger who said he had never heard of her. Despondently, Sally walked away. It was more than twenty years since she had seen Madame Poigneau. Perhaps she had died. Sally asked one of the traders at the market. As far as he could recall she had moved years ago to one of the streets at the back of the Vieux Carré. He thought for a moment, but no, he couldn’t remember where. He hadn’t seen her lately. Not for months, a year probably. She asked several more traders. They all knew Madame Poigneau, but they hadn’t seen her for some time. One trader gave Sally an address where he thought the old woman might be. Sally walked there and knocked at the entrance of a small clapboard house. The door opened and it was Madame Poigneau. She looked at Sally and, with a broad smile on her face, pulled her into a hug. Sally told her why she had come. But I had always thought you were white, replied the woman. She took her into her house, saying in a mixture of Spanish and English that she had been such a small, lost child. She could never understand what she was doing with Mrs. Canby, especially since she spoke with a German accent. Sally Miller took a sudden breath, and then asked her if she was sure about what she was saying. Yes, yes, said Madame Poigneau. I remember you. You were Bridget Wilson, and you spoke like a German.
Eva Schuber also walked the streets of New Orleans looking for witnesses. She was seeking people who remembered Salomé Müller in Amsterdam and would identify her as Daniel Müller’s daughter. She had expected to find twenty or thirty easily—after all, hundreds of them had arrived in 1818—yet, as she began to knock on doors and ask among the German community, she was surprised at how few of them there were. They had spread across the length and breadth of America. Some had moved upriver to states farther north. A few had gone to California; many more had journeyed east to Philadelphia or New York, where they had relatives and had originally planned to go before Krahnstover had taken them south. Many had died, seemingly within a few years of arriving. Eva heard stories of cholera, drowning, vague illness, hard drinking, childbirth, madness, yellow fever. Even within her own family there weren’t many left—her mother-in-law and her sister Margaret were both dead; the other Salomé, the sister of the Müller brothers and wife of Christoph Kirchner, had completely disappeared. Christoph and Salomé’s daughter, Dorothy, had lived in New Orleans for a couple of years, married, and moved somewhere upriver, but Eva didn’t know where. Henry Müller was dead, and while she knew his children were in Mississippi, she hadn’t seen them in a long time.
But there were also those who prospered and frequented the German Club, boasting of how easy it was to succeed in America. Eva spoke to them. Surely they remembered Daniel Müller and his wife Dorothea and their four children? There was Locksmith Müller and Shoesmith Müller. They both had children, but there was one particular child, Daniel’s daughter, a pretty, dark-haired girl—this was the one who had been held as a slave for twenty-five years and had now returned. Some asked if it was true that she’d had black men for husbands. And had children by them as well? Questions that insinuated that she was undeserving of their help, or that if she was truly German, this wouldn’t have happened. Eva would reply that it was all behind Sally now. Or, whatever had occurred, she wasn’t in any position to resist.
Others, although sympathising, would shake their heads and say they couldn’t remember that far back. There were so many children on the boats. There was so much distress, so many starving, sick people. It was hard to remember. Some didn’t want to remember. It had taken them years to put their nightmares to rest. Sometimes Eva would persuade one or two to visit her house and look at Sally who, with sullen resentment, would pose for her visitors. It was so difficult after all these years, they would say. Eva would nod, and say she understood, and make them tea and offer raisin cake, and then escort them to the door.
Mr. Wagner was one of these visitors to Eva’s house. Although he was from Württemberg, he had gotten to know the Müller family on board the Rudolph in the port of Helder in 1817. He drank coffee with Sally and asked her about her childhood in Germany and was surprised to learn that she didn’t remember anything. He took Eva aside and said he couldn’t in all conscience swear on a Bible that he recognized her. But Eva mustn’t think that he was withdrawing his support. He still believed in her and he would be quite willing to come to court and tell the judge about the mistreatment on the voyage to America and how all of them, including Daniel Müller and his children, were sold as redemptioners.
When Eva totted up her list of witnesses there were only seven, and that included herself and her husband. It was such a disappointment after all the effort she had put into it. She spoke to Mr. Eimer in his shop in Bienville Street. He was one of the most generous contributors to the fund to free Sally Miller, and was always ready to lend a sympathetic ear. He asked if the seven included Madame Carl, because he had heard that she was seriously ill. She had some sort of mysterious lump in her stomach, and the doctors didn’t know what to do about it.
Eva called on Madame Carl on her way home. She was in bed and seemed smaller than Eva had remembered her. Her skin was as gray as a winter’s dawn and there were deep circles under her eyes. Madame Carl smiled at her friend. Yes, of course, she would still give evidence. She inquired when the hearing was to be held. It was six weeks away. Ah yes, she said, she should still be around for that.
John Fitz Miller called on people who in years past had drunk his wine, dined at his house, and ridden out with him on early morning gallops. He hadn’t seen most of them for years, not since the disgrace of his bankruptcy, but an even greater disgrace threatened him now. It had to be done; he had to ask for help. To each he made the same request: Would they come to court to swear that they had never seen a little German girl among the domestic servants at his and his mothers house?
A pure white person couldn’t be a slave. This wasn’t a presumptive rule that could be rebutted by an owner bringing evidence to the contrary. Quite simply, no white person could be a slave—and no number of contracts of sale, court records, or memories of mothers in bondage could make it otherwise. At the core, the issue in Sally Miller’s case was whether she was of pure German descent. If she was, it didn’t matter how Miller obtained her, she must be free.
Sally Miller’s petition would be heard according to the unique laws of Louisiana. In 1803, when Thomas Jefferson purchased Louisiana from Napoleon Bonaparte, the territory was governed by the laws of the Spanish and French colonial administrators. Acting on the assumption that such laws must be barbarous, one of the first things the new American governor of the territory, William Claiborne, did was to attempt to impose America’s version of the English common law on the state. Much to his surprise, the citizens resisted. They liked their civil laws. They regarded their laws as morally superior to, and certainly more understandable than, the common law. Bowing to the storm of protests, Claiborne confined himself to reforming the criminal law and the law of evidence, and left the civil law of Louisiana to its Roman traditions. It was subsequently codified in 1808. Its sources were mainly French, but some Spanish, Roman and English elements were included in one harmonious mass. It was revised from time to time, most notably in 1825, but its fundamentals remained the same.
With biblical simplicity (and anticipating by 150 years the push for plain English), the code set out complex concepts in terms the ordinary man could understand. Here is an example:
Article 449. Common things may not be owned by anyone. They are such as the air and the high seas that may be used by everyone conformable with the use for which nature intended them.
Article 450. Public things are owned by the state or its political subdivisions in their capacity as public persons.
Article 453. Private things are owned by individuals, other private persons, and by the state or its political subdivisions in their capacity as private persons.
With such elegant brevity, is it any wonder the people of Louisiana fell in love with their civil code? Behind its apparent simplicity lay 2,000 years of wisdom, distilled and refined by the Justinian Institutes, the ancient writings of the Spanish partidas, and the works of Montesquieu. At every turn there was a religious and moral basis to the code. Whereas the common law was about the preservation of landed estates and the sanctity of a bargain between merchants, the code was devoted to the protection of the family and honest practices in business. For example, contracts were regarded as creating mutual obligations that involved concepts of fair dealing quite unknown to the common law. There was the astounding belief that merchants should act morally and that an agreement could be set aside if there was a defect that made the thing useless. In family law, acquisitions of property became, not the exclusive possession of the husband, but the joint possession of the spouses. A father in composing his will was compelled to reserve a portion of his estate for his widow and children. Bastards were legitimized by marriage and could inherit property along with the legitimate children. Parents were responsible for the damage caused by their children.
The Code was the source of the law, and it mattered not what an earlier generation of judges might have said about it. The dead hand of precedent was shunned. By way of contrast, the common law was jammed together by judge-made rulings stretching back centuries, to be ascertained not in one volume, but in hundreds of law reports that only the very rich could possibly possess.
However, at Governor Claiborne’s insistence, the rules relating to evidence at trials were determined according to the common law, and its contribution to Sally Miller v. Louis Belmonti and John F. Miller was to rule that neither Sally Miller, nor Louis Belmonti, nor John Fitz Miller could appear as witnesses. This was because, under the arcane laws that applied in the common law world at that time, a person with an interest in the outcome of a legal action could not appear as a witness in his own cause. The law reasoned that people couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth if the outcome might impact on their own pocket. Sally Miller, as well as being excluded under this rule, was doubly silenced because she was a slave. In Southern courts, the only time a slave was permitted to speak was to confess to a crime or to condemn another slave. The rule against an interested person giving evidence also applied to Francis Schuber, on the technical reasoning that he might lie to the court to save the thousand-dollar bond he had posted against Sally Miller’s promise to appear at court. Upton, anxious that Francis should give evidence, realized this problem in time, and a few weeks before the trial was due to commence, another person in the German community, a Mr. Boman, became the bondsman in his place.
Sally Miller left the Schuber household a fortnight before the trial began, and moved to a boarding house in Lafayette. Why the change? Only one insubstantial clue exists: during the cross-examination of Francis Schuber some weeks later, the attorney for Miller asked him if he had “expressed great partiality” for the plaintiff. Evidently, Francis was prepared for the question, because he ignored its sexual overtones and replied that he had taken “the part of the plaintiff because he knew her to be in the right.”
It was a nasty, underhanded question that had nothing to do with the merits of the case, but was damaging just the same—as Miller’s attorney had intended. Nothing more about the relationship between Francis Schuber and Sally Miller appears in the documents. Did the questions suggest that Francis Schuber was infatuated with Sally Miller? It is difficult to think what else the attorney was getting at. If it was the case, did Eva Schuber order her out of the house? Perhaps. In any event, although Sally left the Schubers’ home, there was no faltering in Eva’s dedication to the cause of freeing her goddaughter. Eva had devoted her very being to making Sally free, and she was determined to see it through, come what may.
Two days before the trial was due to commence, Eva Schuber’s son arrived at Upton’s office and handed him an envelope. He waited in case there was a reply. Inside was a brief, handwritten message. It said that Madame Carl had died during the night. Then a P.S.: I thought it important that you should know as soon as possible. Eva Schuber.
Upton thanked the boy. No, there wasn’t a reply.
As he shut the door behind the departing messenger, Upton felt a great weight settle on his shoulders. He cursed the bad luck of it. He had planned to make Madame Carl his first witness. He had lost the dramatic opening of her discovery of Sally Miller at Belmonti’s cabaret. He then had planned to lead her through the story of the journey from Germany, the deaths during the voyage, and how they were sold as redemptioners when they arrived. She had impressed him as a resolute woman, not likely to be flustered by his opponent’s cross-examination. She was to be the one to dispel any thought that this was a case brought by excited immigrants hoping to bring a lost relative back from the dead. Heaven knows the case had enough difficulties as it was. There was still no solution to the baffling puzzle of the unaccounted-for years between 1818 and 1822, which had swallowed Salomé Müller and spawned forth Bridget Wilson. Nor had anyone given him proof that Miller had engaged Daniel Müller and his children as redemptioners, much less that Miller had kept Dorothea and Sally at one of his plantations in Attakapas. And what had happened to Dorothea? No one knew that, either. According to Miller’s answer, Sally Miller was about twelve in 1822. Eva Schuber was now saying she was much younger. It was Eva’s recollection that the girl was a little over three when they left Alsace in 1817. She may have been younger, she may have been older, but whatever age, you would think she would remember something of her parents and the sea journey to the United States.
If this wasn’t enough, at the last moment Roselius had bowed out, giving as his excuse that he was obligated to appear in the Supreme Court for the churchwardens of the St. Louis Cathedral who were arguing that the building belonged not to Bishop Blanc, nor even Pope Leo XII, but to them. With only a perfunctory apology to Upton, Roselius had said that the most he could do was to appear to make the opening address, but thereafter Upton would be on his own.
Upton had learned that John Randolph Grymes would oppose him, and he had reason to be overawed at the prospect. Grymes was the elder statesman of the New Orleans bar and its most famous practitioner. He was the first choice of wealthy clients, and other counsel could only marvel at the fees that he could command. In one case, the infamous batture case,* he earned a reported one hundred thousand dollars for rescuing a strip of waterfront land for the City of New Orleans from the claims of a fellow lawyer, Edward Livingston. In another case, he and the same Edward Livingston were paid twenty thousand dollars each by the gentleman buccaneer Jean Lafitte to defend his brother, Pierre, on a charge of piracy. At the time when this engagement came his way, Grymes was the district attorney for the parish of Orleans, but the prestige of public office wasn’t enough to hold him and he resigned to appear for Lafitte. The team of Grymes and Livingston failed to obtain Pierre’s release, so the pirates organized a jailbreak and freed Pierre anyway. Jean Lafitte, ever the honorable man, acknowledged his debt and invited Grymes and Livingston to his island hideaway in Barataria Bay to collect their fee. What happened next is the stuff of legend, one version of which was recounted by Herbert Asbury in his book The French Quarter:
Grymes, who was notorious in New Orleans as a gambler and a playboy, accepted eagerly, but Livingston declined, and deputized Grymes to collect his fee at a commission of ten per cent. Grymes received the money the day he arrived at the pirate’s establishment, but he lingered on the island, charmed by Lafitte’s hospitality, and nightly gambled with the pirate chieftain. At the end of a few days the twenty thousand dollars Grymes had collected for himself was back in Lafitte’s strong-box, together with the two-thousand-dollar commission from Livingston.95
Such stories only added to Grymes’s reputation for absurd adventures and high living. The strict hearsay around New Orleans was that everything he earned through the law, he let slip through his fingers in high living, careless generosity, and discreet affairs of the heart. He frequented the cockfighting pits in the French Quarter, the horse track at Metairie, and the card table at the St. Charles Hotel. An invitation to dine at his table, with its magnificent food and fine wines, was to be savored for months afterward. During his lifetime he was involved in several duels, one as an upshot of his involvement with Jean Lafitte. A man imprudently accused him of being ‘seduced by the blood-stained gold of pirates’; Grymes was the steadier shot, and his bullet hit his accuser in the hip and left him a permanent cripple. On another occasion, while he was briefly a member of the state legislature, he attacked a fellow legislator.
The distinguished historian of Louisiana, Charles Gayarré, wrote:
There is nothing of the scholar in Grymes; his collegiate education has been imperfect; his reading is not extensive as to legal lore, nor anything else. But there is infinite charm in his natural eloquence and his powerful native intellect knows how to make the most skilful use of the materials which it gathers at random outside of any regular course of study and research. He has the reputation of never preparing himself for the trial even of important cases, and he seems pleased to favor the spreading of that impression. He affects to come into court after a night of dissipation, and to take at once all his points and all the information which he needs from his associates in the case, and even from what he can elicit from his opponents during the trial. It is when he pretends to be least prepared, and has apparently to rely only on intuition and the inspiration of the moment, that his brightest and most successful efforts are made. Many have some doubts about the genuine reality of this phenomenon, and believe that Grymes works more in secret that he wants the public to know.
No man was ever more urbanely sarcastic in words or pantomime. If the Court disagrees with him on any vital point, and lays down the law adversely to his views, he has a way of gracefully and submissively bowing to the decision with a half-suppressed smile of derision, and with an expression of the face which clearly says to the bystanders: I respect the magistrate, as you see, but what a goose that fellow is!96
A case with little law and few witnesses to sizzle was Grymes’s meat. Those burned by his cross-examination remembered his piercing eyes that mesmerized concessions that they never intended to make. In addressing juries he was witty, elegant, and cynical. He cajoled them with folksy humor and peppered them with shrewd observation about society, the fond silliness of women, the grandness of Southern culture, the bumbling ways of public officials and the inherent stupidity of dark-skinned people. He always spoke softly, with a lilt to his speech and a smile on his lips. His voice was easy to listen to and had a cadence that persuaded.
Upton spent the rest of the day fussing about his office, tidying his papers and going through his notes of examination of witnesses for the hundredth time. He made sure that the petition and the answer, the summons to appear and the bond papers were neatly indexed in a folder. That done, he leaned back in his chair. He wondered what would happen to Sally Miller if he lost the case. He supposed she would have to be returned to Belmonti. What then? Belmonti would be free to inflict any punishment upon her he felt she deserved. Still, on the couple of occasions he had met Belmonti, he didn’t seem a bad sort of fellow. Perhaps he wouldn’t be too harsh. But who would know? And there was always Miller in the background, who might want to borrow her for a while so that he could inflict some punishment of his own.
Upton’s mind wandered through the various aspects of the case. It seemed to him that Grymes had the much easier task. Miller’s explanation of how he obtained Sally at least had the advantage of simplicity—over twenty years ago, Williams came to his sawmill and left him a slave girl to sell. Williams didn’t return, so Miller sold her to his mother. Later he bought her back from his mother and sold her to Belmonti. And that was it. Logical, simple, and believable. Whereas his own case depended upon a court believing that a miracle had occurred when a German woman missing for a quarter of a century had been found in a New Orleans cabaret—and in Upton’s experience, courts didn’t like miracles. His witnesses were a succession of immigrants who could recognize a little girl after twenty-five years on the strength of two moles and because she looked like her dead mother. Upton took a deep sigh, willing himself to believe.