If she be not, then nobody has told who she is.
Judge Bullard, in Sally Miller v. Louis Belmonti (1845)151
John Fitz Miller lived until 1857, thriving on the hatred and anger he felt toward Salomé Müller and those who had supported her. He died on his beloved Orange Island, New Iberia, having fended off to the end the persistent attempts by his creditors to wrestle it from him. He was aged seventy-seven. After his death, there was yet another attempt to seize his assets, but the Louisiana Supreme Court, in an opinion that became an authority much quoted in bankruptcy law, ruled that his considerable estate was now out of reach.152
Miller may have appreciated the irony that the only favorable decision he ever received from the judges of the court he so detested was after his death—but then perhaps not, because a consequence was to hand his money to Nathan Wheeler, someone he detested even more.
Roselius continued to practice law in New Orleans for another thirty years, while making time to lecture to students at the University of Louisiana, a role he performed for two decades, eventually being appointed a professor. He was one of the few voices raised against ceding from the Union at the State Convention that plunged Louisiana into the Civil War. After Union forces took the city, he was regarded by many as a traitor. He was offered the position of chief justice of the state twice, once by General Shepley during Occupation and once by Governor Wells during Reconstruction. He refused it both times, citing the failure to guarantee him judicial independence. He died in his sleep, with his affairs in order, in 1873 at the age of seventy-one. On the day of his death, he had been due to appear in court in the morning and to deliver a lecture to his students at the university in the afternoon.
Buchanan wrote judgments reflecting public prejudice that made him seem wise—so wise, indeed, that he was elected by popular vote to the Supreme Court in 1853. There he appeared even wiser by writing judgments that bore heavily on black people.153 He sat until the Civil War came to the city in April 1862.
The notoriety of the Sally Miller case did little to advance Wheelock S. Upton’s career, as in the eyes of many it marked him as a fool and an abolitionist. His practice suffered for it. He survived, if not particularly prospering, as a lawyer until his death, at age fifty, in Carroll-ton, a suburb of New Orleans, in 1860.
John Randolph Grymes continued his colorful career at the New Orleans bar. He was counsel for Myra Clark Gaines in the celebrated case involving a disputed inheritance and a lost will, which ran for almost fifty years. Grymes died well before its completion, in New Orleans in 1854, aged sixty-eight.
Litigation over the identity of Sally Miller had consumed six years of the lives of Francis and Eva Schuber. Even when it was over, it continued to weigh upon them, aware, as they were, that many derided them as being the naive victims of an ambitious slave. In the 1850s they moved to Panama, where an elite society, made wealthy by sugar, tobacco, and coffee, was as prosperous as any in the Gulf states. There they disappeared from the sight of history.
John Lawson Lewis, the man who felt compelled to tell the truth, was elected mayor of New Orleans in 1854. During the Civil War, he was a major general, commanding the First Division of the Louisiana militia. He survived the war, to die in 1886. The obituary writer of the Monroe Bulletin wrote of him:
The close of the war saw the gallant old General stripped of the wealth he had amassed during his busy and useful life; but he ever remained the same courtly, genial gentleman he had always been, a man among men, ever generous, brave, hospitable and typifying in his own person the high qualities of the ancient Southern chevalier.154
What happened to Salomé Müller? Cable’s version, relying on what he was told by members of the German community forty years after the event, was that she married John Given, a riverboat pilot. “As might readily be supposed,” added Cable, “this alliance was only another misfortune to Salomé, and the pair separated.” He wrote that Salomé then went to California. Her cousin, Henry Schuber, told Cable that he had seen her in Sacramento City in 1855,“living at last a respectable and comfortable life.” Deiler, relying on similar sources, said she married a white man named Frederick King. Deiler agreed with Cable that she went to live in California.155
According to Cable, “Salomé being free, her sons were, by law, free also.” They went to Tennessee and Kentucky and became “stable-boys to famous horses, and disappeared.” Cable quoted no authority for this belief, and it is difficult to believe. It wasn’t likely that Miller would release Salomé’s children; to the contrary, Miller would have relished a freedom petition from the children, since it would have given him yet another opportunity to have battled their mother in the courts. Since Lafayette died in about 1839, presumably Cable was referring to Madison and Charles. Cable seemed to be unaware of the existence of Adeline. When Salomé fled to the Schuber home, she left her son Charles behind in Belmonti’s cabaret and seemed happy to leave him there to be brought up by the man who was probably his father. The last time Madison and Adeline were mentioned in court documents was Upton’s ill-fated writ of habeas corpus, which was adjourned off, never to return. It is more likely that all of Salomé Müller’s children remained as slaves, owned by either Belmonti or Miller.
Who, then, was she?
She was Salomé Müller; she was Bridget Wilson; she was Mary Miller; she was Sally Miller; she was Sally Brigger; she was Polly Moore; she was Sally Hamilton. She was born on an unknown date; she was born in 1809; she was born in 1813; she was born in 1815. She was raised in Tatnall County, Georgia; she was raised in Langensoultzbach, Alsace. She was a mulatto; she was part Amerindian; she was pure German; she was yellow; she was white. She was a redemptioner and the servant of Grayson, Thomasson, and Gleason. She was a slave and had six owners: Wilson, Rigdon, Thomas, Williams, Miller, Canby, and Belmonti. She never married and had four slave children from four men. She was married, raised two children, and died in 1842 in the arms of her husband, Alexis Hamilton, on a farm on the Ouachita River. She went to California in 1849 and lived happily ever after.
The tale of the Lost German Slave Girl has been a curiosity of Louisiana’s history for the past century and a half, and its telling has usually been adapted to suit the writer’s particular ideological purpose. The story was first used by abolitionist to warn that slavery had so brutalized the South that even white women were at risk of being taken into bondage. During the 1890s, in Cable’s hands, it became a melodrama, with Salomé Müller as the heroine, Upton and Roselius as the gallants, and John Fitz Miller playing the role of the dastardly villain. About the same time, Deiler used the story to show how the German community had rallied to help one of its own. In 1939, a Louisiana historian, John Smith Kendall, after describing the events leading up to the first Supreme Court decision, concluded that “the people of New Orleans in those days, even the slave-holding class, seemed to have been a very humane and justice-loving people, at least as far as concerned the theory of the law, whatever may have been the practice.”156
Historians writing after Cable and Deiler have uncritically adopted the formulae laid down by them—that Salomé Müller’s story is that of a white woman taken in slavery who overcame tremendous obstacles to eventually be released. Cable claimed to have read the court files—if he did, he was guilty of the most disgraceful suppression of information and distortion of the facts. The considerable and persuasive evidence that John Fitz Miller assembled to show that she was an imposter was either disparaged or ignored. Even worse, both he and Deiler ended the tale in 1845 after the Supreme Court victory, with Salomé Müller and her lawyers triumphing over Miller.
Cable was a writer with an international following, adept at extracting all he could from Louisiana’s exotic and mysterious past. His aim was to write stories that would sell—and the struggle of a German woman escaping from slavery was a formula for a surefire success. He knew his market, and it was predominantly white. He knew that his audience wouldn’t want to read about a mulatto who had fooled white people, her own lawyers, and, ultimately, the highest court in the state. So he constructed the plot to suit his readers’ prejudices and ignored anything to the contrary.
Yet, if he had been fair about the material on the court files, he could have written about a quite different heroine. He could have written about an illiterate slave woman named Bridget Wilson, who with incredible perseverance, bravery, and guile conducted a lonely six-year struggle to be free. And she succeeded!
If this is what Bridget Wilson did (and I believe it is so), then the artfulness with which she pursued her goal of freedom was simply astonishing. Not once did she say she was of German descent; she left that to her supporters. Not once did she come forward with scraps of information about her childhood, although these could have easily been gained from the Schubers. Not once did she recall events before living at Miller’s sawmill; it was for others to discover her past. She didn’t falter. Her constant goal was freedom—for herself and for her children. She seized the one chance of liberty that was ever likely to come her way, and she hung on to that chance with a tenacity I could only marvel at. She is a symbol of the human spirit and of the many, many slaves who never accepted their bondage.
This is who Sally Miller was. She was Bridget Wilson, the slave.