‘The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans’

When might a Southern court have favored a slave over a slave owner? Consider The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans (Rutgers University Press), on a legal battle in which “the murky waters of Southern racial designation came under scrutiny.”

Carol Wilson, a historian at Washington College, begins her tale with the startling claim of an immigrant woman who visited a New Orleans cafe in early 1843. Madame Karl, as she was known, thought she recognized Sally Miller, a slave working in the cafe, as Salomé Muller, a fellow German, who had disappeared as a child decades before. Sure of her feeling, she took Sally to the home of Salomé's cousin who agreed and said she would recognize Salomé “among one hundred thousand persons.” With their help, Sally Miller filed a lawsuit declaring herself a white woman and suing for her freedom. The suit was against her master, the cafe’s proprietor, but soon primarily involved her previous owner, John F. Miller.

The Muller family had left the Rhineland to escape the famine that followed 1816, known in Europe as the “year without a summer.” Buying passage to Philadelphia, they were swindled and stranded in a Dutch port. Their recourse was a ship to New Orleans under the terms of “redemption,” an unusual form of indentured servitude. But if Sally Miller was to be believed, as Salomé, her status as redemptioner had devolved into slavery.

Ms. Wilson explores the society the Mullers encountered in New Orleans, then the sixth-largest city in the United States. A place of unlimited dissipation, said a visitor of the era, who also noted the city’s diversity in “commixtures not yet classified.” Such racial questions were at the heart of the lawsuit. Who was Sally Miller? Along with claiming she was Salomé, her lawyers’ arguments went beyond features and skin color to a performative aspect of race. Sally Miller’s very perseverance, they argued, was testimony to her whiteness. John Miller’s supporters, on the other hand, considered Sally a quadroon: three-fourths white and one-fourth black, and by law and bill of sale a slave.

An initial verdict in his favor was reversed on appeal to Louisiana’s Supreme Court. Undaunted, John Miller continued, accusing Sally Miller of fraud and brandishing a new and spectacular claim: He’d found the real Salomé Muller. The book acknowledges that evidence points to two separate lives, one Sally’s, one Saloméis. Why then did the state’s highest court ultimately disagree?

It was preferable, Ms. Wilson says, to see Sally as white and a “tragic victim of fate” than to admit that a slave of African descent had “bent white law, public opinion, and the courts to her will.”

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http://chronicle.com Section: Research & Publishing Volume 54, Issue 8, Page A16