Two women find a lost girl on the streets of New Orleans and begin a court case that unintentionally exposes the horrors of slavery and racism.
Today’s book that should be a movie is The Lost German Slave Girl: The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans by John Bailey, from Grove Press.
In this story, Bailey brings to light the struggles of many groups, with emphasis on the German and African-American experiences, in early 19th century America, particularly those in New Orleans, Louisiana. In a narrative that brings to life the Victorian streets of the Crescent City, he covers the struggles of immigrants, lawyers, pioneers, slaves, Creoles, slave owners, and their mixed-raced descendants. These descendants went by a variety of names – mulatto, quadroon, griffe, metif, marabon, sacatra, meamelouc, sang-melee – which were derived from the race – African, Caucasian, Spanish, Native American, biracial – of the parents. They were often discriminated against and faced severe limits on their freedom due to the percentage of non-white blood they supposedly contained. The prevailing belief at the time was it took seven generations to “breed” the minority blood out of someone’s lineage before they could be considered “pure white” and it was not uncommon for 19th-century travelers to see what appeared to be white people being auctioned off at slave markets and living in slave quarters. Some of these slaves were indeed Caucasians who had been kidnapped at a young age and grew up believing themselves to be black.
The story of The Lost German Slave Girl begins in the spring of 1843 when German immigrant Madame Carl Rouff finds a young woman on a busy New Orleans street. The girl looks just like Dorothea Muller, a fellow immigrant who had died on the voyage over, and Madame Carl concludes that she must be her daughter, Salome, whom the immigrant community lost track of after their landing and referred to as the “lost girl.” The young woman insisted she was Mary Miller, was a “yellow girl,” and belonged to a cabaret owner, Mr. Belmonti. However, after Madame Carl finds that she has dark auburn hair just like her supposed mother Dorothea, she insists that she come with her to the house of Francis and Eva Schuber. Eva had been Salome’s godmother in Germany and had washed her many times, so she knew where to check for identifying marks, which were to be moles. The ladies found these exact moles on the girl claiming to be Mary Miller.
The ladies immediately went to Mr. Belmonti and demanded that he free the girl they believed to be Salome. He refused, of course. But then a few weeks later, Salome showed up on the Schuber’s doorstep asking if she could be free. Immediately Eva Schuber went about gathering support from the German immigrant community.
The story of the German’s immigration is fascinating in and of itself and deserves to take up the first 15 minutes or so of a film adaptation of The Lost German Slave Girl. Their ordeal began in 1816 when crop failure in Alsace, due to the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia which resulted in a dust cloud that blocked out the sunlight worldwide, was causing a severe famine. Two brothers, Daniel and Henry Muller, heard of a land of plenty called America and convinced many of their fellow villagers to sell everything and immigrate with them. They joined throngs of refugees fleeing by foot to Amsterdam to charter a ship. The city was overflowing with thousands of refugees struck with Auswanderungsfieber (migration fever). The captain that took their money put them on a rickety ship and then disappeared, leaving the Mullers and the other families sitting in the harbor. Five months later the ship still hadn’t sailed and now contained 900 people when officials boarded the ship and said it was being repossessed. The immigrants, back in the crowded streets of Amsterdam and without a ship, had no other choice but to sign redemption agreements in which they would become indentured slaves to pay off the costs of the voyage. The immigrants then found themselves on a cramped voyage that was longer than expected since the captain had decided to take them to New Orleans so he could load up his ship with profitable goods like cotton. Food and water ran low and diseases ran rampant. Every day bodies were committed to the sea and some passengers jumped overboard out of despair. Daniel Muller’s wife and youngest child died. He tied them together and dropped their bodies in the sea by himself. The teenagers on the voyage, including Eva, found themselves in charge of taking care of the children whose parents were dead or sick. This is how Eve came to know Salome so intimately.
The ship finally reached America and the immigrants endured sixteen more days on board as it went up the winding Mississippi River. After docking at New Orleans, the passengers had to wait on board for someone to buy their redemption contracts from the ship’s captain. The redemptioners weren’t as expensive as slaves and were considered the better bargain because, unlike slaves, the owners were not legally and morally obligated to take care of the sick, wounded, and aged. Many families would be separated. Eva was sold to a Creole woman in New Orleans as a domestic. Daniel Muller, however, refused to separate his family, consisting now of just him, his two daughters, and a son. They were the last to be sold off the ship. The last time Eva saw them they were in rags and were going to work for a landowner in Attakapas.
Believing without a doubt that they had found Salome, the Schubers hired a lawyer, Wheelock Samuel Upton, to sue for her freedom in court. What happens next, covering several years, is a legal battle that has all the twists and turns of a John Grisham novel, the revelations of a detective story, and the legal hankering, suspense, and complications of the 2016 Golden Globe winner Wolf Hall. At one point someone had to journey back to Germany to find Salome’s birth certificate to prove that the girl called Mary was the same age as her. Modern audiences would be shocked to hear that stereotypes of African-American girls developing puberty at an earlier age than Caucasians were admissible evidence in court. Others will find the legal aspects fascinating, that while lawsuits demanding freedom based on race were common during the antebellum period, Louisiana was, due to its period of colonization by Spain, the only Southern state where a slave could sue for their freedom directly in court.
There are a variety of colorful, Dickenseques characters. The Harvard-educated lawyer Upton would quote Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott in the courtroom. John Fritz Miller, Sally Miller’s former owner, a confirmed bachelor in his mid-sixties in debt due to horse racing bets, who went to court to defend his ninety-year-old mother’s honor, to whom he had given Mary as a gift, from the slanderous suggestion that she had been involved in enslaving a white girl. Christian Roselius, a German immigrant who, after teaching himself English by reading Shakespeare and Milton, became a lawyer and rose to become Louisiana’s attorney general. John Grymes, dueler, lavish spender, and ally of Andrew Jackson.
The story of Sally Miller/Salome Muller/Bridget Wilson/Sally Miller/Sally Brigger, her name is part of the complicated plot, is part of Louisiana folk history, and has often been told by 19th-century writers like George W. Cable, with lawyers Upton and Roselies as gallants who saved Salome from the clutches of the evil slaver owner John Frizz Miller in the court cases Sally Miller v. Louis Belmonti and Miller v. Miller. These versions of the story would end when the lawyers convinced the juries and the legal system that she was Salome, white, and should be free. Even the abolitionists, many of whom were racists by 21st-century standards, used the story in their pamphlets without the big reveal at the end because it did not fit within their agenda of showing that slavery was an octopus whose tentacles were bringing down the white race.
However, according to John Bailey’s research, the real Salome Muller had eventually settled in northeast Louisiana near Monroe. The woman the courts had declared free was who she had originally said she was, Mary Miller, a biracial slave. In this twist, the real hero of the story is not the lawyers but an Americanized version of Princess Caraboo, a lower-class woman in Victorian England who managed to convince the upper crust that she was royalty. In this case, she is a biracial slave girl who used white society’s legal system and sentiments to win her freedom.
The Lost German Slave Girl is written by an Australian lawyer, so there is an international audience for the story, but more importantly, the story of The Lost German Slave Girl, whoever she was, would make a great historical drama because it shows a different side to slavery in American history. Instead of focusing on the logistics and brutality on plantations, a film would take audiences into the courtrooms and law offices of the antebellum period. The experience of immigrants and German-Americans in the early eighteen-hundreds is not seen often in film. These elements showing how complicated life was back then would make a thought-provoking film that shows how easy it would have been to overlook the ills of society if we had lived during that time and would make us ask ourselves what are some things we simply overlook today due to confirmed laws and social norms. As the audience leaves the theater they would probably be asking themselves if Mary Miller was a hero considering she took advantage of the good intentions and emotional sentiments of the Schubers. Then again, in a society where freedom was restricted based on one’s racial lineage, who can blame her?
That is why I believe that The Lost German Slave Girl, in the hands of skilled directors such as Robert Redford, Ron Howard, Aaron Sorkin, or John Lee Hancock should be a period courtroom drama. A biracial or racially ambiguous actress who has the talent to convey motivation and hidden meaning through just her eyes would be the ideal choice to play Salome/Sally/Bridget. There is also the French Quarter, Jackson Square, and many historic structures surrounding New Orleans that would be great filming locations.
Because it is a thought-provoking true story that shows different aspects of slavery in American history, I believe that The Lost German Slave Girl by John Baily Should Be A Movie.
For Further Reading
The Two Lives of Sally Miller: A Case of Mistaken Racial Identity in Antebellum New Orleans by Carol Wilson, Rutgers University Press.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider a donation so I can continue posting in the future. Thank you.
