The Lost German Slave Girl The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans

by Bailey, John

• ISBN13: 9780802142290
• ISBN10: 080214229X
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-11-29
• Publisher: Grove Press

Summary

It is a spring morning in New Orleans, 1843. In the Spanish Quarter, on a street lined with flophouses and gambling dens, Madame Carl recognizes a face from her past. It is the face of a German girl, Sally Miller, who disappeared twenty-five years earlier. But the young woman is property, the slave of a nearby cabaret owner. She has no memory of a "white" past. Yet her resemblance to her mother is striking, and she bears two telltale birthmarks. In brilliant novelistic detail, award-winning historian John Bailey reconstructs the exotic sights, sounds, and smells of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, as well as the incredible twists and turns of Sally Miller's celebrated and sensational case. Did Miller, as her relatives sought to prove, arrive from Germany under perilous circumstances as an indentured servant or was she, as her master claimed, part African, and a slave for life? A tour de force of investigative history that reads like a suspense novel, The Lost German Slave Girl is a fascinating exploration of slavery and its laws, a brilliant reconstruction of mid-nineteenth-century New Orleans, and a riveting courtroom drama. It is also an unforgettable portrait of a young woman in pursuit of freedom.

Table of Contents

Author's Note	ix
Mary Miller	1	(10)
The Children of Slaves	11	(9)
The Year Without Summer	20	(28)
New Orleans	48	(20)
Sally Miller	68	(13)
John Fitz Miller	81	(11)
Bridget Wilson	92	(19)
Salome Muller	111	(17)
The First District Judicial Court of New Orleans	128	(26)
The Defense	154	(30)
Judgment	184	(12)
The Appeal	196	(17)
A Presumption in Favor of Liberty	213	(5)
The Children of Salome Muller	218	(5)
Polly Moore	223	(14)
Nullity	237	(16)
The Woman Who Remembered Nothing	253	(5)
Endnotes	258