Book: The Lost German Slave Girl

Book:  The Lost German Slave Girl:  The Extraordinary True Story of Sally Miller and Her Fight for Freedom in Old New Orleans--John Bailey (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003).  One day, while sitting in a law library in New Orleans researching a possible book on slave laws and how they affected the day to day relations of slaves and their rights, author John Bailey stumbled upon the case of Sally Miller.  Leaving Germany with her family in the early 1800's, Salome Muller's mother died at sea, her father died shortly after arriving in America, and the children were consigned as working slaves.  Later in life, the question was further complicated when a German family, the Schubers, who had known the Mullers swore that a slave they had found working in the French Quarter was, in fact, Salome.  Who was Sally Miller?  Was she Salome Muller, a long-lost German immigrant girl enslaved by a Southern planter? Or was she really a light-skinned black woman, shrewd enough to exploit her only opportunity for freedom?   Struck by her remarkable resemblance to their late cousin Dorothea Muller, and unusual birthmarks exactly like the daughter Salome's, the Schubers claimed Sally as kin and set about trying to prove her identity as Salome and obtain her freedom. Bailey brings to life the fierce legal proceedings with vivid strokes. The Miller case was controversial because her owner, the perfect Southern gentleman John Fitz Miller, faced disgrace if proved to have forced a white German girl into slavery. The case was heard several times in appeal, and Bailey delves into the bewildering array of possible identities turned up for Sally by numerous witnesses as well as the complexities of 19th-century Louisiana slave law and the status of black women. Sally herself remains an enigma at the center of this highly engrossing tale. 

Early on in the book Bailey explains that the Creole slavocracy created an extensive vocabulary for the grades of miscegenation:

Mulatto:  The pairing from a White and an African.

Quadroon:  The pairing from a White and a Mulatto.

Griffe:  The pairing from a Mulatto and an African.

Metif:  The pairing from a White and a Quadroon.

Marabon:  The pairing from a Mulatto and a Griffe.

Sacatra:  The pairing from a Griffe and an African.

Meamelouc:  The pairing from a White and a Metif.

Sang-Melee:  The pairing from a White and a Meamelouc.

The universal rule of the South was that if the mother was a slave, so was her child.  The law was contained by the term partus sequitur ventrem, literally "that which is brought forth from the womb."  Partus sequitur ventrem was a rule calculated to perpetuate slavery through generations.  Bondage was transmutted like a birth defect.  Even if a parent later reached their freedom, their children, born as slaves, remained slaves and were removed from the freed parent.  Bailey's book offered fascinating insight, for me, into the laws and customs of slavery, immigration and racial mixing.