Strange True Stories of Louisiana Part 16

"My name," the woman replied to her question, "is Mary." And to another question, "No; I am a yellow girl. I belong to Mr. Louis Belmonti, who keeps this 'coffee-house.' He has owned me for four or five years. Before that? Before that, I belonged to Mr. John Fitz Muller, who has the saw-mill down here by the convent. I always belonged to him." Her accent was the one common to English-speaking slaves.

But Madame Karl was not satisfied. "You are not rightly a slave. Your name is Muller. You are of pure German blood. I knew your mother. I know you.

We came to this country together on the same s.h.i.+p, twenty-five years ago."

"No," said the other; "you must be mistaking me for some one else that I look like."

But Madame Karl: "Come with me. Come up into Lafayette and see if I do not show you to others who will know you the moment they look at you."

The woman enjoyed much liberty in her place and was able to accept this invitation. Madame Karl took her to the home of Frank and Eva Schuber.

Their front door steps were on the street. As Madame Karl came up to them Eva stood in the open door much occupied with her approach, for she had not seen her for two years. Another woman, a stranger, was with Madame Karl. As they reached the threshold and the two old-time friends exchanged greetings, Eva said:

"Why, it is two years since last I saw you. Is that a German woman?--I know her!"

"Well," said Madame Karl, "if you know her, who is she?"

"My G.o.d!" cried Eva,--"the long-lost Salome Muller!"

"I needed nothing more to convince me," she afterwards testified in court.

"I could recognize her among a hundred thousand persons."

Frank Schuber came in, having heard nothing. He glanced at the stranger, and turning to his wife asked:

"Is not that one of the girls who was lost?"

"It is," replied Eva; "it is. It is Salome Muller!"

On that same day, as it seems, for the news had not reached them, Madame Fleikener and her daughter--they had all become madams in Creole America--had occasion to go to see her kinswoman, Eva Schuber. She saw the stranger and instantly recognized her, "because of her resemblance to her mother."

They were all overjoyed. For twenty-five years dragged in the mire of African slavery, the mother of quadroon children and ignorant of her own ident.i.ty, they nevertheless welcomed her back to their embrace, not fearing, but hoping, she was their long-lost Salome.

But another confirmation was possible, far more conclusive than mere recognition of the countenance. Eva knew this. For weeks together she had bathed and dressed the little Salome every day. She and her mother and all Henry Muller's family had known, and had made it their common saying, that it might be difficult to identify the lost Dorothea were she found; but if ever Salome were found they could prove she was Salome beyond the shadow of a doubt. It was the remembrance of this that moved Eva Schuber to say to the woman:

"Come with me into this other room." They went, leaving Madame Karl, Madame Fleikener, her daughter, and Frank Schuber behind. And when they returned the slave was convinced, with them all, that she was the younger daughter of Daniel and Dorothea Muller. We shall presently see what fixed this conviction.

The next step was to claim her freedom. She appears to have gone back to Belmonti, but within a very few days, if not immediately, Madame Schuber and a certain Mrs. White--who does not become prominent--followed down to the cabaret. Mrs. White went out somewhere on the premises, found Salome at work, and remained with her, while Madame Schuber confronted Belmonti, and, revealing Salome's ident.i.ty and its proofs, demanded her instant release.

Belmonti refused to let her go. But while doing so he admitted his belief that she might be of pure white blood and of right ent.i.tled to freedom. He confessed having gone back to John F. Muller[28] soon after buying her and proposing to set her free; but Muller, he said, had replied that in such a case the law required her to leave the country. Thereupon Belmonti had demanded that the sale be rescinded, saying: "I have paid you my money for her."

"But," said Muller, "I did not sell her to you as a slave. She is as white as you or I, and neither of us can hold her if she chooses to go away."

Such at least was Belmonti's confession, yet he was as far from consenting to let his captive go after this confession was made as he had been before. He seems actually to have kept her for a while; but at length she went boldly to Schuber's house, became one of his household, and with his advice and aid a.s.serted her intention to establish her freedom by an appeal to law. Belmonti replied with threats of public imprisonment, the chain-gang, and the auctioneer's block.

Salome, or Sally, for that seems to be the nickname by which her kindred remembered her, was never to be sold again; but not many months were to pa.s.s before she was to find herself, on her own pet.i.tion and bond of $500, a prisoner, by the only choice the laws allowed her, in the famous calaboose, not as a criminal, but as sequestered goods in a sort of sheriff's warehouse. Says her pet.i.tion: "Your pet.i.tioner has good reason to believe that the said Belmonti intends to remove her out of the jurisdiction of the court during the pendency of the suit"; wherefore not _he_ but _she_ went to jail. Here she remained for six days and was then allowed to go at large, but only upon _giving still another bond and security_, and in a much larger sum than she had ever been sold for.

The original writ of sequestration lies before me as I write, indorsed as follows:

No. 23,041.

Sally Miller ) Sequestration.

) vs. ) Sigur, Caperton ) Louis Belmonti. ) and Bonford.

Received 24th January, 1844, and on the 26th of the same month sequestered the body of the plaintiff and committed her to prison for safe keeping; but on the 1st February, 1844, she was released from custody, having entered bond in the sum of one thousand dollars with Francis Schuber as the security conditioned according to law, and which bond is herewith returned this 3d February, 1844.

B.F. LEWIS, d'y sh'ff.

Inside is the bond with the signatures, Frantz Schuber in German script, and above in English,

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE COURT PAPERS.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: handwritten text]

Also the writ, ending in words of strange and solemn irony: "In the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and forty-four and in the sixty-eighth year of the Independence of the United States."

We need not follow the history at the slow gait of court proceedings. At Belmonti's pet.i.tion John F. Miller was called in warranty; that is, made the responsible party in Belmonti's stead. There were "prayers" and rules, writs and answers, as the cause slowly gathered shape for final contest.

Here are papers of date February 24 and 29--it was leap year--and April 1, 2, 8, and 27. On the 7th of May Frank Schuber asked leave, and on the 14th was allowed, to subst.i.tute another bondsman in his place in order that he himself might qualify as a witness; and on the 23d of May the case came to trial.

VIII.

THE TRIAL.

It had already become famous. Early in April the press of the city, though in those days unused to giving local affairs more than the feeblest attention, had spoken of this suit as destined, if well founded, to develop a case of "unparalleled hards.h.i.+p, cruelty, and oppression." The German people especially were aroused and incensed. A certain newspaper spoke of the matter as the case "that had for several days created so much excitement throughout the city." The public sympathy was with Salome.

But by how slender a tenure was it held! It rested not on the "hards.h.i.+p, cruelty, and oppression" she had suffered for twenty years, but only on the fact, which she might yet fail to prove, that she had suffered these things without having that tincture of African race which, be it ever so faint, would entirely justify, alike in the law and in the popular mind, treatment otherwise counted hard, cruel, oppressive, and worthy of the public indignation.

And now to prove the fact. In a newspaper of that date appears the following:

Hon. A.M. Buchanan, _Judge_.

Sally Miller _vs_. Belmonti. }--No. 23,041.

This cause came on to-day for trial before the court, Roselius and Upton for plaintiff, Canon for defendant, Grymes and Micou for warrantor; when after hearing evidence the same is continued until to-morrow morning at 11 o'clock.

Salome's battle had begun. Besides the counsel already named, there were on the slave's side a second Upton and a Bonford, and on the master's side a Sigur, a Caperton, and a Lockett. The redemptioners had made the cause their own and prepared to sustain it with a common purse.

Neither party had asked for a trial by jury; the decision was to come from the bench.

The soldier, in the tableaux of Judge Buchanan's life, had not dissolved perfectly into the justice, and old lawyers of New Orleans remember him rather for unimpeachable integrity than for fine discrimination, a man of almost austere dignity, somewhat quick in temper.

Before him now gathered the numerous counsel, most of whose portraits have long since been veiled and need not now be uncovered. At the head of one group stood Roselius, at the head of the other, Grymes. And for this there were good reasons. Roselius, who had just ceased to be the State's attorney-general, was already looked upon as one of the readiest of all champions of the unfortunate. He was in his early prime, the first full spread of his powers, but he had not forgotten the little Dutch brig _Jupiter_, or the days when he was himself a redemptioner. Grymes, on the other side, had had to do--as we have seen--with these same redemptioners before. The uncle and the father of this same Sally Miller, so called, had been chief witnesses in the suit for their liberty and hers, which he had--blamelessly, we need not doubt--lost some twenty-five years before.

Directly in consequence of that loss Salome had gone into slavery and disappeared. And now the loser of that suit was here to maintain that slavery over a woman who, even if she should turn out not to be the lost child, was enough like to be mistaken for her. True, causes must have attorneys, and such things may happen to any lawyer; but here was a cause which in our lights to-day, at least, had on the defendant's side no moral right to come into court.

One other person, and only one, need we mention. Many a New York City lawyer will recall in his reminiscences of thirty years ago a small, handsome, gold-spectacled man with brown hair and eyes, noted for scholars.h.i.+p and literary culture; a brilliant pleader at the bar, and author of two books that became authorities, one on trade-marks, the other on prize law. Even some who do not recollect him by this description may recall how the gifted Frank Upton--for it is of him I write--was one day in 1863 or 1864 struck down by apoplexy while pleading in the well-known Peterhoff case. Or they may remember subsequently his constant, pathetic effort to maintain his old courtly mien against his resultant paralysis.

This was the young man of about thirty, of uncommon masculine beauty and refinement, who sat beside Christian Roselius as an a.s.sociate in the cause of Sally Miller _versus_ Louis Belmonti.