Sally Miller was enslaved woman who brought a freedom suit claiming that she was a German immigrant who had been unlawfully indentured.
After serving a German immigrant one day in New Orleans, Salome (nee Sally) was identified as the lost daughter of the woman's German immigrant hometown friend, Daniel Muller.
Thereafter a protracted legal battle began to gain her freedom as well as her children's.
In 1845, the Louisianna State Supreme Court ruled for her freedom stating that: "That on the law of slavery in the case of a person visibly appearing to be a white man, or an Indian, the presumption is he is free, and it is necessary for his adversity to show that he is a slave." The following year the Louisiana State Constitutional Convention abolished the Louisiana Supreme Court. John Bailey who has written the definitive account of the story concluded in The Lost German Slave Girl (2003) that Sally Miller was probably not Salome Muller, but an enslaved woman who "... seized the one chance of liberty that was ever likely to come her way, and she hung on to that chance with a tenacity I could only marvel at."
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Mixed Experience History Month is the annual blog post series created by writer Heidi Durrow celebrating the history of the Mixed experience. Established in 2007, Mixed Experience History Month is an effort to highlight the long history of folks involved in the Mixed experience. Please look for more profiles of people, places and events of the Mixed experience every weekday of May at Lightskinned-ed Girl, the blog! Thanks for reading. And check out some of the previous year's profiles: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011.
