The Lost German Slave Girl is a remarkable account of a German immigrant (Sally Miller) and her legal battle for freedom in antebellum New Orleans. Her story is widely acclaimed in early Louisiana legal history, in part because it featured a suspenseful courtroom battle between the astute legal minds of John Randolph Grymes and Wheelock Upton. The fate of Miller, whether she be proclaimed a free white woman or thrown back into the depravity of slavery, twists and transforms throughout the 1840s in the controversy over whose life into which she was born.
John Bailey unravels the complex story of Miller, a fair-skinned slave woman in New Orleans. While sitting on the doorstep of a tenement building, Miller was approached by a member of the New Orleans German immigrant community, who thought her to be their long-lost relation. Miller wholeheartedly accepted her invitation into the German community, which embraced her as one of its own after 25 years of absence, even though she was still legally a black slave.
The better part of the study revolves around a dramatic legal battle about identity. Miller, who cannot remember anything from her childhood and refuses to speak openly about her past (supposedly, she was stricken with yellow fever at an early age, thus erasing her memory), plays only a minor character to the legal wrangling between Upton and Grymes. While the two barristers dog it out in the courtroom about the childhood of Miller, she sits mute. It is discouraging to the reader that the fundamental theme of identity in The Lost German Slave Girl is not disclosed by the central character in the study, nor does she, herself, reveal a single piece of her past.
Otherwise, the Bailey study is clear and concise. While the case was long and treacherous, Bailey elucidates the murky legalese and refines the sequences of events to flow in an easy non-fiction format. He describes, in great detail, the harrowing journey of several Germanic families from their native country and across the Atlantic Ocean to the unknown land of America. Further, he paints a lucid picture of the early 18th-century Southern judicial dynamic and its wavering stance on the true identity of a supposed slave.
Bailey’s study reads like a legal suspense novel. Throughout the narrative you cannot tell if Miller is black or white, German or American, free or slave. Essentially, The Lost German Slave Girl raises the conflict between two white societies fighting over a woman who has been subdued by slavery her entire life. It begets the question of how much white society depended on slaves and further, how the institution of slavery was a typical facet of Southern gentry.
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