The Müller family, including daughter Salomé, emigrated to the United States from Alsace in 1817, following years of war and famine in their native land. Like many immigrants, they endured a harrowing crossing that claimed the lives of the Müller mother and one son, only to arrive in America (along with many other family members, neighbors, and friends) too impoverished to pay their fare, thus indenturing themselves for a period of years upon arrival. And then they disappeared.
Twenty-five years after their arrival, Madame Carl recognizes a slave woman as the long-lost Salomé, thus setting in motion a case that gripped New Orleans, much of the South, and eventually even the North, for the next several years. With the support of the German community behind her, Salomé sues her master for freedom, seeking to prove that, as a white woman, she has been improperly enslaved from girlhood.
In telling Salomé's story, John Bailey also tells the story of New Orleans, with its rich French-Spanish-Creole-American history and customs, as well as the story of slavery in the U.S., particularly its evolution to an ever more tightly regulated endeavor in which slaves' rights were increasingly reduced, whatever the wishes of their masters. Ultimately, Salomé's case hinges on whether the court believes that she arrived in the U.S. as an impoverished but purely white immigrant, or whether she was born into slavery anywhere in the country.
This is a fascinating account, not only of the Müller trial, but of antebellum New Orleans. Bailey does a masterful job with these events, including providing his own beliefs as to a case that has been debated many, many times in the 150+ years since it was decided.
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