),[1][2] was an American woman enslaved sometime in the late 1810s, whose freedom suit in Louisiana was based on her claimed status as a free German immigrant and indentured servant born to non-enslaved parents.
Beginning in 1816, many impoverished Europeans immigrated to the United States as refugees from the crop failures of the Year Without a Summer, the wars of Napoleon, and other economic and social problems.
They began an extended legal struggle to have Mary (later called Sally) Miller recognized as a native European and free woman.
[12] In the case, Upton charged the planter John F. Miller with having reduced the indentured servant to slavery upon the death of her father and older brother.
Their numbers had increased in the early nineteenth century with the arrival of thousands of refugee free people of color fleeing the disruption of the revolution in Haiti.
Now known as Louisiana Creoles, the mixed-race residents then constituted a separate class between the European-Americans and the large majority of mostly black African slaves.
Its ruling in Miller v. Belmonti (1845) included this statement: 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.
[15] The Court's ruling was also unpopular across the South, where the abolition movement was considered a growing threat to the Southern economy and culture.
When the Commission re-established a state Supreme Court the following day, it did not reappoint Chief Justice Francois Xavier Martin or any of his five colleagues to the bench.
[16] After gaining her freedom, Miller petitioned to have her mixed-race children freed based on their having been born to a woman who was legally free.
The jury had reported it was unable to reach a decision (11 were in favor of Sally Miller and one was opposed), and the attorneys decided to go to the judge.
[17] The abolitionist Parker Pillsbury wrote in 1853 to his colleague William Lloyd Garrison: "A white skin is no security whatsoever.