But by how slender a tenure was it held! It rested not on the "hardship, 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 | } | 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 scholarship 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 associate in the cause of Sally Miller versus Louis Belmonti.
FOOTNOTES:
[27] Long since burned down.
[28] The similarity in the surnames of Salome and her master is odd, but is accidental and without significance.