hrong of the
crowded court-room.

And then, as we have already said, there was another means of
identification which it seemed ought alone to have carried with it
overwhelming conviction. But this we still hold in reserve until we have
heard the explanation offered by John F. Miller both in court and at the
same time in the daily press in reply to its utterances which were giving
voice to the public sympathy for Salome.

It seems that John Fitz Miller was a citizen of New Orleans in high
standing, a man of property, money, enterprises, and slaves. John Lawson
Lewis, commanding-general of the State militia, testified in the case to
Mr. Miller's generous and social disposition, his easy circumstances, his
kindness to his eighty slaves, his habit of entertaining, and the
exceptional fineness of his equipage. Another witness testified that
complaints were sometimes made by Miller's neighbors of his too great
indulgence of his slaves. Others, ladies as well as gentlemen,
corroborated these good reports, and had even kinder and higher praises
for his mother, Mrs. Canby. They stated with alacrity, not intending the
slightest imputation against the gentleman's character, that he had other
slaves even fairer of skin than this Mary Bridget, who nevertheless, "when
she was young," they said, "looked like a white girl." One thing they
certainly made plain--that Mr. Miller had never taken the Mueller family or
any part of them to Attakapas or knowingly bought a redemptioner.

He accounted for his possession of the plaintiff thus: In August, 1822,
one Anthony Williams, being or pretending to be a negro-trader and from
Mobile, somehow came into contact with Mr. John Fitz Miller in New
Orleans. He represented that he had sold all his stock of slaves except
one girl, Mary Bridget, ostensibly twelve years old, and must return at
once to Mobile. He left this girl with Mr. Miller to be sold for him for
his (Williams's) account under a formal power of attorney so to do, Mr.
Miller handing him one hundred dollars as an advance on her prospective
sale. In January, 1823, Williams had not yet been heard from, nor had the
girl been sold; and on the 1st of February Mr. Miller sold her to his own
mother, with whom he lived--in other words, _to himself_, as we shall see.
In this sale her price was three hundred and fifty dollars and her age was
still represented as about twelve. "From that time she remained in the
house of my mother," wrote Mille