On the night of December 5, 1861, John Miller stood outside the house he shared with Mary Jane Jackson in Gretna, across the river from New Orleans, and told the neighbors she needed a thrashing. Then he went inside. The fight that followed ended with Miller stabbed to death. He was a jailer, a fight manager and a criminal who had killed men himself, and she had met him while she was locked up in the Parish Prison. For his death she was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to ten years.
She was born in 1837 on Girod Street in New Orleans, and the city knew her as Bricktop for her bright red hair. She went into sex work at thirteen and at fourteen became the mistress of a saloon keeper; when he left her three years later, she beat him so badly that he lost an ear and had his nose broken. She could not get along with the other women and drifted from brothel to brothel. She was also accused, never proved, of killing a husband in Cincinnati.
In 1856, at nineteen, she beat a man to death after he called her a whore. The next year she stabbed to death a man known as Long Charley, nearly seven feet tall. On November 7, 1859, at a saloon on Rampart Street with two other women, Ellen Collins and America Williams, she went on swearing louder when a blacksmith, Laurent Fleury, asked her to stop. He slapped her, and the three women stabbed him to death. The police found his trouser pocket and his money on her, but she was released when the autopsy could not establish how he had died.
She served about nine months of the ten years. In 1862, with the city under Union occupation, the military governor, George F. Shepley, emptied the local prisons, and she went free. That November she was accused of stabbing a sailor. She is said to have left New Orleans for a time and came back at some unknown date; she died there on December 20, 1897.