The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918Various
History
The Journal of Negro History, Volume 3, 1918
Various
African Americans -- Periodicals
The miscegenation of the whites and blacks extended so widely that it
became a matter of concern to the colonies farther north where the
Negro population was not considerable. Seeking also to prevent this
"spurious mixt issue" Massachusetts enacted in 1705 that a Negro or
mulatto man committing fornication with an "English woman, or a woman
of any other Christian nation," should be sold out of the province."
"An English man, or man of any other Christian nation committing
fornication with a Negro or mulatto woman," should be whipped, and the
woman sold out of the province. None of her Majesty's English or
Scottish subjects, nor of any other Christian nation within that
province should contract matrimony with any Negro or mulatto, under a
penalty imposed on the person joining them in marriage. No master
should unreasonably deny marriage to his Negro with one of the same
nation; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.[469]
There was much social contact between the white servants and the
Negroes in Pennsylvania, where the number of the latter greatly
increased during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Turner
says a white servant was indicted for this offence in Sussex County in
1677 and a tract of land there bore the name of "Mulatto Hall."[470]
According to the same writer Chester County seemed to have a large
number of these cases and laid down the principle that such admixture
should be prohibited,
"For that hee," referring to a white man, "Contrary to his
Masters Consent hath ... got wth child a certaine molato wooman
Called Swart anna." "David Lewis Constable of Haverford Returned
a Negro man of his And a white woman for having a Bastard Childe
... the Negroe said she Intised him and promised him to marry
him: she being examined, Confest the same: the Court ordered that
she shall receive Twenty one lashes on her bare Backe ... and the
Court ordered the negroe never more to meddle with any white
woman more uppon paine of his life."[471]
Advertising for Richard Molson in Philadelphia in 1720, his master
said, "He is in company with a white woman named Mary, who is supposed
now goes for his wife"; "and a white man named Garrett Choise, and
Jane his wife, which said white people are servants to some neighbors
of the said Richard Tilghman."[472] In 1722 a woman was punished for
abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a Negro. In
the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, June 1, 1749, appeared the notice of the
departure of Isaac Cromwell, a mulatto, who ran away with an English
servant woman named Anne Greene.[473]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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