African women were frequently bequeathed to daughters to serve as their maids.[1] It may be inferred from these facts that if the comparative rarity of female domestic slaves in the beginning was one of the causes leading to the inclusion of all negresses in the list of tithables, that cause ceased to operate by the time the last decade of the century had been reached, but the reasons prompting a desire to promote an increase in the number of the white female servants would still remain in force. It is not improbable, however, that the exemption of white women employed in household service from taxation, was due in the greatest measure to a wish on the part of the Assembly to encourage the withdrawal of all members of that sex and race from the field. By removing the tax from them when thus occupied and at the same time allowing it to remain on the negresses, engaged in the performance of household duties, it was made plainly to the interest of the planter to confine his choice of female domestic servants to individuals of his own color, and this was a consideration which only citizens of fortune could afford to overlook.
The testimony is contradictory as to whether the owner
- ↑ See Will of Thomas Cocke, Records of Henrico County, original vol. 1688-1697, p. 687. Cocke bequeathed to his daughter, Agnes Harwood, a mulatto girl, who was to be employed as Mrs. Harwood thought fit, except that she was not to be ordered to “beat at the mortar or to work in the ground.” “My will is that she may be an ease to my daughter’s own person, and that the girl may be well and kindly used, and I also give with her, the weaver’s loom and all the stages and harness to the same, with all other appurtenances thereto, all of which is to be enjoyed by my daughter, to be used by the girl, Sue. At my daughter’s death, the girl and loom to pass to her son Thomas.” Cocke thus concludes: “My will is that ye girl be well used in all her time of service, whoever shall happen to be her master or mistress, for if she shall bee by any of them notoriously abused, my will is that shee shall have liberty to choose which of my sons she pleases for her master to live with.”
