an overseer was required, to make them perform the various tasks to which they were set. Even if superintendence had been unnecessary in the case of the white servants, which, as has been seen, it was not, it would have been called for as soon as slaves, whether crude barbarians or men already trained for their work, began to be introduced in any number.
There are indications at an early date of improper sexual relations between white men and slave women, a condition to be expected from the intimate association of members of the two races in the performance of their daily tasks. This immoral intercourse was not, however, confined on the part of the whites to the indented male servants. One of the charges brought against Lawrence, the principal adviser of Bacon in the insurrection of 1676, was that he worshipped the goddess Venus in the person of his female slave, but that his course of conduct was as much disapproved of in that age by the general sentiment of the community as it was in later times, is shown by the great scandal it created at Jamestown.[1] As early as 1630, one Hugh Davis, who was discovered in the same relation with a negress, was roundly lashed in public, and compelled to acknowledge his fault before the congregation with which he worshipped.[2] Nine years later, Robert Sweet, who is described in a patent to him in 1628 as “gentleman,”[3] having been detected in the same offence,
- ↑ The following is from the Archives of Maryland, Court and Testamentary Business, vol. 1649-1657, p. 114: “The complainant prosecuting against the defendant upon an action of defamation, for that the defendant reported here that he had heard one Thomas Gutridge in Virginia say that the plaintiff had got one of his negroes with child, and that he had a black bastard in Virginia, which report the complainant with tends much to his disgrace and defamation, which he values at 20,000 lbs.
- ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. I, p. 146.
- ↑ Va. Land Patents, vol. 1623-1643, p. 70.
