was ordered to appear in the church of the parish in which he resided, in a white sheet, according to the English ecclesiastical laws, while the woman who was the other party to the act of self-indulgence received a sound whipping.[1] A case is recorded in Lower Norfolk County in which a white man and his black paramour were required to stand up together in the same situation dressed in white sheets and holding white rods in their hands.[2] The public sentiment of the Colony was not content with leaving the punishment to the operation of church laws; a general statute was passed imposing a heavy fine upon all white men who were guilty of criminal intimacy with female slaves, and this was the regulation at the time when the number of negroes in Virginia did not exceed several hundred.[3] Nevertheless, the permanent relations between white men and negresses were maintained to a more or less open extent. A somewhat remarkable case came to light in 1697. In that year a mulattress entered a petition in the Lancaster court praying that she should be set free. She claimed that she had been purchased by John Beaching from Mrs. Elizabeth Spencer in consideration of his tanning one thousand hides. He had caused her and her child to be baptized, and if the assertion of the petition was to be relied on, had promised to marry her, an evidence that he was the father of her offspring and that he had lived with her without disguise. The jury to whom the question of her freedom was submitted, decided in her favor as against Mrs. Spencer, who was a member of one of the most powerful families in the Colony.[4]
The punishment inflicted upon a white woman for
