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to arise upon close association with the African for a great length of time.[1] There must have been, by the middle of the century a number of mulattoes in the Colony, sprung from black mothers, who were less repulsive in person and manners than the average negro. The class of white women who were required to work in the fields belonged to the lowest rank in point of character; not having been born in Virginia and not having thus acquired from birth a repugnance to association with Africans upon a footing of social equality, they yielded to the temptations of the situations in which they were placed. The offence, whether committed by a native or an imported white woman, was an act of personal degradation that was condemned by public sentiment with as much severity in the seventeenth century as at all subsequent periods.[2] Mulattoes were referred to by the law as an “abominable mixture,”[3] and the mere fact that a marriage ceremony had given apparent sanctity to the relations resulting in such births, did not in the eyes of the community at large make this mixture of whites and blacks less odious in its character. So repugnant to popular feeling became all physical commerce between the races that intermarriages between their members were strictly forbidden, and the minister

  1. ↑ See Richmond Dispatch, Saturday, June 30, 1894. A letter from Warrenton, Va., dated June 29, gives a case occurring in 1894, which shows that the absence of this prejudice, arising from the same fact, leads to the same result occasionally in the present century.
  2. ↑ How degraded were the white women who had sexual intercourse with negroes in the seventeenth century is very clearly shown in a revolting series of depositions relating to the case of Mrs. Watkins, preserved in the Records of Henrico County, vol. 1677-1692, pp. 191-195, Va. State Library. See the characterization of Mrs. Hyde of York, who is referred to (the exact words are too gross to be quoted) as a woman of such abandoned character that she would admit even a negro to her embraces. Vol. 1694-1697, p. 14, Va. State Library.
  3. ↑ Hening’s Statutes, vol. III, p. 86.
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