In no respect was the system of slavery more reprehensible than in the illicit sexual relations that grew out of it. The extent of the evil may be realized when we simply reflect that the numerous race of mulattoes and quadroons did not originate from wedlock. In 1691 it was enacted that any white man or woman, whether bond or free, intermarrying with a negro, mulatto, or Indian, should be banished for life. In 1705 the penalty was changed to fine and imprisonment, and for any minister who should dare to perform the ceremony there was prescribed a fine nearly equal to his whole year’s salary.[170] Yet the “abominable mixture and spurious issue,” against which these statutes were aimed, went on, unsanctioned by law and unblessed by the church. Usually mulattoes were the children of negresses by white fathers, but it was not always so. Some of the wretched women from English jails seem to have had fancies as unaccountable as those of the frail sultanas of the Arabian Nights. In such cases the white mother, if free, was fined £15, or in default thereof was sold into servitude for five years; if she were a bondwoman, the church-wardens waited for her term of service to expire, and then sold her for five years; her child was bound to service until thirty years of age.[171] The case of the bastards of negresses was very simply disposed of by enacting that the legal status of children was the same as that of their mother.[172] This made them all slaves, from the prognathous and platyrrhine creature with woolly hair to the handsome and stately octoroon, and secured their labour to the master. At first the illicit relations between masters and their female slaves were frowned at, and in some instances visited with church discipline or punished by fines.[173] But public opinion seems to have lost its sensitiveness in the presence of a custom which lasted until slavery was abolished.[174] With the signal advance in refinement which the nineteenth century ushered in, there is reason to believe that in many a southern home there were earnest hearts that deplored the dreadful evil, and welcomed at last the downfall of the system that sustained it.
Classes in Virginia society.
Some writers divide Old Virginia society into four classes,—the great planters, the small planters, the white servants and freedmen, and the negro slaves. The division is sound, provided we remember that between the two upper classes no hard and fast line can be drawn. Already in England the classes of rural gentry and yeomen shaded into one another; in Virginia both alike became land-holders and slave-owners, they mingled together in society, and their families intermarried. A typical instance is that of the parents of Thomas Jefferson. His paternal ancestors were yeomanry who in Virginia developed into country squires. The first Jefferson in Virginia was a member of the first House of Burgesses in 1619; Thomas’s father, who was also a burgess and county lieutenant, owned about thirty slaves. Thomas’s mother, Jane Randolph, whose grandfather migrated to Virginia in 1674, belonged to a family that had been eminent in England since the thirteenth century, including among its members a baron of the exchequer, a number of knights, a foreign ambassador, a head of one of the colleges at Oxford, etc.
Huguenots in tidewater Virginia.
There can be no doubt that the white blood of tidewater Virginia was English almost without admixture until the end of the seventeenth century, and of the very slight admixture nearly all was from the British islands. There was a desultory sprinkling of Protestant Frenchmen, Walloons, and Dutch, scarcely appreciable in the mass of the population. But after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, in 1685, Virginia received a small part of the Huguenot exodus from France. The largest company, more than seven hundred in number, led by the Breton nobleman, Olivier, Marquis de la Muce, arrived in the year 1700, and settled in various places, more particularly at Monacan Town in Henrico County. A part of this company were Waldenses from Piedmont, who had taken refuge in Switzerland, and thence made their way through Alsace and the Low Countries to England.[175] Other parties came from time to time, adding to Virginia many estimable citizens whom France could ill afford to lose. Among the Huguenot names in Virginia, the reader will recognize Maury, Flournoy, Jouet, Moncure, Fontaine, Marye, Bertrand, and others.[176] Dabneys (D’Aubigné) and Bowdoins (Baudouin) came to Virginia as well as to Boston. Such was the principal foreign admixture while Virginia was still tidewater Virginia, before the crossing of the Blue Ridge. The advent of Germans and Scotch-Irish will be treated in a future chapter.
Influence of the rivers upon society.
Some exports and imports.
Having thus considered the composition of society in its different strata, as connected with wholesale tobacco culture, let us observe one of the most conspicuous results of this industry as influenced by the physical geography of the country. One might suppose that the necessity for exporting the enormous crops of tobacco would have called into existence a large class of thriving merchants, who would naturally congregate at points favourable for shipping, and thus give rise to towns. In most countries that is what would have happened. But the manner in which the Virginia planter disposed of his crops was peculiar. Most of the large plantations lay on or near the wide and deep rivers of that tidewater country;[177] and each planter would have his own wharf, from which his own slaves might load the tobacco on to the vessels that were to carry it to England. If the plantation lay at some distance from a navigable river, the tobacco was conveyed to the nearest creek and tied down upon a raft of canoes, and so floated and paddled down stream until some head of navigation was reached, where a warehouse was ready to receive it. The vessels which carried away this tobacco usually paid for it in all sorts of manufactured articles that might be needed upon the plantations. Every manufactured article that required skill or nicety of workmanship was brought from England, in ships of which the owners, masters, and crews were for the most part either natives of the British islands or of New England. Such a ship would unload upon the planter’s wharf some part of its motley cargo of mahogany tables, chairs covered with russia leather, wines in great variety from the Azores and Madeira,[178] brandy, Gloucester cheeses, linens and cottons, silks and dimity, quilts and featherbeds, carpets, shoes, axes and hoes, hammers and nails, rope and canvas, painters’ white lead and colours, saddles, demijohns, mirrors, books,—pretty much everything.[179] If she came from a New England port she was likely to bring salted cod and mackerel, with fragrant rum, either out of the distilleries at Newport and Boston,[180] or imported from Antigua or Jamaica. Sometimes the rum came from Barbadoes, along with sugar and molasses, and occasionally ginger and lime-juice, in return for which the ship often carried away some of the planter’s live hogs or packed pork, as well as butter, and corn, and tanned leather. The landing of rum was sometimes private and confidential, for there were duties on it which lent a charm to evasion.