In making more stringent regulations for servants and slaves, North Carolina provided in 1715 that if a white servant woman had a child by a Negro, mulatto or Indian, she must serve her master two years extra and should pay to the Church wardens immediately on the expiration of that time six pounds for the use of the parish or be sold four years for the use aforesaid.[465] A clergyman found guilty of officiating at such a marriage should be fined fifty pounds. This law, according to Bassett, did not succeed in preventing such unions. Two ministers were indicted within two years for performing such a marriage ceremony. "In one case the suit was dropped, in the other case the clergyman went before the Chief Justice and confessed as it seems of his own accord.... In 1727 a white woman was indicted in the General Court because she had left her husband and was cohabiting with a negro slave.... So far as general looseness was concerned this law of 1715 had no force. Brickell, who was a physician, says that white men of the colony suffered a great deal from a malignant kind of venereal disease which they took from the slaves."[466]
By the law of 1741 therefore the colony endeavored to prevent what the General Assembly called "that abominable mixture and spurious issue, which hereafter may increase in this government, by white men and women intermarrying with Indians, Negroes, mustees, or mulattoes." It was enacted that if any man or woman, being free, should intermarry with an Indian, Negro, mustee or mulatto man or woman, or any person of mixed blood, to the third generation, bond or free, he should, by judgment of the county court forfeit and pay the sum of fifty pounds, proclamation money, to the use of the parish.[467] It was also provided that if any white servant woman should during the time of her servitude, be delivered of a child, begotten by any Negro, mulatto or Indian, such servant, over and above the time she was by this act to serve her master or owner for such offence, should be sold by the Church wardens of the parish, for two years, after the time by indenture or otherwise had expired.[468]
The miscegenation of the whites and blacks extended so widely that it became a matter of concern to the colonies farther north where the Negro population was not considerable. Seeking also to prevent this "spurious mixt issue" Massachusetts enacted in 1705 that a Negro or mulatto man committing fornication with an "English woman, or a woman of any other Christian nation," should be sold out of the province." "An English man, or man of any other Christian nation committing fornication with a Negro or mulatto woman," should be whipped, and the woman sold out of the province. None of her Majesty's English or Scottish subjects, nor of any other Christian nation within that province should contract matrimony with any Negro or mulatto, under a penalty imposed on the person joining them in marriage. No master should unreasonably deny marriage to his Negro with one of the same nation; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.[469]
There was much social contact between the white servants and the Negroes in Pennsylvania, where the number of the latter greatly increased during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Turner says a white servant was indicted for this offence in Sussex County in 1677 and a tract of land there bore the name of "Mulatto Hall."[470] According to the same writer Chester County seemed to have a large number of these cases and laid down the principle that such admixture should be prohibited,
"For that hee," referring to a white man, "Contrary to his Masters Consent hath ... got wth child a certaine molato wooman Called Swart anna." "David Lewis Constable of Haverford Returned a Negro man of his And a white woman for having a Bastard Childe ... the Negroe said she Intised him and promised him to marry him: she being examined, Confest the same: the Court ordered that she shall receive Twenty one lashes on her bare Backe ... and the Court ordered the negroe never more to meddle with any white woman more uppon paine of his life."[471]
Advertising for Richard Molson in Philadelphia in 1720, his master said, "He is in company with a white woman named Mary, who is supposed now goes for his wife"; "and a white man named Garrett Choise, and Jane his wife, which said white people are servants to some neighbors of the said Richard Tilghman."[472] In 1722 a woman was punished for abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a Negro. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, June 1, 1749, appeared the notice of the departure of Isaac Cromwell, a mulatto, who ran away with an English servant woman named Anne Greene.[473]
The Assembly, therefore, upon a petition from inhabitants inveighing against this custom enacted a prohibitory law in 1725. This law provided that no minister, pastor or magistrate or other person whatsover who according to the laws of that province usually joined people in marriage should upon any pretence whatever join in marriage any Negro with any white person on the penalty of one hundred pounds. And it was further enacted that if any white man or woman should cohabit or dwell with any Negro under pretense of being married, such white man or woman should be put out of service as above directed until they come to the age of thirty-one years; and if any free Negro man or woman should intermarry with a white man or woman, such Negro should become a slave during life to be sold by order of the justice of the quarter sessions of the respective county; and if any free Negro man or woman should commit fornication or adultery with any white man or woman, such Negro or Negroes should be sold as a servant for seven years and the white man or woman should be punished as the law directs in cases of adultery or fornication.[474]
This law seemed to have very little effect on the miscegenation of the races in certain parts. In Chester County, according to the records of 1780, mulattoes constituted one fifth of the Negro population.[475] Furthermore, that very year when the State of Pennsylvania had grown sufficiently liberal to provide for gradual emancipation the law against the mingling of the races was repealed. Mixed marriages thereafter became common as the white and the blacks in the light of the American Revolution realized liberty in its full meaning. Thomas Branagan said:
"There are many, very many blacks who ... begin to feel themselves consequential, ... will not be satisfied unless they get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly impertinent to white people in low circumstances.... I solemnly swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies and the Southern States). I know a black man who seduced a young white girl ... who soon after married him, and died with a broken heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to have a negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after married a white woman. ... There are perhaps hundreds of white women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are thousands of black children by them at present."[476]