learn to imitate it.... The man must be a prodigy who can retain his
manners and morals undepraved in such circumstances.The jury is still out over Jefferson’s own relationship with his slave Sally
Hemings.
Various attempts were made to prevent “abominable Mixture” and its
“spurious issue,” as a law of 1741 in North Carolina described a sexual
union between a black and a white. As early as 1630 a court in Virginia
ordered a white man whipped for “defiling his body in lying with a Negro.”
In 1664 Maryland prohibited mixed marriages; Virginia followed suit in
- The legislature of Virginia, in Act 14, provided that “for the preven-
tion of that abominable mixture and spurious issue which hereafter may
encrease in this dominion... negroes, mulattoes, and Indians intermarry-
ing with English, or other white women... shall within three months after
such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever.” In
1715 a statute in North Carolina specified that “no White man or woman
shall intermarry with any Negro, Mulatto or Indyan Man or Woman under
the penalty of Fifty Pounds for each White man or woman.”
Law after law was passed; but in a situation of “most unremitting despo-
tism” it remained too easy for white men to satisfy their lust with black
women. Not only legislation but also court cases and folklore reveal that
many white masters found black women sexually attractive. By the middle of
the eighteenth century, many slaves were the offspring of such unions, and
mulattoes were quite common. The General Assembly of North Carolina
complained in 1723 that “great Numbers of Free Negroes, Mulattoes, and
other persons of mixt Blood...have intermarried with white Inhabitants of
this Province.” “Intermarrying” remained common. When, in 1773, the
lawyer Josiah Quincy of Boston went to the South to encourage support for
Massachusetts’s stand against Britain, he found that “enjoyment of a negro
or mulatto woman is spoken of as quite a common thing: no reluctance, del-
icacy or shame is made about the matter.” As is evident in the proliferation of
the mulatto population, attempts to restrain white masters were to no avail.
The American South unknowingly followed a pattern common in colo-
nial territories. In Bengal, then Britain’s most important colony, Englishmen
quite openly kept zenanas (harems) of dark-skinned women. But when the
wives and families of the Englishmen began to arrive in India toward the end
Blacks in America 175