In Virginia, sex ratios among the English immigrants were highly skewed in the early years (there were six men to one woman in the 1630s), so it would not have been surprising to find white men looking for black or Indian women as partners; what may be more surprising is the large number of white women servants who crossed racial lines.
Unlike in Louisiana, most of the so-called mulattoes on the Eastern Shore of Virginia were free, and they appear to have traced their roots to unions between white women and black men, further evidence of the fluidity of racial lines in Virginia during the seventeenth century. This led to a society of free people of color on the Eastern Shore in the seventeenth century that briefly looked more like Cuba than Louisiana or other mainland British American colonies. But whereas in Cuba the large proportion of “mulattoes” among free people of color can be explained only through selective manumission practices that targeted the offspring of interracial unions with enslaved women, in Virginia free people of color owed their freedom to the racial background of their mothers. The existence of white female indentured servants in Virginia, combined with the low proportion of women among European settlers in Cuba, help explain these parallels. Before marriage across racial lines was banned in Virginia in 1691, a number of interracial marriages were recorded. One of the first, in 1656, involved Elizabeth Key, the young woman of color who had made her case for freedom based on her Christian faith, and William Grinsted (or Greensted), the white man listed as her “legal representative” in her successful suit the previous year.
More common were marriages between men of color and white women. Philip Mongom, in 1651, married a white widow, Martha Merris, agreeing to reserve to her for her use the property she brought to the marriage, including both personal items and livestock. Mongom signed the document with a picture of a bow and arrow rather than a signature or an X. He appears to have remarried within a decade, to a black woman, and then shortly thereafter he was charged with fathering the “mulatto bastard” of a white woman, Margery Tyer.
THE “INCONVENIENCE” OF BLACK FREEDOM
Francis Payne married a white woman, Aymey, in 1656, and they lived together without incident until his death in 1673. Emanuel Driggus, Richard Johnson, and Anthony Longo also married white women in the mid-seventeenth century in Northampton County.64 More common than marriage across the color line was interracial sex. John Johnson, the son of Anthony Johnson, was brought into the Accomack County court to admit paternity of white servant Hannah Leach’s bastard child in 1664. He was released when his wife, Susanna, a free woman of color, petitioned for his return home, and a white man, Morris Mathews, gave security. Elizabeth Lang was sentenced to an additional three-year term of service in 1671 for bastard bearing, but begged the court that the child’s “Indian [father] not have my child.” Dorothy Bestick, a white woman, paid a double fine and received thirty lashes for bearing a bastard with “a Negro slave” in 1691. Numerous white women, as well as free women of color, were called into court between 1695 and 1710 in Accomack County for bearing “mulatto” children.
As early as 1662, fines for fornication across the color line were set at double the amount for in-group nonmarital sex, typically 1,000 rather than 500 pounds of tobacco. However, the Northampton County court, at least, was slow to change. Several prosecutions for fornication between blacks and whites during the 1660s resulted in fines of 500 pounds of tobacco. Only much later is there any evidence that higher fines were enforced, around the time when the legislature passed a series of laws with harsher penalties for interracial sex and marriage. In 1691, the legislature decreed that any white person who married a person of color had to leave Virginia within three months.
The law also addressed the status of the mixed-race children of white women. The white unmarried mother of a mixed-race child paid a fine of fifteen pounds, or was sold as a servant for a five-year term if she could not pay the fine; the child was bound out as a servant to the age of thirty. In 1705, the term of indenture for a “mulatto bastard” was raised to thirty-one, and a white person who married a “negro or mulatto” was sentenced to imprisonment for six months and a ten-pound fine, rather than banishment. The punishment was extended to the next generation in 1723, when children of mulatto or Indian women serving their thirty- or thirty-one-year indentures were also sentenced to serve thirty to thirty-one years (this was later reduced to eighteen for female children and twenty-one for males in 1765). Tamar Smith, a white woman in Northampton County, served the prison term and paid the fine in order to marry mulatto Edward Hitchens, but few other interracial marriages were recorded after 1705. By contrast, a significant number of women continued to be charged with interracial bastardy. In Northampton County there were numerous cases of interracial fornication before 1705, but after 1705, we see increasing charges against both white and mulatto women for bastard bearing as well, including Tabitha Cope, Hannah Carter, Margret Edsall, Esther Weeks, Anne Toyer, and Elisha Pitts. These women paid their fines or named the father to have him brought into court to “make the county harmless” and pay the church wardens. In Accomack County, Elizabeth Lang, a white indentured servant, gave birth to the child of an Indian, Oni Kitt, in 1671/72, and agreed to add three years to her indenture. In 1704, Mary Newman was accused of having a “bastard child by a Negro”; Mary admitted to fornication but named William Edgg, a white man, as the father. In 1707, white servant Rachell Wood, was sentenced to an extra year of service and sale for bearing a “bastard mulata female child.” Wood resisted serving the extra year and was not sold.
Thus, in Virginia, a significant number of white servant women continued to form relationships with men of color, often bearing mixed-race children, but they paid an increasingly heavy price for doing so. Women and men at the lower end of the socioeconomic spectrum defied increasing pressure from slaveholding elites to separate white from “negro,” especially when it resulted in more free children of color born to white women. As in Louisiana, this was a small but important population in Virginia, one that maintained links with enslaved people of color as well as free white people. Legal proscriptions could not keep people apart; however, they did, in both Virginia and Louisiana, keep them from creating the kind of community that was already blossoming in Cuba.**
**How did Africans become “blacks” in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders’ efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies – Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana
Becoming Free, Becoming Black
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Whites women cannot resist black men. They’ll fuck anything granted but they can’t resist us.
