Note (return) — Chapter II

In the North as well as in the South the intermingling of the blood of the races was discountenanced. In Pennsylvania as early as 1677 a white servant was indicted for cohabiting with a Negro. In 1698 the Chester County court laid it down as a principle that the mingling of the races was not to be allowed. In 1722 a woman was punished for promoting a secret marriage between a white woman and a Negro; a little later the Assembly received from the inhabitants of the province a petition inveighing against cohabiting; and in 1725-6 a law was passed positively forbidding the mixture of the races.32 In Massachusetts as early as 1705 and 1708 restraining acts to prevent a "spurious and mixt issue" ordered the sale of offending Negroes and mulattoes out of the colony's jurisdiction, and punished Christians who intermarried with them by a fine of £50. After the Revolutionary War such marriages were declared void and the penalty of £50 was still exacted, and not until 1843 was this act repealed. Thus was the color-line, with its social and legal distinctions, extended beyond the conditions of servitude and slavery, and thus early was an important phase of the ultimate Negro Problem foreshadowed.