No stigma was associated [in the early 1600s] with what we today call intermarriages… |
No stigma was associated [in the early 1600s] with what we today call intermarriages. Black men servants often married white women servants. Records from one county reveal that one fourth of the children born to European servant girls were mulatto (Breen and Ennis 1980). Historian Anthony Parent (2003) notes that five out of ten black men on the Eastern Shore were married to white women. One servant girl declared to her master that she would rather marry a Negro slave on a neighboring plantation than him with all of his property, and she did (P. Morgan 1998). Given the demographics, servant girls had their choice of men. One white widow of a black farmer had no problem with remarrying, this time to a white man. She later sued this second husband, accusing him of squandering the property she had accumulated with her first husband (E. Morgan 1975, 334). In another case, a black women servant sued successfully for her freedom and then married the white lawyer who represented her in court (P. Morgan, 1998)…
Audrey Smedley, “The History of the Idea of Race… And Why it Matters,” (paper presented at the conference on Race, Human Variation and Disease: Consensus and Frontiers, American Anthropological Association (AAA), Warrenton, Virginia, March 14-17, 2007).
Tags: Audrey Smedley