[Footnote 1:  Hurd, commenting on an act of 1649 declaring all imported male servants to be tithables, speaks as follows (230):  “Tithables were persons assessed for a poll-tax, otherwise called the ’county levies.’  At first, only free white persons were tithable.  The law of 1645 provided for a tax on property and tithable persons.  By 1648 property was released and taxes levied only on the tithables, at a specified poll-tax.  Therefore by classing servants or slaves as tithables, the law attributes to them legal personality, or a membership in the social state inconsistent with the condition of a chattel or property.”]

If the Indian was destined to be a vanishing factor, the mulatto and the free Negro most certainly were not.  In spite of all the laws to prevent it, the intermixture of the races increased, and manumission somehow also increased.  Sometimes a master in his will provided that several of his slaves should be given their freedom.  Occasionally a slave became free by reason of what was regarded as an act of service to the commonwealth, as in the case of one Will, slave belonging to Robert Ruffin, of the county of Surry in Virginia, who in 1710 divulged a conspiracy.[1] There is, moreover, on record a case of an indentured Negro servant, John Geaween, who by his unusual thrift in the matter of some hogs which he raised on the share system with his master, was able as early as 1641 to purchase his own son from another master, to the perfect satisfaction of all concerned.[2] Of special importance for some years were those persons who were descendants of Negro fathers and indentured white mothers, and who at first were of course legally free.  By 1691 the problem had become acute in Virginia.  In this year “for prevention of that abominable mixture and spurious issue, which hereafter may increase in this dominion, as well by Negroes, mulattoes and Indians intermarrying with English or other white women, as by their unlawful accompanying with one another,” it was enacted that “for the time to come whatsoever English or other white man or woman being free shall intermarry with a Negro, mulatto, or Indian man or woman, bond or free, shall within three months after such marriage be banished and removed from this dominion forever, and that the justices of each respective county within this dominion make it their particular care that this act be put in effectual execution."[3] A white woman who became the mother of a child by a Negro or mulatto was to be fined L15 sterling, in default of payment was to be sold for five years, while the child was to be bound in servitude to the church wardens until thirty years of age.  It was further provided that if any Negro or mulatto was set free, he was to be transported from the country within six months of his manumission (which enactment is typical of those that it was difficult to enforce and that after a while were only irregularly observed).  In 1705 it was enacted that no “Negro, mulatto,