or Indian shall from and after the publication of this act bear any office ecclesiastical, civil or military, or be in any place of public trust or power, within this her majesty’s colony and dominion of Virginia”; and to clear any doubt that might arise as to who should be accounted a mulatto, it was provided that “the child of an Indian, and the child, grandchild, or great-grandchild of a Negro shall be deemed, accounted, held, and taken to be a mulatto.”  It will be observed that while the act of 1670 said that “none but freeholders and housekeepers” could vote, this act of 1705 did not specifically legislate against voting by a mulatto or a free Negro, and that some such privilege was exercised for a while appears from the definite provision in 1723 that “no free Negro, mulatto, or Indian, whatsoever, shall hereafter have any vote at the election of burgesses, or any other election whatsoever.”  In the same year it was provided that free Negroes and mulattoes might be employed as drummers or trumpeters in servile labor, but that they were not to bear arms; and all free Negroes above sixteen years of age were declared tithable.  In 1769, however, all free Negro and mulatto women were exempted from levies as tithables, such levies having proved to be burdensome and “derogatory to the rights of freeborn subjects.”

[Footnote 1:  Hening:  Statutes, III, 537.]

[Footnote 2:  Virginia Magazine of History, X, 281.]

[Footnote 3:  The penalty was so ineffective that in 1705 it was changed simply to imprisonment for six months “without bail or mainprise.”]

More than other colonies Maryland seems to have been troubled about the intermixture of the races; certainly no other phase of slavery here received so much attention.  This was due to the unusual emphasis on white servitude in the colony.  In 1663 it was enacted that any freeborn woman intermarrying with a slave should serve the master of the slave during the life of her husband and that any children resulting from the union were also to be slaves.  This act was evidently intended to frighten the indentured woman from such a marriage.  It had a very different effect.  Many masters, in order to prolong the indenture of their white female servants, encouraged them to marry Negro slaves.  Accordingly a new law in 1681 threw the responsibility not on the indentured woman but on the master or mistress; in case a marriage took place between a white woman-servant and a slave, the woman was to be free at once, any possible issue was to be free, and the minister performing the ceremony and the master or mistress were to be fined ten thousand pounds of tobacco.  This did not finally dispose of the problem, however, and in 1715, in response to a slightly different situation, it was enacted that a white woman who became the mother of a child by a free Negro father should become a servant for seven years, the father also a servant for seven years, and the child a servant until thirty-one