years of age.  Any white man who begot a Negro woman with child, whether a free woman or a slave, was to undergo the same penalty as a white woman—­a provision that in course of time was notoriously disregarded.  In 1717 the problem was still unsettled, and in this year it was enacted that Negroes or mulattoes of either sex intermarrying with white people were to be slaves for life, except mulattoes born of white women, who were to serve for seven years, and the white person so intermarrying also for seven years.  It is needless to say that with all these changing and contradictory provisions many servants and Negroes did not even know what the law was.  In 1728, however, free mulatto women having illegitimate children by Negroes and other slaves, and free Negro women having illegitimate children by white men, and their issue, were subjected to the same penalties as in the former act were provided against white women.  Thus vainly did the colony of Maryland struggle with the problem of race intermixture.  Generally throughout the South the rule in the matter of the child of the Negro father and the indentured white mother was that the child should be bound in servitude for thirty or thirty-one years.

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.[1] 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 L50.  After the Revolutionary War such marriages were declared void and the penalty of L50 was still exacted, and not until 1843 was this act repealed.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.

[Footnote 1:  Turner:  The Negro in Pennsylvania, 29-30.]

Generally then, in the South, in the colonial period, the free Negro could not vote, could not hold civil office, could not give testimony in cases involving white men, and could be employed only for fatigue duty in the militia.  He could not purchase white servants, could not intermarry with white people, and had to be very circumspect in his relations with slaves.  No deprivation of privilege, however, relieved him of the obligation to pay taxes.  Such advantages as he possessed were mainly economic.