Page:Economic History of Virginia Vol 2.djvu/124

 to arise upon close association with the African for a great length of time. There must have been, by the middle of the century a number of mulattoes in the Colony, sprung from black mothers, who were less repulsive in person and manners than the average negro. The class of white women who were required to work in the fields belonged to the lowest rank in point of character; not having been born in Virginia and not having thus acquired from birth a repugnance to association with Africans upon a footing of social equality, they yielded to the temptations of the situations in which they were placed. The offence, whether committed by a native or an imported white woman, was an act of personal degradation that was condemned by public sentiment with as much severity in the seventeenth century as at all subsequent periods. Mulattoes were referred to by the law as an &#8220;abominable mixture,&#8221; and the mere fact that a marriage ceremony had given apparent sanctity to the relations resulting in such births, did not in the eyes of the community at large make this mixture of whites and blacks less odious in its character. So repugnant to popular feeling became all physical commerce between the races that intermarriages between their members were strictly forbidden, and the minister