arriage should be fined fifty pounds. This law, according to
Bassett, did not succeed in preventing such unions. Two ministers were
indicted within two years for performing such a marriage ceremony. "In
one case the suit was dropped, in the other case the clergyman went
before the Chief Justice and confessed as it seems of his own
accord.... In 1727 a white woman was indicted in the General Court
because she had left her husband and was cohabiting with a negro
slave.... So far as general looseness was concerned this law of 1715
had no force. Brickell, who was a physician, says that white men of
the colony suffered a great deal from a malignant kind of venereal
disease which they took from the slaves."[466]

By the law of 1741 therefore the colony endeavored to prevent what the
General Assembly called "that abominable mixture and spurious issue,
which hereafter may increase in this government, by white men and
women intermarrying with Indians, Negroes, mustees, or mulattoes." It
was enacted that if any man or woman, being free, should intermarry
with an Indian, Negro, mustee or mulatto man or woman, or any person
of mixed blood, to the third generation, bond or free, he should, by
judgment of the county court forfeit and pay the sum of fifty pounds,
proclamation money, to the use of the parish.[467] It was also
provided that if any white servant woman should during the time of her
servitude, be delivered of a child, begotten by any Negro, mulatto or
Indian, such servant, over and above the time she was by this act to
serve her master or owner for such offence, should be sold by the
Church wardens of the parish, for two years, after the time by
indenture or otherwise had expired.[468]

The miscegenation of the whites and blacks extended so widely that it
became a matter of concern to the colonies farther north where the
Negro population was not considerable. Seeking also to prevent this
"spurious mixt issue" Massachusetts enacted in 1705 that a Negro or
mulatto man committing fornication with an "English woman, or a woman
of any other Christian nation," should be sold out of the province."
"An English man, or man of any other Christian nation committing
fornication with a Negro or mulatto woman," should be whipped, and the
woman sold out of the province. None of her Majesty's English or
Scottish subjects, nor of any other Christian nation within that
province should contract matrimony with any Negro or mulatto, under a