penalty imposed on the person joining them in marriage. No master
should unreasonably deny marriage to his Negro with one of the same
nation; any law, usage or custom to the contrary notwithstanding.[469]

There was much social contact between the white servants and the
Negroes in Pennsylvania, where the number of the latter greatly
increased during the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Turner
says a white servant was indicted for this offence in Sussex County in
1677 and a tract of land there bore the name of "Mulatto Hall."[470]
According to the same writer Chester County seemed to have a large
number of these cases and laid down the principle that such admixture
should be prohibited,

"For that hee," referring to a white man, "Contrary to his
Masters Consent hath ... got wth child a certaine molato wooman
Called Swart anna." "David Lewis Constable of Haverford Returned
a Negro man of his And a white woman for having a Bastard Childe
... the Negroe said she Intised him and promised him to marry
him: she being examined, Confest the same: the Court ordered that
she shall receive Twenty one lashes on her bare Backe ... and the
Court ordered the negroe never more to meddle with any white
woman more uppon paine of his life."[471]

Advertising for Richard Molson in Philadelphia in 1720, his master
said, "He is in company with a white woman named Mary, who is supposed
now goes for his wife"; "and a white man named Garrett Choise, and
Jane his wife, which said white people are servants to some neighbors
of the said Richard Tilghman."[472] In 1722 a woman was punished for
abetting a clandestine marriage between a white woman and a Negro. In
the _Pennsylvania Gazette_, June 1, 1749, appeared the notice of the
departure of Isaac Cromwell, a mulatto, who ran away with an English
servant woman named Anne Greene.[473]

The Assembly, therefore, upon a petition from inhabitants inveighing
against this custom enacted a prohibitory law in 1725. This law
provided that no minister, pastor or magistrate or other person
whatsover who according to the laws of that province usually joined
people in marriage should upon any pretence whatever join in marriage
any Negro with any white person on the penalty of one hundred pounds.
And it was further enacted that if any white man or woman should
cohabit or dwell with any Negro under pretense of being married, such
white man or woman should be