put out of service as above directed
until they come to the age of thirty-one years; and if any free Negro
man or woman should intermarry with a white man or woman, such Negro
should become a slave during life to be sold by order of the justice
of the quarter sessions of the respective county; and if any free
Negro man or woman should commit fornication or adultery with any
white man or woman, such Negro or Negroes should be sold as a servant
for seven years and the white man or woman should be punished as the
law directs in cases of adultery or fornication.[474]

This law seemed to have very little effect on the miscegenation of the
races in certain parts. In Chester County, according to the records of
1780, mulattoes constituted one fifth of the Negro population.[475]
Furthermore, that very year when the State of Pennsylvania had grown
sufficiently liberal to provide for gradual emancipation the law
against the mingling of the races was repealed. Mixed marriages
thereafter became common as the white and the blacks in the light of
the American Revolution realized liberty in its full meaning. Thomas
Branagan said:

"There are many, very many blacks who ... begin to feel
themselves consequential, ... will not be satisfied unless they
get white women for wives, and are likewise exceedingly
impertinent to white people in low circumstances.... I solemnly
swear, I have seen more white women married to, and deluded
through the arts of seduction by negroes in one year in
Philadelphia, than for eight years I was visiting (West Indies
and the Southern States). I know a black man who seduced a young
white girl ... who soon after married him, and died with a broken
heart. On her death he said that he would not disgrace himself to
have a negro wife and acted accordingly, for he soon after
married a white woman. ... There are perhaps hundreds of white
women thus fascinated by black men in this city, and there are
thousands of black children by them at present."[476]

A reaction thereafter set in against this custom during the first
decade of the nineteenth century, when fugitives in the rough were
rushing to that State, and culminated in an actual campaign against it
by 1820. That year a petition from Greene County said that many
Negroes had settled in Pennsylvania and had been able to seduce into
marriage "the minor children of the white inhabitants."[477] Th