is
county, therefore, asked that these marriages be made an offence
against the laws of the State. Such a marriage was the cause of a riot
in Columbia in 1834 and in 1838 the members of the Constitutional
Convention engaged in a heated discussion of the custom.[478]
Petitions were frequently sent to the legislature asking that this
admixture be penalized by law, but no such action was ever taken.
Relying upon public opinion, however, the advocates of racial
integrity practically succeeded. Marriages of whites and blacks
eventually became so odious that they led to disturbances as in the
case of the riot of 1849, one of the causes of which was that a white
man was living with a Negro wife.[479] This was almost ineffective,
however, in the prevention of race admixture. Clandestine
intermingling went on and tended to increase in enormous proportions.
The conclusive proof of this is that in 1860 mulattoes constituted one
third of the Negro population of Pennsylvania.

Persons who professed seriously to consider the future of slavery,
therefore, saw that miscegenation and especially the general
connection of white men with their female slaves introduced a mulatto
race whose numbers would become dangerous, if the affections of their
white parents were permitted to render them free.[480] The Americans
of the future would thereby become a race of mixed breeds rather than
a white and a black population. As the lust of white persons for those
of color was too strong to prevent this miscegenation, the liberty of
emancipating their mulatto offspring was restricted in the slave
States but that of selling them remained.[481]

These laws eventually, therefore, had their desired effect. They were
never intended to prevent the miscegenation of the races but to debase
to a still lower status the offspring of the blacks who in spite of
public opinion might intermarry with the poor white women and to leave
women of color without protection against white men, who might use
them for convenience, whereas white women and black men would
gradually grow separate and distinct in their social relations.
Although thereafter the offspring of blacks and whites did not
diminish, instead of being gradually assimilated to the type of the
Caucasian they tended to constitute a peculiar class commonly called
people of color having a higher social status than that of the blacks
but finally classified with all other persons of African blood as
Negroes.