While it later became a capital offence in some of the slave States
for a Negro man to cohabit with a white woman, Abdy who toured this
country from 1833 to 1834 doubted that such laws were enforced. "A
man," said he, "was hanged not long ago for this crime at New Orleans.
The partner of his guilt--his master's daughter--endeavored to save
his life, by avowing that she alone was to blame. She died shortly
after his execution."[482] With the white man and the Negro woman the
situation was different. A sister of President Madison once said to
the Reverend George Bourne, then a Presbyterian minister in Virginia:
"We Southern ladies are complimented with the name of wives; but we
are only the mistresses of seraglios." The masters of the female
slaves, however, were not always the only persons of loose morals.
Many women of color were also prostituted to the purposes of
young white men[483] and overseers.[484] Goodell reports a
well-authenticated account of a respectable Christian lady at the
South who kept a handsome mulatto female for the use of her genteel
son, as a method of deterring him, as she said, "from indiscriminate
and vulgar indulgences."[485] Harriet Martineau discovered a young
white man who on visiting a southern lady became insanely enamored of
her intelligent quadroon maid. He sought to purchase her but the owner
refused to sell the slave because of her unusual worth. The young
white man persisted in trying to effect this purchase and finally
informed her owner that he could not live without this attractive
slave. Thereupon the white lady sold the woman of color to satisfy the
lust of her friend.[486]

The accomplishment of this task of reducing the free people of color
to the status of the blacks, however, was not easy. In the first
place, so many persons of color had risen to positions of usefulness
among progressive people and had formed connections with them that an
abrupt separation was both inexpedient and undesirable. Exceptions to
the hard and fast rules of caste were often made to relieve the people
of color. Moreover, the miscegenation of the races in the South and
especially in large cities like Charleston and New Orleans had gone to
the extent that from these centers eventually went, as they do now, a
large number of quadroons and octoroons,[487] who elsewhere crossed
over to the other race.

White men ashamed of the planters who abused helpless black women are
now trying to minimize the prev