Faithful Bodies: Performing Religion and Race in the Puritan Atlantic

11 “If any white woman shall have a child by any Negroe or other slave”

11 / “If any white woman shall have a child by any Negroe or other slave” In 1723, Bermudian lawmakers revised the “Act against Bastardy” to include racial categories: “white women” convicted of having a child “by any Negroe or other slave” received an automatic whipping, while their partners would be “publickly whipt . . . under the Gallows by the Common Hangman.”1 For an English colony in the Americas, 1723 was a comparatively late year to codify evolving understandings of human difference in its statutory laws on fornication or marriage. Antigua passed a law in 1644 that specified gradated penalties for “Carnall Copulation ” between “any Christian man or woman” and “A heathen man or woman.” In 1662, Virginia doubled the fines from 500 to 1,000 pounds of tobacco if “any christian shall commit Fornication with a negro man or woman.” Maryland passed a law in 1664 that discouraged interracial marriage between “woemen of the English or other Christian nacōns” and “Negroes or other slaves” by sentencing the woman to thirty years of service, claiming that such unions were “shamefull matches.” A 1705 law in Massachusetts instistuted heavy penalties for fornication between “English” men or women or those “of any other Christian nation” and “negro, or molatto” women or men.2 Plymouth passed a law against fornication in 1645 and had not added race as a category by the time the colony merged with Massachusetts in 1692. Rhode Island prohibited all fornication as part of a general criminal statute in 1663; it did not outlaw interracial marriage until the end of the eighteenth century.3 The opposition between “christian” or members of “any other Christian nation” and “negro, or mulatto” categorized Africans as non-Christians. 250 / disciplining Virginia’s 1662 law was a key moment in Anglo-Virginians’ move over the seventeenth century from considering Africans and Indians as “potential Christians” to viewing them as “hereditary heathens,” a perception supported by Virginia’s demographic of continued high rates of slave importations. Maryland’s law designated the children of those “shamefull matches” as inheriting an enslaved status from their fathers. Massachusetts legislators passed that colony’s law as a response to their increased awareness of the presence of Africans and other non-English inhabitants, a perception heightened by New England colonists’ participation in the wars of the end of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth century.4 In contrast, when Bermudian legislators defined “white” against “Negroe or any other slave” in 1723, they conflated darker skin color with bonded status but did not draw on interlocking categories of religion and race. “To mary with or have commerce with any negroes molattoes or musteses” When legal scholars of race have mentioned Bermuda, many of them have pointed to a 1662/3 resolution against interracial sex as the beginning of racial separation in Bermuda, a timing on par with the Chesapeake .5 But such interpretations take this resolution out of its local context , giving it more legal weight than it had. In 1662/3, the Assembly reported to the Somers Islands Company that it had resolved against the insolent carriage of “negroes molattoes & musteses.” The reported enactment warned against individuals in those categories carrying themselves “mutinous or proudly against his Maiesties Subjects.” Excluded from the category of the king’s subjects even if no master claimed “their services ,” “negroes molattoes & musteses” were “not Free to all nationall priviledges.” Any “Free borne subjects” who married or had sexual “commerce ” with persons of African descent were to become servants to the colony, or were to be banished.6 While Virginia’s 1662 law used religious categories that presumed, as Rebecca Goetz has argued, “English people were Christian; people of African descent were not,” Bermuda’s General Assembly did not make any use of “Christian” or other reference to religion. Instead, they excluded people of color from “nationall priviledges” of English subjecthood .7 “Mustee” was a term more common in places like the plantation colonies that parsed degrees of African and Indian descent with greater precision than was common in Bermuda. The word did not often appear if any white woman shall have a child / 251 in Bermuda’s records. Its repeated presence in this letter to the Company suggests that the proceedings it described were anomalous rather than indicative of the prevailing local racial ideology. This 1662/3 resolution was never effectually enforced, nor did officials present any cases under it.8 Roughly...