servant was indicted for cohabiting with a Negro. In 1698 the Chester
County court laid it down as a principle that the mingling of the races
was not to be allowed. In 1722 a woman was punished for promoting a
secret marriage between a white woman and a Negro; a little later the
Assembly received from the inhabitants of the province a petition
inveighing against cohabiting; and in 1725-6 a law was passed positively
forbidding the mixture of the races.[1] In Massachusetts as early as
1705 and 1708 restraining acts to prevent a "spurious and mixt issue"
ordered the sale of offending Negroes and mulattoes out of the colony's
jurisdiction, and punished Christians who intermarried with them by a
fine of £50. After the Revolutionary War such marriages were declared
void and the penalty of £50 was still exacted, and not until 1843 was
this act repealed. Thus was the color-line, with its social and legal
distinctions, extended beyond the conditions of servitude and slavery,
and thus early was an important phase of the ultimate Negro Problem
foreshadowed.

[Footnote 1: Turner: _The Negro in Pennsylvania_, 29-30.]

Generally then, in the South, in the colonial period, the free Negro
could not vote, could not hold civil office, could not give testimony in
cases involving white men, and could be employed only for fatigue
duty in the militia. He could not purchase white servants, could not
intermarry with white people, and had to be very circumspect in his
relations with slaves. No deprivation of privilege, however, relieved
him of the obligation to pay taxes. Such advantages as he possessed were
mainly economic. The money gained from his labor was his own; he might
become skilled at a trade; he might buy land; he might buy slaves;[1] he
might even buy his wife and child if, as most frequently happened,
they were slaves; and he might have one gun with which to protect his