“Abominable Mixture”: Toward the Repudiation of Anglo-Indian Intermarriage in Seventeenth-Century Virginia |
The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
Volume 95, Number 2 (April, 1987)
pages 157-192
David D. Smits, Professor of History
The College of New Jersey
Students of Amerindian-white relations have long ascribed to the English colonists an aversion to race mixing, especially through intermarriage, with the North American natives. To be sure, it is recognized that there was some Indian-white interbreeding, and even marriage, on all Anglo-American frontiers, but proportionately less than in Franco- and Hispanic-America. Virginia’s well-known marriage of John Rolfe to Pocahontas did not establish a widely imitated precedent for Anglo-Indian matrimony in the colony. A 1691 Virginia law prohibiting Anglo-Indian marriage and informal sexual unions surely indicates that they occurred; with a few notable exceptions, however, the Englishman who took a native wife, concubine, or mistress violated the colony’s mores…
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