The mixture of the races began to take place almost as soon as the first Negroes and white men came into contact in America. |
The mixture of the races began to take place almost as soon as the first Negroes and white men came into contact in America. This was the experience of the Spanish and the French as well as the English colonists. When colonization brings two dissimilar races into contact, the fusion of the races is as a rule more often the result of the union of the men of the stronger race with the women of the weaker. This was true in America where the scarcity of white women possibly operated to cause interracial alliances. No doubt, Shufeldt is correct when he claims: “The crossing of the two races commenced at the very out-start of the vile slave trade that brought them thither; indeed, in those days many a negress was landed upon our shores already impregnated by someone of the demoniac crew that brought her over.” Captain Daniel Elfrye, said by some to be responsible for the introduction of the first Negroes into Virginia, received a letter from the London Company, May 10, 1632, “condemning him for too freely entertaining a mulatto.”
James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia & Miscegenation in the South, 1776-1860, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 165-166.
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