Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race
The American Historical Review, June 2001
PATRICK WOLFE
In a letter of March 1757 to his brother Moses, Peter Fountaine, a Huguenot descendant of Westover, Virginia, complained of the “many base wretches among us” who took up with Negro women, “by which means the country swarms with mulatto bastards” who, once three generations removed, would, “by the indulgent laws of the country,” be allowed to intermarry with whites. As he continued: 31
Now, if, instead of this abominable practice which hath polluted the blood of so many among us, we had taken Indian wives in the first place, it would have been some compensation for their lands. They are a free people, and the offspring would not have been born in a state of slavery. We should become the rightful heirs to their lands and should not have smutted our blood, for the Indian children when born are as white as the Spaniards or Portuguese, and were it not for the practice of going naked in summer and besmearing themselves with bears grease, etc., they would continue white.66
66 Quoted in James Hugo Johnston, Race Relations in Virginia and Miscegenation in the South, 1776–1860 (Amherst, Mass., 1970), 170, who also quotes Colonel William Byrd to almost identical effect.