Maryland’s all-white, all-male legislature passed the first colonial law intended to prevent interracial marriage.
Calling marriages between free white women and enslaved Black men a “disgrace [to] our Nation,” the law aimed at “deterring such freeborne women from such shamefull Matches“ by declaring that the children of these marriages would be born enslaved. This legislation deviated from the precedent that the children of free women followed the status of their mothers and thus were born free. The law also stipulated that white women who married enslaved Black men would become indentured to their husbands’ enslaver for the duration of their spouses’ lives. Altogether, it bolstered a rigid racial caste system by denying dignity and humanity to interracial couples and condemned countless children to the horrific condition of enslavement.
This 1664 law was the first of a series of “anti-miscegenation” laws Maryland passed in opposition to intimate relationships between Black and white partners interacting as equals, even as white enslavers were often permitted to inflict sexual violence against Black women, men, and children with impunity. Following Maryland’s lead, laws targeting interracial marriages were passed in other colonies, including Virginia (1691), Massachusetts (1705), North Carolina (1715), Pennsylvania (1725), and Georgia (1750).
It would take over 300 years, until the 1967 Supreme Court ruling Loving v. Virginia, for anti-miscegenation laws to be banned across the U.S.