"The Prevention of That Abominable Mixture and Spurious Issue": Continuity in the Prosecution of Miscegenation in Virginian Laws and Court Decisions, 1630-1691
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the historical debate over the legitimation of Virginian black slavery in the seventeenth century, some historians argue that the legal prosecution of interracial sexual relations was a calculated effort to institute slavery. Conversely, others assert that lawmakers and law enforcers did not actively discourage interracial sex until they enacted legislation that explicitly forbade miscegenation in the 1660s and again in the 1690s. However, an examination of Virginian laws and court decisions regarding fornication from 1630 to 1691 reveals a different story. Colonial authorities inherited a revulsion towards miscegenation from the English intellectual and religious tradition, and they used three different legal methods to prevent sex between blacks and whites. Before they introduced legislation that explicitly sought to punish whites for miscegenation in the 1660s and 1690s, the secular authorities of the 1630s and 1640s resorted to enforcing moral laws originally meant for the Church courts, and they then introduced general laws against fornication that were disproportionately applied to cases of pre-marital sexual intercourse involving blacks. While the methods of sexually segregating white and black colonists changed over the course of the seventeenth century, the desire to prevent miscegenation was always present in the minds of colonial officials in this era.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".