Book Description

Like many other southern free Negro families originating in the colonial era (when many whites, women, as well as men were subject to servitude), the family of T. O. Madden, Jr., began with the birth in 1758 of his great-great-grandmother Sarah Madden. She is one of the two ancestors to whom he dedicates this book. Sarah's mother, Mary Madden, contributed the surname that endured. Mary Madden was an Irishwoman who had probably immigrated as a servant a few years before Sarah's birth. Although the myths of Virginia would make every colonial who was white into an aristocrat, Mary Madden, like most eighteenth-century Virginians, was indigent. But unlike many others, she was free. Of Sarah Madden's father, nothing is known. The legal definition of mixed-race children of blacks and whites had been settled in 1662, when the Virginia legislature enacted laws prohibiting interracial marriages and declaring that children followed the status of their mother. Such legislation made children like Sarah Madden free, but illegitimate.