Persina, a Queen of Ethiopia, 60 BC, presented her husband, Hydaspes, with a light-colored child, “which color is strange among Ethiopians.” She declared it was due to the presence of a white statue in the room at the time of conception.
Similarly Maria Theresa of Spain and Austria, wife of Louis XIV, King of France, bore him a mulatto daughter in 1665. The Queen spent most of her time with a Negro dwarf, named Nabo, while the King passed most of his time with the beauties that thronged his court.
The doctors explained the color of the child by saying that the black man looked at the Queen. “It must have been a very penetrating look”, said the King, wrathfully. A noted writer of that time attributed the color of a similar child, born to a high noblewoman, to the mother’s fondness for chocolate.
Anna, a Negro servant girl of Calavecchio, Italy, wife of a white muledriver, became the concubine of Pope Clement VII. Her son, Alessandro, born 1511, became reigning Duke of Florence, and married Margaret, only daughter of the Emperor Charles V, ruler of Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, and Spain in 1536.
White American slave-holders used to induce white women to marry Negro slaves in order to hold the women slaves for life.
Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States, and father of the Declaration of Independence, was the father of a large number of mulatto children. His wife protested long and loud to no avail. Patrick Henry, another signer of that document, had a Negro son named Melancthon.
Napoleon planned to solve the color problem in Haiti by making it legal for each man to take three wives, one white, one mulatto, the other black. He had several conferences with the theologians on “this grand measure” and tried to win the consent of the Pope.
In 1787 while a party of 351 freed Negroes was aboard ship at Portsmouth, England, enroute to Sierra Leone, West Africa, the authorities brought on board sixty-two white women, prostitutes and others, whom they wished to get rid of, and married them to as many men,a nd sent them off to be the future mothers of the colony.
In the 1850’s, Mrs. Leybonn, an Englishwoman, was “Queen of the Slave-traders”, at Rio Pongo, one of the principal slave posts in West Africa. She had a fort armed with cannon and armed by 300 devoted blacks. She had three mulatto children by a Negro,a boy and two girls. One of the latter married a white slave-trader, and the other,a British Consul.
The Countess de Beauharnais, who was related by marriage to Napoleon, married a full-blooded Haitian Negro, name Castaing, who was a member of the Paris Convention og 1792-1795.