Both white and mixed-race children were bound out by the Virginia courts. White boys til twenty-one and white girls in some colonies to 16 and in others to 18 years. If the mother was a servant, she had to serve extra time for "the trouble of her master's house" and receive lashes or pay a fine for the offense. Sometimes her master would agree to an additional year of service in return for payment of the fine. A special law of 1691 ordered the mixed-race children of white women bound out for thirty years (later thirty-one if I remember correctly) and the woman was to pay 15 pounds currency or be sold for 5 years. Servant women could not pay 15 pounds currency, so they were sold, often to their former master. It was clearly a punishment. In Maryland white women were sold for 7 years, but it did not deter hundreds of them from having mixed-race children. At least one woman was sold for 28 years. Paul