The term "house negro" appears in print by 1711. On May 21 of that year, ''[[The Boston News-Letter]]'' ran an advertisement that "A Young House-Negro Wench of 19 Years of Age that speaks English to be Sold."<ref name=OED>{{cite encyclopedia |title=House |encyclopedia=Oxford English Dictionary |year=2009 |version=Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) |publisher=Oxford University Press |isbn=978-0-19-956383-8 }}</ref> In a 1771 letter, a [[Province of Maryland|Maryland]] slave-owner compared the lives of his slaves to those to "house negroes" and "plantation negroes", sayingrefuting an accusation that his slaves were poorly fed by saying they were fed as well as "plantation negroes", though not as well as the "house negroes".<ref name=OED/><ref>{{cite journal |title=Extracts from the Carroll Papers |journal=Maryland Historical Magazine |publisher=[[Maryland Historical Society]] |date=June 1919 |volume=XIV |issue=2 |page=135 |url=https://archive.org/details/msa_sc_5881_1_54 |accessdate=January 18, 2018 }}</ref></blockquote> In 1807, a report of the [[African Institution]] of London describesdescribed an incident aboutin which an old woman who reportedly was required to work in the field after an altercation where she refused to throw salt-water and gunpowder on the wounds of other slaves after theywho had been whipped. According to the report, she had previously enjoyed a favored status as a "house negro".<ref>{{cite book |title=Report of the Committee of the African Institution |date=1807 |publisher=William Phillips, George Yard, Lombard Street |place=London}}</ref></blockquote>
[[Margaret Mitchell]] made use of the term in her famed 1936 Southern plantation fiction, ''[[Gone With the Wind (novel)|Gone With the Wind]]:
