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On his first trip to the Deep South to work as an itinerant painter, George Fuller (1822-1884) of Deerfield, Massachusetts, commented in his diary of seeing "negroes" at work and in leisure time. In the first entry selected here, Fuller appears stunned that among the "negroes" he witnessed being baptized, one was so white he "could not detect the dark shade." Seen as mere property, thousands of slave women were raped by their owners and overseers, resulting in many children of mixed race. Laws throughout the South, however, ruled that regardless of a child's parentage, if the mother was a slave, so too would be her offspring.

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