American Slavery As It Is

Theodore Dwight Weld, ed., American Slavery As It Is Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839 reprinted. New York Arno, 1968), pp. 72, 77. 

It is against this backdrop that the history of political whiteness took shape and that the fluidity of certain groups racial identities became apparent. The crosscurrents here are terribly complex. The Mexican War, slavery and Emancipation, Reconstruction, Indian wars, anti-Chinese agitation, Pacific expansion, and popular accounts of Pacific, Asian, and African exploration all kept vividly alive the crucial distinction in American political culture dividing white from nonwhite populations, as did... 

---