The conditions that I have described as existing in Louisiana and South Carolina did not exist throughout the nineteenth century but only into the decade preceding the Civil War, the 1850s. Thereafter, as sectional tensions grew, more and more pressures developed to define race in such a way as to simplify racial identity. It is at this moment in history that “white” finds its modern definition in America: It comes to mean one whose forebears are white and white only; one who does not carry in his or her body a known (or acknowledged) “drop of black blood.”
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