cracker - From Ulster to America
Source: From Ulster to America: The Scotch-Irish Heritage of American English
Author: Michael Montgomery
Comments: From Ulster to America recounts the lasting impact eighteenth-century settlers from Ulster have made on the development of the English language of the United States. The book documents over 500 vocabulary items contributed to American English by these ‘Scotch-Irish’ settlers. Each ‘shared’ term with its meaning is authenticated by quotations from both sides of the Atlantic. This searchable online version of his book takes its text from the dictionary part of the second edition published by the Ullans Press in 2017.
cracker n Originally, a boaster or lively talker. The term became associated with the American backwoods by late colonial days (see 1766/1767 citations). Today it usually refers to a rural white person in the American South, especially from Georgia or Florida. For an account of its development in the U.S., see 1987 Otto Cracker.
Ulst.:
1880 Patterson Antrim/Down Glossary 25 = a boaster.
1953 Traynor Donegal Glossary 64 = a boaster.
U.S.:
1766 Cochrane Letter I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode. They steal horses in the southern provinces and sell them in the northern and those in the Northern provinces they sell in the southern. They get Merchants by degrees to trust them with more and more goods to trade with the Indians and at first make returns till they have established some credit, then leave those that trusted them in the lurch, return no more but go to some other place to follow the same practice. Some of them stay in the Indian country and are perpetually endeavouring to stir up a war by propagating idle stories that they may join them and share in the plunder. They delight in cruelty which they often practice even to one another.
1767 (in 1921 Cracker 99) CharlesTown, August 7. Letters from Silver Bluff, on Savannah river, dated on tuesday last week, inform us, that a number of the people called Crackers, who live above Augusta, in the Province of Georgia, had gone in a hostile manner to the Indian town and settlement at Okenee, where, on their arrival finding only one old Indian man, all the others being out hunting, they plundered the village of everything of any value that they could carry off, and then burnt every house in it.
1854 (in 1956 Eliason Tarheel Talk 267) The townfolks are to have a barbecue … They sent today [to invite] the ‘country crackers’.
1908 Payne Word-list East Alabama 302 = a Georgian.
