A poor southern white. The whips used by some of these people are called “crackers,” from their having a piece of buckskin at the end. (See quot. *1835.) Hence the people who cracked the whip came to be thus named. (See 1838, 1842.) And the loose bonnets worn by the women came to be called “cracker bonnets.”
1784. The London Chronicle, with reference to Maryland: “that hardy banditti well known by the name of Crackers.”—(N.E.D.)
1808. “A cracker planter” sends verses to the Savannah (Ga.) Museum, which are reprinted in The Balance, Sept. 6, p. 144.
1836. The ‘cracker’ soon discovered that he had caught a Tartar. [This was a native of Florida.]—Knick. Mag., viii. 285 (Sept.).
1838. By-the-way, Cornelia, are you never going to hold your whip-hand steady; you jerk it like a cracker woman! (Note.) Appellation given to the back country people, who use long whips with their wagons, which they crack to stimulate the team.—Caroline Gilman, ‘Recollections of a Southern Matron,’ p. 56.
1838. [She was] dressed in homespun, with a cracker or cape bonnet of the same material.—Id., p. 131.
1842. We saw many of the country people coming into town; some on horseback, some in waggons, and some on foot…. Single-breasted coats without collars, broad-brimmed and low-crowned hats, and grey hair floating in loose locks over their shoulders, were among their peculiarities…. They are called by the town’s-people “Crackers,” from the frequency with which they crack their large whips, as if they derived a peculiar pleasure from the sound.—J. S. Buckingham, ‘Slave States,’ i. 210.
1845. He then called up the bailiff, a tremendous looking cracker, wearing a broad brimmed hat, with crape. [A court scene in Georgia.]—‘The Cincinnati Miscellany,’ i. 140–1.
1845. “Now, doctor,” called out the clown, “if you want to see a cracker’s head cracked——”—W. T. Thompson, ‘Chronicles of Pineville,’ p. 35 (Phila.).
1847. I met one of the ‘country crackers,’ as the backwoodsmen are called, who having been to Wetumpka with a load of shingles, was on his way home.—Knick. Mag., xxix. 433 (May).
1848. Under ther curious lookin cracker-bonnets [at Lowell, Mass.] thar was sum lovely faces and eyes, that looked better by moonlight than any I have seed sense I left Georgia.—W. T. Thompson, ‘Major Jones’s Sketches of Travel,’ p. 131 (Phila.).
1852. A resident of Florida supplies the following local terms:—A cracker has just lighted at my office, and informed me that a neighbor who was in cahoot with him had honey-fackled him in the matter of a heap of logs which they had been getting out on a quarter (40 ac.) about a look from a branch near the old field on the Fatio grant.—Knickerbocker Mag., xl. 548 (Dec.).
1856. ‘I was amused enough,’ said Nina, ‘with Old Hundred’s indignation at having to get out the carriage and horses to go over to what he called a cracker funeral!’—H. B. Stowe, ‘Dred,’ chap. xii.
1861. The operatives in the cotton-mills [at Columbus, So. Carolina] are said to be mainly “Cracker girls” (poor whites from the country), who earn, in good times, by piece-work, from $8 to $12 a month.—Olmsted, ‘Cotton Kingdom,’ i. 273 (London).
1902. The Crackers, a name given to the poor whites of the South, formed a large part of the population at that time. They were a rude, uneducated class, but often possessing strong common sense and ideas of justice. On one of my journeys I came to a Cracker’s cabin, where a tall, gaunt man in hunting shirt and slouch hat was smoking his pipe and caressing the head of a deerhound. “Hallo, stranger,” came the salutation, “be you a preacher?” “Yes,” I answered. “Then I want to know if dogs kin go to heaven.”—Bishop Whipple, ‘Lights and Shadows,’ p. 16.
*1835. To the end of the lash is attached a soft, dry, buckskin cracker, about three eighths of an inch wide and ten or twelve inches long, which is the only part allowed to strike, in whipping on the bare skin. So soft is the cracker, that a person who has not the sleight of using the whip, could scarcely hurt a child with it.—Dr. J. W. Monett, in the Appendix to Ingraham’s ‘The South-West,’ ii. 288.
