Cracker (term)
"[9][10] This usage is illustrated in a 1766 letter to the Earl of Dartmouth which reads:[11] 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.The label followed the Scotch-Irish American immigrants, who were often seen by officials as "unruly and ill-mannered.
The compound corn-cracker was used of poor white farmers (by 1808), especially from Georgia, but also extended to residents of northern Florida, from the cracked kernels of corn which formed a staple food of this class of people.
Hence the people who cracked the whips came to be thus named.Another possibility, which may be a modern folk etymology, supposes that the term derives from "soda cracker", a type of light wheat biscuit that in the Southern US dates back to at least the Civil War.
Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that "some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.
"[24] In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin quotes a Professor Wyman as saying, "One of the 'crackers' (i.e. Virginia squatters) added, 'We select the black members of a litter [of pigs] for raising, as they alone have a good chance of living.'"
The term is also used in his song "Louisiana 1927" from the same album, where the line "Ain't it a shame what the river has done to this poor cracker's land" is attributed to President Coolidge.
In 2008, former President Bill Clinton used the term "cracker" on Larry King Live to describe white voters he was attempting to win over for Barack Obama:You know, they think that because of who I am and where my politic[al] base has traditionally been, they may want me to go sort of hustle up what Lawton Chiles used to call the 'cracker vote' there.
"[31] In his 1790 memoirs, Benjamin Franklin referred to "a race of runnagates and crackers, equally wild and savage as the Indians" who inhabit the "desert[ed] woods and mountains.
"[33] On November 29, 1993, in a speech given at Kean College in New Jersey, Nation of Islam spokesman Khalid Abdul Muhammad called Pope John Paul II "a no good cracker.
