27 July 2020
Cracker is a derogatory name given to poor, white people of the American South.
The verb to crack goes back to the Old English cracian, which appears in several texts glossing the Latin verb crepare, meaning to rattle, creak, or clatter. In Middle English, the sense of speaking or making an utterance was added to the original sense, presumably from the metaphor of the sound of a voice. This sense of crack survives in the phrase to crack a joke. For instance, in his Reeve’s Tale, Geoffrey Chaucer writes:
For which this millere stal bothe mele and corn
An hundred tyme moore than biforn;
For therbiforn he stal but curteisly,
But now he was a theef outrageously,
For which the wardeyn chidde and made fare.
But therof sette the millere nat a tare;
He craketh boost, and swoor it was nat so.(For which this miller stole both meal and grain
A hundred times more than before
For before this he stole only decently,
But now he was thieving outrageously,
For which the warden (of the college) complained and made a fuss.
But the miller thought that was not worth a weed;
He cracked loud talk and swore it was not so.)
And a craker is someone who boasts. The Promptorium parvulorum, a Latin-English dictionary from 1440 has this entry:
Schakere, crakere, or bost makere: Iactator
Shakespeare uses cracker to mean someone who boasts or otherwise talks loudly in his play King John:
What cracker is this same that deafes our eares
With this abundance of superfluous breath?
The connection to the American South rises in the mid eighteenth century. In June 1752 an anonymous poet, signing himself as Jack Cracker, pens this poem attacking another with whom he was having a dispute:
A SQUIB
“Each Critic, come! your Squib provide,
“See Pindar there in Triumph ride!”
Since fairly, Friend, you thus Invite;
With due Respect I cast my Mite.
Whoever reads you, Pindar, over
May have the Pleasure to discover
Your Worms resemble Men so well,
That which is which no Man can tell.
Which makes some People think your Rants
Want Worming like Tobacco-Plants.
But Critics will not be so rude, To [sic] blame so just Similitude.
So when you Critics praise, pray name us
Your Bookworms, for Destruction famous; And in Return we you will dub
Our most triumphant swaggering Grub.
JACK CRACKER.
And a British officer, Captain Gavin Cochrane wrote the following in a report to the Earl of Dartmouth in 1766:
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 [sic] on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.
So, the insult comes from a stereotypical tendency to boast and speak loudly.
Cracker is often conflated with corncracker, another term for a poor, white farmer, and cracker, which comes first, undoubtedly influenced the later term. Literally, a corn cracker is a corn mill, and by extension a person who grinds corn, and more specifically, one who makes or drinks corn whiskey.
The literal use of corn cracker, meaning a grist mill, appears in this 1829 description of a cider mill in the periodical New York Farmer:
By a simple and cheap appendage it is converted into a corn cracker: Taking it altogether, it is in our view, the cheapest and most convenient article of the kind, yet brought before the public.
And the use of the term as an epithet for a poor farmer appears as early as June 1835 in the Western Review:
There is neither wit nor meaning in the terms Hoosier, Sucker, Corncracker, and Buckeye, which have become so current.
But the idea of cracking corn is probably most familiar to people today from the antebellum and racist minstrel song “Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly.” In the song, predominantly performed by whites in blackface, a slave celebrates his master’s death by getting drunk. The slave owner was thrown from a horse because it was bitten by a blue-tail fly, which the slave was supposed to keep away from the horse. The song, since it was written and performed by whites, was undoubtedly intended to be critical of the ungrateful and lazy slave, but it can also be read as subversive, with the slave having given the master what is coming to him and celebrating that he got away with it:
When I was young I us’d to wait
On Massa and hand him de plate;
Pass down de bottle when he git dry,
And bresh away de blue tail fly.
Jim crack corn I don’t care,
Jim crack corn I don’t care
Jim crack corn I don’t care
Ole Massa gone away.An’ when he ride in de arternoon,
I foller wid a hickory broom;
De poney being berry shy,
When bitten by de blue tail fly.
Jim crack corn &c.One day he rode aroun’ de farm,
De flies so numerous dey did swarm;
One chance to bite ‘im on the thigh,
De debbie take dat blu [sic] tail fly.
Jim crack corn &c.De poney run, he jump an’ pitch,
An’ tumble massa in de ditch;
He died, an’ de jury wonder’d why
De verdic was de blue tail fly
Jim crack corn &c.
So, cracker does not come from corncracker, as many believe. Rather the use of the latter as an epithet was influenced by the former.
Sources:
“ART. 150. —Making Cider—Description and Drawing of Thurston’s Improved Grater Cider Mill.” New York Farmer, October 1829. ProQuest American Periodical Series II.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Reeve’s Tale” (c. 1390). The Canterbury Tales. 1:3995–4001. The Geoffrey Chaucer Page, Harvard University, 2008.
Cracker, Jack. “A Squib.” Virginia Gazette (Williamsburg), 25 June 1752, 2. Newsbank: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Dictionary of Old English, A to I, 2018, s.v. cracian.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang, 2020, s.v. cracker n.3, corn n.1.
Mathews, Mitford, M. A Dictionary of Americanisms. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 1951, s.v. cracker, n., 426.
Middle English Dictionary, 2018, s.v. craken, v., craker, n.
Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. cracker, n., corn-cracker, n.
Promptorium parvulorum (1440). A. L. Mayhew, ed. Early English Text Society. London: K. Apul, Trench, Trubner, and Co., 1908, 393. HathiTrust Digital Library.
Shakespeare, William. King John (c.1595). First Folio, 1623 (Folger copy no. 68). Act 1, scene 2. Folger Shakespeare Library.
Virginia Minstrels. “Jim Crack Corn, or the Blue Tail Fly.” Baltimore: F.D. Benteen, 1846. Temple Digital Collections.