"Cracker Culture" is a provocative study of social life in the
Old South that probes the origin of cultural differences between
the South and the North throughout American history. Among
Scotch-Irish settlers the term "Cracker" initially designated a
person who boasted, but in American usage the word has come to
designate poor whites. McWhiney uses the term to define culture
rather than to signify an economic condition. Although all poor
whites were Crackers, not all Crackers were poor whites; both,
however, were Southerners.The author insists that Southerners and
Northerners were never alike. American colonists who settled south
and west of Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries were
mainly from the "Celtic fringe" of the British Isles. The culture
that these people retained in the New World accounts in
considerable measure for the difference between them and the
Yankees of New England, most of whom originated in the lowlands of
the southeastern half of the island of Britain. From their solid
base in the southern backcountry, Celts and their "Cracker"
descendants swept westward throughout the antebellum period until
they had established themselves and their practices across the Old
South. Basic among those practices that determined their
traditional folkways, values, norms, and attitudes was the herding
of livestock on the open range, in contrast to the mixed
agriculture that was the norm both in southeastern Britain and in
New England. The Celts brought to the Old South leisurely ways that
fostered idleness and gaiety. Like their Celtic ancestors,
Southerners were characteristically violent; they scorned pacifism;
they considered fights and duels honorable and consistently ignored
laws designed to control their actions. In addition, family and
kinship were much more important in Celtic Britain and the
antebellum South than in England and the Northern United States.
Fundamental differences between Southerners and Northerners shaped
the course of antebellum American history; their conflict in the
1860s was not so much brother against brother as culture against
culture.
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