He is a ‘‘cracker,’’ actually. The expression, about years old in English
popular usage, means one who boasts, cracks wise, exaggerates, and lies
for the sheer story-making joy of it.^4
Expressive narrative traditions as well as certain economic behaviors
—such as ranging hogs and cattle and neglecting farming—often bleed
past conventional categories of social class. Bolus the fictional lawyer was
brother to other Alabamians, roughly dressed, who waxed outrageous in
speech by campfires along the hog trails to Mobile. Daniel R. Hundley, an
Alabama gentleman and soon to be a Confederate officer, in became
the region’s first serious sociologist with publication ofSocial Relations in
Our Southern States. Crackers as herders and cultural types are hardly seen,
but Hundley devoted large chapters both to ‘‘The Middle Classes’’—towns-
people, storekeepers, craftsmen, and clerks—and to ‘‘The Southern Yeo-
man,’’ who while modestly prosperous to ‘‘poor,’’ bore more resemblance to
the English yeomanry than Fanny Kemble’s pinelanders. Hundley devoted
other chapters to a sort of moral typology overlying economic standing.
‘‘The Southern Gentleman’’ was ideal; ‘‘The Cotton Snob,’’ a disgusting fail-
ure of restraint and responsibility. ‘‘Poor White Trash’’ received thirty-two
pages of mostly reflective, indirect treatment but finally a sad resignation
to heredity and God’s will—Europe and the North had their poor, too, after
all. ‘‘The Southern Bully’’ approaches aspects of the cracker tradition in his
violence and braggadocio, though little else.^5
Considering the enormous volumes and values of the antebellum pork
and beef markets, one might guess with confidence that herders were
roughly the equivalent of what twentieth-century sociology would call
middle- and lower-middle-class folk. These included yeomen who were
serious, perhaps even improving, farmers, plus the legendarily ‘‘careless’’
farmers who preferred ranging and droving to cultivation, but also num-
bers of the landless who, if not even moderately well-off, were comfortable
enough by their own lights, from the animal business alone. These last were
hardly ‘‘trash,’’ save in the eyes of the comfortably ignorant, whose loathing
was ever mingled with fear. So what then, of the ecology of these masses of
white southerners and their culture?
tEurasian domesticated animals—horses, cattle, hogs, but also sheep,
goats, dogs, and cats—were from the beginning great disturbers of New
World environments. Their hooves and feet, whether shod, hard, or soft,
trampled, compacted, but especially stirred the earth, providing opportu-
nity for a variety of Old World plants to establish themselves. These were