American Language Supplement 2 (126 page)
Read American Language Supplement 2 Online
Authors: H.L. Mencken
The two Carolinas have been called variously, but
Tarheel State
for North Carolina and
Palmetto State
for South Carolina seem
likely to prevail. Of the origin of the former the
Overland Monthly
gave the following account in 1869:
A brigade of North Carolinians … failed to hold a certain hill, and were laughed at by the Mississippians for having forgotten to tar their heels that morning. Hence originated the cant name.
This story, of course, did not please the North Carolinians, and in 1901 Walter Clark offered a more flattering version in his “History of the Several Regiments and Battalions From North Carolina in the Great War, 1861–65”:
The following, familiar to all the army of Northern Virginia, illustrates the complacent pride with which the North Carolina soldiers adopted the distinctive sobriquet of
Tar Heels
, first banteringly given them.… Thus, after one of the fiercest battles, in which their supporting column was driven from the field and they successfully fought it out alone, in the exchange of compliments of the occasion the North Carolinians were greeted with the question from the passing derelict regiment: “Any more tar down in the Old North State, boys?” Quick as thought came the answer: “No; not a bit. Old Jeff’s bought it all up.” “Is that so? What is he going to do with it?” was asked. “He is going to put it on you’uns heels to make you stick better in the next fight.”
1
In a speech in 1915 Major William A. Graham, a North Carolina veteran of the Confederate Army, repeated this story substantially as it is told here, but followed it with a quite inconsistent variorum version, as follows:
The Fourth Texas had lost its flag at Sharpsburg.
2
Passing the Sixth North Carolina a few days afterward, they called out “Tar Heel!” and the reply was, “If you fellows had some tar on your heels you would have brought back your flag from Sharpsburg.”
Obviously, the point here is lost unless it is assumed that North Carolinians were known as
Tarheels
before the date of the incident, or, at all events, that some notion of tar was associated with them. That this was the case is shown by the DAE, which offers evidence that they were called
Tar-boilers
so early as 1845, and that their State was the
Turpentine State
by 1850. No one, so far, has unearthed an example of
Tarheel
older than the Civil War, but I suspect that a more diligent investigation than the searchers for the DAE undertook might produce many. At the start, it appears, the term was regarded as opprobrious by the North Carolinians, but
that is certainly not true today. How their view of it was changed was represented by Major Graham in his speech to be as follows:
It was recognized as a term of affront until 1864. Governor Vance,
1
when he visited the Army of Northern Virginia, in opening his speech, said:
“I do not know what to call you fellows. I cannot say ‘fellow soldiers’ because I am not a soldier, nor ‘fellow citizens’ because we do not live in this State, so I have concluded to call you ‘fellow
Tar Heels
.’ ”
There was a slight pause before the applause came, and from that time
Tar Heels
has been honored as an epithet worthy to be offered to a gallant North Carolina soldier.
2
Whatever the truth of all this, the fact remains that
Tarheel
has now lost all derogatory significance in North Carolina. The newspaper of the students at the University of North Carolina has been so called since 1892, and when, in 1922, the State bankers launched a monthly organ at Raleigh it was given the name of
Tarheel Banker
. Other nicknames recorded for North Carolina by Shankle and other authorities are
Old North State, Land of the Sky
and
Rip Van Winkle State
. The first arose naturally out of the geography and history of the State, and the DAE traces it, on the authority of Bartlett, to the campaign which made William A. Graham, apparently the father of the aforesaid Major Graham, Governor from 1845 to 1849.
Land of the Sky
is logically applicable only to the beautiful mountain country in the far western part of the State; Eastern North Carolina is far closer to the bottom of the Atlantic than to the sky.
Rip Van Winkle State
remains unexplained. It appears on the
Brother Jonathan
list of 1843, but is not recorded by the DAE. Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle” was first published in his “Sketch Book” in 1819.
The palmetto, a variety of fan palm, has been associated with South Carolina since colonial days, though it also grows in other States. The DAE traces its use as a common noun to 1739.
Palmetto State
appeared in both the
Knickerbocker Magazine
and
Brother Jonathan
lists in 1843. During the turmoils preceding the Civil War
palmetto
was used in various terms associated with the Nullification and Secession movements –
e.g., palmetto speech
, 1840,
palmetto cockade
, 1846, and
palmetto banner
, 1860 – and at the outbreak of the war the
palmetto flag
was the shining symbol of the Confederacy. The prevailing American belief in those days was that the South Carolinians were an especially bellicose folk, so the State was sometimes called the
Gamecock State
or the
Harry Percy of the Union
. The DAE traces the former to 1862, but it was probably not new at that time. Both it and
Harry Percy of the Union
have vanished as the fires of the South Carolinians have cooled. Their State has also been called the
Rice State
, the
Iodine State
, the
Swamp State
and the
Sand-lapper State
. Between the Revolution and the Civil War those living on the low-lying coastal plain were often called
Ricebirds
by the people of higher regions.
Rice State
, however, is not recorded by the DAE, nor are
Swamp State
and
Iodine State
. During the years before the Civil War the inhabitants of sandy regions throughout the South were often called
Sandlappers
. In “The Scout,” 1841 (also published as “The Kinsman”), W. G. Simms described one of them as “a little, dried up, withered atomy – a jaundiced
sand-lapper
or
clay-eater
from the Wassamasaw country.”
Sand-hiller
was a variant.
Clay-hiller
belonged to both Carolinas. Thornton defines the term on the authority of a mysterious Ida May, as follows:
A miserable set of people inhabiting some of the Southern States, who subsist chiefly on turpentine whiskey
1
and appease their craving for more substantial food by filling their stomachs with a kind of aluminous earth which abounds everywhere. This gives them a yellowish-drab-colored complexion, with dull eyes and faces whose idiotic expression is only varied by a dull despair or a devilish malignity. They are looked down upon by the Negroes with a contempt that they return with a hearty hatred.
2
They were finally dissuaded from this diet by the Public Health Service doctors and nurses who began purging them of hookworms in the early days of the present century.
Georgia was listed as the
Pine State
by
Brother Jonathan
in 1843, but by 1872 Schele de Vere was calling it the
Cracker State
, though he added with some haste that it “little deserved” the nickname.
Cracker
as a designation for a low-down Southern white man is traced by the DAE to 1767, and from the start it seems to have been felt that such persons were especially numerous in Georgia. The origin of the term is obscure. It was used in the sense of a boaster by Alexander Barclay in “The Shyp of Folys” in 1509, and by Shakespeare in “King John” in 1595, and in this sense it seems to have been suggested by a verb common to all the Germanic languages, signifying to make a short, sharp sound, as of something breaking.
1
But it is hard to connect the verb with the Southern
cracker
, so amateur etymologists have looked elsewhere. One school holds that many of the early
crackers
were teamsters, and got their name by their loud and incessant cracking of their whips. Another believes that it came from their eating of cracked corn. Yet another teaches that it derives from their manner of speaking, which sounded like a mere crackling to strangers.
Crackers
, of course, were (and are) by no means confined to Georgia; they are to be found in all the States south of the Potomac and Ohio. In 1819 a correspondent of the Lancaster (Pa.)
Gazette
reported them in Florida, and in 1856 a traveling English lady said that Kentucky was then called the
Corncracker State
.
2
There was a time when Georgians bitterly resented
Cracker State
, but of late they seem to have become more philosophical, and for some time past the Atlanta
Journal
, which “covers Dixie like the dew,” has been maintaining in Washington a correspondent named Ralph Smith who contributes to it a daily column of “Southern angle, home-State stuff” headed “
Crackerland
in Washington.”
3
At various times in the past Georgia has suffered even more
opprobrious nicknames,
e.g., Buzzard State
, and also basked in some very flattering ones,
e.g., Empire State of the South
. The DAE traces
Buzzard
for Georgian to 1845, and during the same year it appeared in a list of such names in the
Broadway Journal
, one of whose editors was Edgar Allan Poe. Walt Whitman, as we have seen, copied this
Broadway Journal
list into his paper, “Slang in America,” included in “November Boughs” in 1888. He changed or omitted some of the items, but he let
Buzzard
for Georgian stand.
1
Empire State of the South
is traced by the DAE to 1857. It has been disputed by Texas, but is well deserved by Georgia, which is the largest State east of the Mississippi.
Yankee Land of the South
was launched by Frederick Law Olmsted in his once famous book, “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States,” published in 1856, where he credited it to a native Alabamian. It still has a plausible sound, for many Yankee enterprisers flocked to Georgia after the Civil War, and the Atlanta of today has been described as a half-Northern city. But it is highly improbable that any native, or dirt Georgian relishes being called a Yankee, even in compliment.
Goober State
, yet another nickname for Georgia, is traced to 1877 by the DAE. It comes from a common Southern name for the peanut, traced to 1848 but apparently older, and supposedly derived from
nguba
, an African name for the same plant. Georgia is a heavy producer of peanuts, and the hams of its peanut-fed hogs are highly esteemed by connoisseurs. Before the Civil War era
Goober-grabber
was a common nickname for a backwoods Georgian, but it was also applied to Alabamians, and the simple
Goober
was a nickname for North Carolinians.
We have now reviewed the Thirteen Original States, and perhaps it will be more convenient to proceed alphabetically hereafter, beginning with Alabama. It is credited by the
World
Almanac, 1947, with the nickname of
Cotton State
, and Shankle says that this refers to its central position in the cotton-growing area east of the Mississippi, now in sad decay.
Cotton States
is a generic name for the whole group, traced by the DAE to 1844, with
Cottondom
(1861),
Cotton Belt
(1871),
Cotton Country
(1671) and
Cottonia
as variants. Shankle also notes
Cotton Plantation State, Lizard State
and
Yellow-hammer State
as nicknames for
Alabama.
Lizard State
derives from an early nickname for the Alabamians, first recorded in 1845. The origin of this nickname is obscure, but it seems to be clear that it was intended to be opprobrious, for the lizard has always been offensive to
Homo sapiens
. Another nickname,
Yellow-hammer State
, is more flattering, for the yellow-hammer (
Colaptes auratus
) is a beautiful variety of woodpecker. But Shankle cites Mrs. Marie B. Owen, director of the Department of State Archives and History at Montgomery, as authority for the explanation that the nickname was suggested during the Civil War by the fact that the home-dyed uniforms of the Alabama troops had a yellowish tinge.
1
Arizona is called the
Baby State
by the
World
Almanac: it was the last of the forty-eight to be admitted to the Union – on February 14, 1912, more than a month after its sister-State, New Mexico. There is, however, nothing infantile about its
Kultur
, for it was settled by the Spaniards so long ago as 1580, and its Indian civilization goes back to a remote antiquity. Shankle shows that it has also been known as the
Apache State
, the
Aztec State
, the
Sand Hill State
, the
Italy of America
, the
Sunset State
and the
Valentine State
– the last because it was admitted on St. Valentine’s Day, and the others for obvious reasons.
In 1923 the Legislature of Arkansas, prodded by the visionaries of the Arkansas Advancement Association, passed an act designating
Wonder State
as its nickname,
2
but in the past it was the
Bear State
, the
Hot Water State
, the
Bowie State
and the
Toothpick State
. Bartlett recorded
Bear State
so early as 1848, and in 1872 Schele de Vere reported that the local pronunciation was
Bar State
. California and Missouri, in those days, pretended to the same nickname, and there are bears on their State seals to this day.
Hot Water State
, of course, refers to the springs at Hot Springs and elsewhere. Both
Bowie State
and
Toothpick State
recall the
Bowie-knife
, the favorite weapon of the hardy blood-letters who wrested the Southwest from the Mexican, the Indian, the bear, the catamount and all lesser fauna. It was commonly made by grinding a flat, broad file, nine or ten inches long, to a fine point, sharpening both edges to razor
keenness, and fitting a hilt or guard between blade and handle. The DAE says that it was named after Col. James Bowie, who was killed at the Alamo on March 6, 1836, but the available evidence indicates that it was really invented by his brother, Rezin Pleasant Bowie (1793–1841), at some indefinite time before 1827. Its popularity, however, seems to have been due to James, who used it with great effect during the latter year in a famous mass duel at Natchez, Miss. In this gory affair Bowie was brought to his knees by a pistol shot, and an heroic opponent named Major Wright ran upon him with a sword, seeking to dispatch him. But Bowie’s right arm was still working, and with it he plunged his
Bowie-knife
into Wright’s heart, twisting it “to cut the heart string.”
1
How the
Bowie-knife
came to be associated with Arkansas is not known, for the Bowies operated in Louisiana and Texas. But the DAE shows that it was being described as an
Arkansas toothpick
in an act of the Alabama Legislature so early as 1837. The legend was that the Arkansans of the time used it not only for murder, but also for fighting wild animals, butchering cattle, cutting up their victuals, and picking their teeth.
