Florida cracker

Florida cracker refers to colonial-era English and American pioneer settlers and their descendants in what is now the U.S. state of Florida. The first of these arrived in 1763 after Spain traded Florida to Great Britain following the latter's victory over France in the Seven Years' War.

The term "cracker" was in use during the Elizabethan era to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack, meaning "entertaining conversation" (One may be said to "crack" a joke); this term and the Gaelicized spelling "craic" are still in use in Northern England, Ireland and Scotland. It is documented in William Shakespeare's King John (1595): "What cracker is this ... that deafes our ears / With this abundance of superfluous breath?"

By the 1760s, the English, both at home and in the American colonies, applied the term "cracker" to Scots-Irish and English American settlers of the remote southern back country, as noted in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth: "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 word was later associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontiersmen who had migrated South. Also used by Florida cowboys, as with picture of Florida cracker Bone Mizell.

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