Their lineage, as it were, could be traced back to North Carolina, and before that to Virginia’s rejects and renegades. An Anglican minister, Charles Woodmason, who traveled for six years in the Carolina wilderness in the 1760s, offered the most damning portrait of the lazy, licentious, drunken, and whoring men and women whom he adjudged the poorest excuses for British settlers he had ever met. The “Virginia Crackers” he encountered were foolish enough as to argue over a “turd.” The women were “sluttish” by nature, known to pull their clothes tightly around their breasts and hips so as to
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