a limited amount about Cracker culture from the standard primary
sources upon which much of antebellum southern history has been
written--the letters, diaries, and memoirs of educated Southerners
(mostly planters, townfolk, and professionals). The reason was sim-
ple enough. Those people, the most cosmopolitan and learned of
Southerners, were not representative of Cracker culture; indeed,
many of them were not Crackers at all. What I needed--but could
rarely find--were sources written by Crackers themselves, telling
what they thought and did. These proved to be extremely rare;
Crackers infrequently took pen in hand, and the resulting docu-
ments seldom survived to be examined by scholars. What is abun-
dant are the observations of contemporaries, especially travelers,
who visited various parts of the South throughout the antebellum
years. Travel accounts have been criticized as being of limited value
because visitors tended to pass through rapidly and were unfamiliar
with the local people and their traditions, but I have found this
unfamiliarity of visitors with Cracker culture to be more an asset
than a drawback. Because these travelers were outsiders, from a
different cultural background, they often found Crackers unusual
and therefore noticed and remarked upon things that Crackers them-
selves took for granted and would not have thought worth pointing
out.

But travel accounts have been criticized on other grounds as
well--that they are biased, stereotyped, and exaggerated. Some are
obviously biased, but when they are they can tell us as much about
the observer as they do about the observed, and when we have
reciprocal accounts the evidence is mutually reinforcing. For ex-
ample, when Southerners almost uniformly describe Yankees as
money-grubbing and Yankees regularly describe Southerners as im-
provident, each is speaking contemptuously of the other but the
comments are nonetheless revealing. As for stereotypes, they are
often there, of course, but they are generally easy to filter out. The
most obvious example is the common practice of attributing to
slavery the Southerner's disdain for work; the very same travelers
who do so report a similar disdain in those many parts of the South
where there were few if any slaves and among the great majority of
whites who owned no slaves. And as to exaggerations, sometimes
the accounts are clearly so, and yet hyperbole can often capture the
essence of a people's character more accurately than a bare recitation
of facts can do. Tocqueville's often-quoted description of the Yankee
trader with China--a man who endured eight to ten months of
privation and severe hardship at sea just so "he can sell a pound of
his tea for a halfpenny less than the English merchant"--is a good
case in point. ⁷ Tocqueville's sketch is obviously overdrawn, but it

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