There is history and there is other history. After wars, the winners write the histories, often selecting events and accounts that support their “rightness.”

Losers have their own versions that typically contradict the “official” accounts.

That said, I honor historians who scour all available data and set aside their biases to produce as accurate accounts as possible.

There are histories that focus on particular groups or regions with reliability depending upon whether or not compilers have axes to grind. Off-the-cuff histories sometimes try to craft answers for which there are no explanations in existing evidence. One example is the origin of the term “Georgia Cracker.” Someone wrote that it originated with drivers using pop whips to move along draft animals rolling hogsheads of tobacco on Tobacco Road near Augusta. This is obviously wrong because tobacco culture was limited in early Georgia and because “Georgia Cracker” applied to back country plain folks.

Earlier, there were Crackers on the North Carolina frontier and they were bandits. There were Florida Crackers in that state’s rural area, possibly descendants of back country Georgia Crackers. One sensible explanation is crackers

were people who used fourplait pop whips to manage free-range livestock (sheep, cows, hogs) in vast areas where this economic system dominated over agriculture.

One misguided “history” contends that Georgia’s basic culture is that of Scotch Irish settlers.

Migrants from all over the British Isles can be found among those who came to the colony in its early years, but the first settlement of any size from Ulster came after the French and Indian War when the Creeks ceded significant amounts of land.

The mostly Quaker settlement of Wrightsboro flourished. John Rea and George Galpin, Augusta-based Indian traders originally from Ulster, secured a grant for Scotch Irish settlers, but the Queensborough Grant did not see its first settlers until 1769 and their number was not great. The Revolutionary War – coming soon afterwards – pitted these newly-arrived and typically Loyalist settlers against their neighbors, most of whom supported the revolution. Whatever their loyalties, the settlers disbursed, some never to return. My Sikes ancestor did, only to be killed in a Creek uprising.

If we Crackers are not all from Ulster, what are our origins? The answer is just about everywhere. The British Isles were overpopulated. The first writings on over population were from the pen of Thomas R.

Malthus, a scholar from Scotland, at the turn of the 18th century. Laws pushing farmers off the land to toil in the factories of the industrial revolution further motivated Brits to leave their home countries. The colonies attracted English, Lowland Scots, Highlanders, plain Irish and Scotch Irish as soldiers, sailors who sometimes jumped ship, indentured servants who sometimes ran away. The sons of William Penn followed him in granting easy access to Pennsylvania, reportedly at a price. From there, migrants could go west or follow the Pennsylvania Wagon Road into the Carolinas or to its end just upriver from Augusta.

There were Jews. Some arrived by ship at Savannah a year after its founding.

Gen. Oglethorpe reconsidered his initial refusal to let them disembark when he learned that there was a doctor among them. The colony’s only doctor had died of a fever. By the time of the Revolution, these settlers had prospered and David Emanuel became a hero as leader and generous financier of the war in Georgia.

Gen. Oglethorpe established a defensive post down the coast manned by tough Highlanders who soon whipped a Spanish invasion force from Florida and created Darien. He also welcomed Salzbergers, persecuted Lutherans from Catholic Austria. Educated and skilled, they quickly contributed to the colony.

One of them served as a Revolutionary War governor of the infant state. A man from the little Swiss settlement or Purrysburg just across the river in South Carolina crossed over, married a Salzberger girl and saw the spelling of his name changed from Taescher to Dasher. And his descendants are everywhere. After the Revolution, new settlers poured into frontier areas, many of them being veterans rewarded for their service and trusted to be ready to fight the restive Creeks who resented their latest loss of territory for choosing the British as allies. The settlers came from many places but mostly the Carolinas.

Unwillingly, some came from Africa as slaves soon after the colony was established. Other slaves of African descent were transported to Georgia from British colonies in the Caribbean and elsewhere.

Major parts of their culture passed into that of the white people around them – terminology, foods, ways of cooking food, like frying instead of boiling and baking, and hoe cakes.

Corn, central to the diet of Native Americans, was readily adopted by settlers.

The wheat that flourished in northern climes had been bred for centuries for northern Europe and did not do well in the South.

But corn did and could be made into vegetables and various types of bread.

Ground up and boiled, it is grits, a word derived from German. So, this and other foods indigenous to the Americas became staples of the Cracker diet.

The language of our place is itself a melting pot.

Most of the streams bear Native American names.

Use of double, sometimes triple, negatives can be linked to Ulster and parts of England and Lowland Scotland. (“You ain’t never been good for nothing nohow.”) The use of “yonder” reminds one of Shakespeare. “Hark, what light through yonder window breaks.”

And then there is music.

The banjo is African in origin and “black music” is central to blues, jazz and rock & roll. In the traditional music of Appalachia and parts of South Georgia, one hears the themes and instruments of Ireland and Scotland. And all of these sometimes blend in the gospel music of country churches. Perhaps all-day “preaching” and singing with dinner on the grounds is the ultimate melting pot.

Roger G. Branch Sr. is professor emeritus of sociology at Georgia Southern University and is a retired pastor.