Get in my face, Daddy, and I'll mess it up
Title courtesy of Dusty "The American Dream" Rhodes. Text by Gordon S. Wood
From the chapter “Republican Society” in “Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815,” by Gordon S. Wood.
“So barbarous was the fighting among commoners in the South that some observers, including New England Federalists and visiting foreigners, thought the white Americans’ behavior was “worthy of their savage neighbors.” Men on the frontier often fought with “no holds barred,” using their hands, feet, and teeth to disfigure or dismember each other until one or the other surrendered or was incapacitated. “Scratching, pulling hair, choking, gouging out each other’s eyes, and biting off each other’s noses” were all tried, recalled Daniel Drake, growing up in late eighteenth-century Kentucky. “But what is worse than all,” observed the English traveler Isaac Weld, “these wretches in their combat endeavor to their utmost to tear out each other’s testicles.”
Most of these practices of rough-and-tumble fighting had been brought over from the Celtic borderlands of the British Isles—Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Cornwall. Indeed, some historians have persuasively argued that most of the characteristics of the Southern “rednecks”—including their indolence, the making of “moonshine,” fiddling and banjo-playing, chewing tobacco, hunting, and hog-raising—can be traced back to their Celtic ancestors. This is especially true, they say, of the hot-headedness and propensity to personal violence of backcountry Southern “crackers,” with someone like Andrew Jackson being a prime representative.
But what were occasional practices of personal violence in Britain became a unique fighting style in the American South, and gouging out the eyes of one’s opponent became the defining element of that style. Although the acerbic Englishman Charles Janson may have been exaggerating in claiming that “this more than savage custom is daily practiced among the lower classes in the southern states,” he was not wrong in suggesting that it was common. Not only had the Reverend Jedidiah Morse in his American Geography confirmed the prevalence of the practice of gouging, but many early nineteenth-century travelers besides Janson witnessed examples of these gouging matches.
The fighters became heroes in their local communities, and their success in these rough-and-tumble matches generated its own folklore. Eventually these matches became part of the exaggerated boasting and bombast that came to characterize Southwestern humor. At the same time, the prevalence of such personal violence convinced many observers, Federalists and European travelers alike, that as Americans moved westward and down the Ohio River they were losing civilization and reverting to savagery.”