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To: H-NET/OIEAHC Electronic Association in Early American Studies <H-OIEAHC@H-NET.MSU.EDU> - I may be wrong here, but it seems to me that "yeoman" denotes an individual who either owns the land upon which he works, or, perhaps, in an English context, has a secure freehold on that land. In either case the word indicates a degree of independence, and a sense that, in Jeffersonian terms, the yeoman farmer is an important member of the polity. I don't think that this is the sense of the word "cracker." Essentially, a southern yeoman farmer is free, self-sufficient and economically of a "middling class," somewhere between the greater planters and that class of individuals that might find themselves labeled "crackers." Ben L. Price Louisiana State University
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