There are not a few illusions as to these “cracker” whites, which fanciful magazine and dialect writers have helped to spread. A benevolently intended effort has been in progress for a generation on the part of certain sentimentalists, with more money than wisdom, to civilize and Christianize what they are pleased to call the “mountain whites.” One would gather from the pleas made before religious conventions, and from the facile writers who have made these whites their special care, that they have dwelt continually in religious darkness and destitution, and greatly needed the alien missionary to shed the effulgence of his superior civilization and Christianity upon him. I think I am in a position to say that this forlorn and destitute Southern mountaineer, true to his ancient characteristics, has received these effusive visitors and their benevolences with one eye partly closed and with continued cheerful expectoration at knot holes in the neighboring fence. I am reminded of one of Bishop Hoss’s repertoire of anecdotes, all of which have pith and point. Of such a mountaineer as I am depicting, tall, lank, sinewy, frowzy, “a bunch of steel springs and chicken hawk,” a tourist satirically inquired: “May I ask, my friend, if you are a member of the human species?” “No, by gum,” said the mountaineer; “I’m an East Tennesseean.” As a matter of fact there are few people so thoroughly imbued with the religious spirit as these same “cracker” mountain whites, though it is a religion of the Old rather than of the New Testament, in the crude ethics and doctrines which they commonly hold. Even the Kentucky feudist is after a sort an Old Testament religionist, who has not gone beyond the idea of the “blood avenger” of Mosaic permission. Rude, uncouth, ignorant of books as the poor whites of the Old South were and continue largely to be, I pay them the sincere personal tribute of admiration for the homespun virtues that have marked them as a peculiar people. For two years I lived in their wildest mountain fastnesses, went in and out of their rude cabins, taught their youth, broke bread at their tables, and worshiped God with them in their log meetinghouses. I have earned a right, therefore, by personal contact and knowledge to resent with warmth the imputations under which the cracker white, highland or lowland, is too often made to suffer. Even so distinguished an authority as the _New York Advocate_, in a recent article devoted to this class, permitted the usual distortion of fact in all things pertaining to Southern problems.