American Language Supplement 2
Page 87
Another of the older State nicknames is that of Pennsylvania, the Keystone State. The DAE’s first example is dated January 23, 1818, when Niles’ Register said that “the powerful population and ample resources” of the State made it stand “as the keystone of the Federal arch.” This seems enough to account for the nickname, but there have been a number of more fanciful etymologies, two of which are given in George Earle Shankle’s “American Nicknames,”2 and may be sought there by the curious. Pennsylvania, at one time or another, has also been called the Coal State, the Oil State and the Steel State, in each case for obvious reasons, but these names are seldom heard today. The designation Quaker State is sometimes used, but not nearly so often as Quaker City for Philadelphia. The DAE traces the latter to 1841, but it must be older. Bay State, for Massachusetts, is traced to 1801, and Old Bay State to 1838. Both refer to the colony of Massachusetts Bay, founded in 1628. Old Colony, traced by the DAE to 1798, refers to the settlement within the arms of Cape Cod, founded eight years earlier. Shankle records that Massachusetts, at different times, has also been called the Puritan State, the Rock-ribbed State and the Baked-beans State, but these designations are now seldom heard. Vermont, so far as I know, has never been described as anything save the Green Mountain State, which the DAE traces only to 1838, though Green Mountain Boy, to designate an inhabitant, goes back to 1772, a year after the militia so called was organized to protect the present territory of the State against forays from New York. The adjoining New Hampshire is usually called the Granite State, which the DAE traces to 1830. It has also been called the White Mountain State, the Mother of Rivers, and the Switzerland of America. These nicknames, however, have not had much vogue, for White Mountain State collides with the more popular Green Mountain State, the five rivers that arise in New Hampshire are all second-rate, and Switzerland of America is disputed by West Virginia, Colorado, Maine and New Jersey, not to mention the Ozark region and the Canadian Rockies country.
Connecticut, as everyone knows, is commonly called the Wooden Nutmeg State or Nutmeg State in facetious remembrance of the fact that in the early days the pedlars it sent into the back country were sharp traders and devised a thousand ways to rook the settlers, most of whom were of low mental visibility. One of these schemes, according to legend, was to sell them nutmegs made of wood. It has been suggested by various historians of the language that Judge Thomas C. Haliburton, author of “Sam Slick,” was the originator of this fable,1 but the evidence seems to be against them, for Haliburton did not begin to publish his Yankee sketches until 1835, and the DAE finds a reference to wooden nutmegs so early as 1824.2 At the start Land of Wooden Nutmegs seems to have been applied to the whole of New England, but it soon became confined to Connecticut, which took an early lead in manufacturing. At other times the State has been called the Constitution State, the Blue Law State, the Brownstone State, the Freestone State, and the Land of Steady Habits. Constitution State refers to the fact that the Fundamental Orders drawn up by Thomas Hooker at Hartford in 16391 were the first formal constitution written on American soil. Blue Law State, which is traced by the DAE to 1839 but is no doubt older, refers to the Blue Laws alleged to have been in force in Connecticut in colonial days. Whether or not they were ever actually passed and executed has been much debated by historians. They were first made known to the world in a before-mentioned “General History of Connecticut” published in London in 1781 by Samuel A. Peters, a Tory clergyman who had been forced to leave the colony on the outbreak of the Revolution.2 His bias was only too manifest, and for more than a century the existence of the laws he quoted was doubted by the learned, though it was believed in by Americans in general. But of late there has been a tendency to admit that he did not imagine them altogether, though he unquestionably embellished them. The DAE’s earliest example of blue law is from Peters’s history. The term quickly came into common use. Brownstone State, which is not listed by the DAE and is long obsolete, referred, according to Shankle, to the brown-stone quarries at Portland on the Connecticut river, which flourished mightily in the Brownstone Era of the 60s and 70s. Freestone State, also obsolete, referred to similar quarries. It is listed as the only nickname of Connecticut in an article headed “Names and Nick-names of the Several States” published in Brother Jonathan on August 12, 1843,3 and is there credited to an Albany newspaper. It is also given, along with Nutmeg State and Blue Law State, by Schele de Vere.1 The DAE does not trace it beyond Schele. Land of Steady Habits appeared in John Neal’s “Brother Jonathan” in 1825,2 and seems to have been in intermittent use for a long while afterward, but it is now heard only seldom. Schele de Vere, in his manuscript notes to his “Americanisms: The English of the New World,”3 applied it to the whole of New England.
Rhode Island, the smallest of the States in area, is now usually called Little Rhody, but the DAE’s earliest example is dated no further back than 1851. In the Brother Jonathan list, just quoted, the nickname given to it is the Plantation State, an obvious reference to its official name – the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations – though there are few plantations within its bounds today. It has also been called the Lively Experiment, in commemoration of a phrase in its original charter of 1663: “… to hold forth a lively experiment, that a most flourishing civil state may stand and best be maintained … with a full liberty in religious concernment.”4 A list of State nicknames that used to be published annually in the World Almanac gave New Jersey four of them, to wit, Mosquito State, Garden State, Jersey Blue State and New Spain, but in the course of time New Spain was omitted, and then Jersey Blue State, and the Mosquito State, and now Garden State is the only one that remains. It seems to be relatively recent, for Schele de Vere, in 1872, said that Kansas was then the Garden State, and J. H. Beadle, in “Western Wilds and the Men Who Redeem Them,” 1833,5 gave the name to Minnesota. Jersey Blues State (with Blues plural) appears in the Brother Jonathan list of 1843. It was derived from the nickname of the Jersey militia in colonial times: the men wore blue uniforms. The DAE traces it in this sense to 1758. It was transferred to the patriot troops during the Revolution, but by 1850 had degenerated to the lowly estate of a name for a breed of fowl.
In the 80s and 90s New Jersey was known almost universally as the Mosquito State, mainly because of the swarms of the insects that beset New York City from the Jersey marshes, but after the Spanish-American War they began to abate, and on March 24, 1930 the State librarian, Charles R. Bacon, was writing to Shankle that “a considerable number of other States have fully as many, if not more.” These Jersey mosquitoes were frequent themes of the comic artists of the years before 1900, and were represented as having snouts resembling bulldozers or flame-throwers. Shankle says that New Spain arose in 1817, when Joseph Bonaparte, ex-King of Spain, settled in Bordentown, remaining there until 1832 and returning for two years more in 1837. Bordentown’s possession of the splendors of his court aroused the envy of socially ambitious Philadelphians, and they gave vent to it by dubbing New Jersey New Spain, the State of Spain and the Foreigner State. All these nicknames, of course, are now forgotten. Shankle also lists Camden and Amboy State (or State of Camden and Amboy), Clam State and Switzerland of America. The first harks back to the time when the promoters of the Camden and Amboy Railroad ran the politics of the State, and is now obsolete. Clam State refers to the clam fisheries of the Delaware Bay and the Atlantic sea-coast, and is still occasionally heard. As I have noted in connection with New Hampshire, Switzerland of America is shared with four other States. It must seem grotesque to travelers across the melancholy flats which lead to the Jersey coast resorts, but it is justified by some fine scenery along the western border.
Maryland has had half a dozen or more nicknames since colonial times, but only Old Line State and Terrapin State have any remaining vitality today. Both are under formidable competition from Maryland Free State, which was invented in 1923 by Hamilton Owens, then editor of the Baltimore Evening Sun. The story is thus told in “The Sunpapers of Ba
ltimore”:1
Some time in 1923, at the height of the debate over Prohibition, Congressman William D. Upshaw, of Georgia, a fierce dry, denounced Maryland as a traitor to the Union because it had refused (largely through the urgings of the Evening Sun) to pass a State enforcement act. Mr. Owens thereupon wrote a mock-serious editorial headed “The Maryland Free State,” arguing that Maryland should really secede from the Union and go it alone. The irony in this editorial was somewhat finely spun, and on second thought Mr. Owens decided not to print it, but the idea embodied in the title stuck in his mind, and in a little while he began to use it in other editorials. It caught on quickly, and the Maryland Free State is now heard of almost as often as Maryland.
It was first used in the Evening Sun on April 4, 1923, in the headline over a brief extract from a “Geographical Compilation for the Use of Schools,” published in Baltimore in 1806. The late Albert C. Ritchie, then Governor of Maryland, adopted it with delight, and it spread over the country during his campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1924. It appealed greatly to Marylanders, for it was a convenient crystallization of a body of ideas that had been traditional in their State since colonial days, and had been revived and revivified by the Evening Sun after its establishment in 1910. These ideas were all favorable to personal liberty, and had been exemplified in a radical and even somewhat scandalous manner in Articles 6 and 44 of the State Declaration of Rights, adopted September 18, 1867, as follows:
That … whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought reform the old or establish a new government; the doctrine of non-resistance against arbitrary power and oppression is absurd, slavish and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.
That the provision of the Constitution of the United States and of this State apply as well in time of war as in time of peace, and any departure therefrom, or violation thereof, under the plea of necessity, or any other plea, is subversive of good government, and tends to anarchy and despotism.
Once he had launched the Maryland Free State Mr. Owens used it assiduously and it was taken up by other editors throughout the nation, and soon spread the idea that Maryland was a sanctuary from the oppressive legislation and official usurpation that beset the country in general and most of the other States in particular. This idea was given powerful reinforcement in 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt came into the State in an effort to purge the United States Senate of one of the Maryland Senators, Millard E. Tydings, then an active opponent of the New Deal. In a speech made at Denton, Md., on September 5 Roosevelt sought to disarm the Marylanders by describing “the Free State of Maryland” as “proud of itself and conscious of itself,” but then proceeded to argue for submission to “the flag, the Constitution and the President.” The result was that Tydings was reëlected by an overwhelming majority.
Maryland Free State, of course, was suggested by Irish Free State (Saorstat Eireann),1 which was apparently suggested in turn by Orange Free State.2 Some of the staff contributors to the Evening Sun occasionally referred to the Free State as the Saorstat Maryland, but this form did not prosper, and Maryland Free State is now used exclusively.3 It has overshadowed all the old nicknames of the State, including Old Line State and Terrapin State. The former is generally assumed to recall the Maryland Line in the Continental Army, described by a historian as “among the finest bodies of troops in the Army,” but the DAE says that it really refers to the Mason and Dixon Line.4 The DAE’s earliest example is dated 1871, but the designation is much older. Terrapin State is a melancholy memorial to the State’s former glory, Malacolemmys palustris, now on tap in only a few of the more backward-looking clubs of Baltimore and a fast diminishing array of private houses. Shankle says that Maryland was once also called the Cockade State, and quotes King’s “Handbook of the United States” to the effect that the Maryland Line was made up largely of “patrician young men” who wore “brilliant cockades.” The DAE does not list the nickname, and the explanation of it seems somewhat incredible, for the Maryland Line was by no means predominantly aristocratic and cockades were worn by many other Continental troops. Other names that have been applied to Maryland are Monumental State, Queen State and Oyster State. The first was an extension of Monumental City, still often used of Baltimore; it was listed by Brother Jonathan in 1843. The second I have never heard in Maryland, though I was born there the better part of a century ago. The third, like Terrapin State, recalls a faded and now half forgotten pride, for the Chesapeake oyster has been deteriorating steadily for fifty years, and is now seldom encountered in its former state of perfection.
Delaware, which lies cheek by jowl with Maryland, is usually called the Blue Hen State. Shankle quotes the following account of the origin of the name from W. A. Powell’s “History of Delaware”:1
Captain Caldwell of Colonel Haslet’s regiment from Kent county, Delaware, took into the Revolutionary War with his company two game cocks of the breed of a certain blue hen, well known in Kent county for her fighting qualities. When put in the ring these cocks flew at each other with such fury and fought so gamely that a soldier cried: “We’re sons of the Old Blue Hen, and we’re game to the end!”
A related but rather more plausible etymology was printed in the Niles’ Register in 1840, as follows:
Captain Caldwell had a company recruited from Kent and Sussex, called by the rest “Caldwell’s game cocks,” and the regiment, after a time in Carolina, was nicknamed from this “the Blue Hen’s Chickens” and “the Blue Chickens.” … After they had been distinguished in the South the name of the Blue Hen was applied to the State.
How much truth is in this story I do not know, but in one form or another it is believed and cherished in Delaware. The DAE traces blue hen’s chicken for “a fiery, quick-tempered person” to 1830, and Blue Hen State to 1840, but the latter was not listed by Brother Jonathan in 1843. Delaware has also been called the Diamond State,2 New Sweden and Uncle Sam’s Pocket Handkerchief. The DAE says that the first was probably suggested by the small size of the State, as the third unquestionably was. Diamond State is traced to 1869 by the DAE, but Uncle Sam’s Pocket Handkerchief is not listed, and Shankle says he has been unable to discover anything about its history. New Sweden is simply a translation of Nye Sverige, the name of the original settlement of Swedes on Christiana creek, founded in 1638. Brother Jonathan listed Little Delaware in 1843, but this was hardly a nickname.
The two Carolinas have been called variously, but Tarheel State for North Carolina and Palmetto State for South Carolina seem likely to prevail. Of the origin of the former the Overland Monthly gave the following account in 1869:
A brigade of North Carolinians … failed to hold a certain hill, and were laughed at by the Mississippians for having forgotten to tar their heels that morning. Hence originated the cant name.
This story, of course, did not please the North Carolinians, and in 1901 Walter Clark offered a more flattering version in his “History of the Several Regiments and Battalions From North Carolina in the Great War, 1861–65”:
The following, familiar to all the army of Northern Virginia, illustrates the complacent pride with which the North Carolina soldiers adopted the distinctive sobriquet of Tar Heels, first banteringly given them.… Thus, after one of the fiercest battles, in which their supporting column was driven from the field and they successfully fought it out alone, in the exchange of compliments of the occasion the North Carolinians were greeted with the question from the passing derelict regiment: “Any more tar down in the Old North State, boys?” Quick as thought came the answer: “No; not a bit. Old Jeff’s bought it all up.” “Is that so? What is he going to do with it?” was asked. “He is going to put it on you’uns heels to make you stick better in the next fight.”1
In a speech in 1915 Major William A. Graham, a North Carolina veteran of the Confederate Army, repeated this story substantia
lly as it is told here, but followed it with a quite inconsistent variorum version, as follows:
The Fourth Texas had lost its flag at Sharpsburg.2 Passing the Sixth North Carolina a few days afterward, they called out “Tar Heel!” and the reply was, “If you fellows had some tar on your heels you would have brought back your flag from Sharpsburg.”
Obviously, the point here is lost unless it is assumed that North Carolinians were known as Tarheels before the date of the incident, or, at all events, that some notion of tar was associated with them. That this was the case is shown by the DAE, which offers evidence that they were called Tar-boilers so early as 1845, and that their State was the Turpentine State by 1850. No one, so far, has unearthed an example of Tarheel older than the Civil War, but I suspect that a more diligent investigation than the searchers for the DAE undertook might produce many. At the start, it appears, the term was regarded as opprobrious by the North Carolinians, but that is certainly not true today. How their view of it was changed was represented by Major Graham in his speech to be as follows:
It was recognized as a term of affront until 1864. Governor Vance,1 when he visited the Army of Northern Virginia, in opening his speech, said:
“I do not know what to call you fellows. I cannot say ‘fellow soldiers’ because I am not a soldier, nor ‘fellow citizens’ because we do not live in this State, so I have concluded to call you ‘fellow Tar Heels.’ ”
There was a slight pause before the applause came, and from that time Tar Heels has been honored as an epithet worthy to be offered to a gallant North Carolina soldier.2