Rough and Tumble
“I felt mighty skittish and jubus uv Davis, fur he was allers a-swaggerin', and cavortin', and boastin' about, tellin' how many men he'd licked, and so on. But I were mad as flugence, and didn't care a dried-apple cuss whether I lived ur died. I jumped into the ring; 'Verbum sat,' says I, and slapped my hands aginst my hips, and crowed like a game-rooster. In jumped Davis, and come full drive at me, like a fishin' hawk dartin' at a fish. I had no idee uv boxin' with him, fur his arms was long as Maypoles. So I jist hipped him, and throwed him co-whollup--a desput fall on the hard yeth--on the flat uv his back, soused my eyestring feelers sock into his eyes, and he blated like a calf…”
— Hardin E. Taliaferro, “Fisher’s River”
Rough and Tumble
Here’s a lazy summer read for all you porchmaxxers out there. Enjoy!
A Man from Princeton
Long ago the sons of Yankee shopkeepers, horsebreeders, and other gentle folk would leave the cramped comforts of the city and head southward into the backcountry wilds. There they would encounter a most uncivil society in a most uncivilized place, with a people more closely connected to the land. Instead of a periwigs, lace-ruffled cuffs, and buckled shoes, the unwashed plain folk of the backcountry wore leather breeches and coarse osnaburg shirts, and they were frequently barefoot. They were a proud race, despite the poverty of their community, and their stunning indifference towards the world and their fellow man belied a savage ferocity that would become the stuff of legend.
One Yankee traveler — a graduate of Princeton, I believe — wrote home during such a visit. He described these low-born backcountry planters as “rogues” and “wretches,” so hopelessly obstinate and opinionated, “that neither sense, reason…or even the whipping post” could make an impression. Despite their inferior breeding and lack of education, the incorrigible scamps dared to hoot and jeer at their esteemed gentlemen visitors. And the young Princetonian was no exception, as he sourly observed.
But it wasn’t the rudeness that most disturbed our young friend — that was common enough. Instead, it was the backcountry’s culture of ruthlessness that really bothered him. For these plain people regularly engaged in “fist battles” — widely known as “rough and tumble” — and nearly killed one another over a joke or some other trifle. Calling one of them a buckskin, for example, would inevitably lead to a bloodthirsty reprisal. Combatants were known to bite off noses, ears, and lips, tear at their opponent’s testicles, or most decisively, pluck out an eye. Commonly known as “gouging,” the successful extraction of an enemy eyeball was the preferred path to victory, and many low-born scoundrels had become rather skilled at it. Much to the horror of cosmopolitan passersby, some expert eye-gougers sharpened their fingernails and hardened them over an open fire to perfect their craft. Such refinements would guarantee the swift removal of an eyeball from its socket on a first pass, and sometimes the partially-blinded belligerent wouldn’t even know he was a cyclops until his adversary was triumphantly waving an eyeball before him.
After witnessing such scenes, the young Princetonian concluded that the backcountry was cursed and only “devils, prostitutes, or monkeys could sire creatures so unfit for human society.” He eventually published his impressions in a book that has since been lost to history, though it made quite a splash at the time.
Nothing rankled genteel sensibilities quite like rough and tumble. Of course in those days even gentle folk weren’t necessarily opposed to fighting. Most gentlemen were generally skilled at boxing, for example, a sport with strict rules against biting, testicle-tearing, and eye-gouging. The gentlemen knew that they could and would best a Rough and Tumbler in the right venue and with the proper rules.
In the end such innovations to the art of violence prevailed, and backcountry rough and tumble gradually faded away. The low-born planters, the flatboatmen, the stevedores, and the frontier roustabouts did not abandon violence altogether, of course, but they slowly adopted the methods of their betters — or at least attempted to.
And in this they never really excelled.
Sources
https://www.ncpedia.org/gouging
Tom Parramore, "Gouging in Early North Carolina," North Carolina Folklore Journal (1974)
Rhys Isaac, The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill, 1982)
Vickers Fithian, Journals and Letters, ed. Hunter Dickinson Farish (Williamsburg, VA, 1943)
Voices of the Old South: Eyewitness Accounts 1528-1861, ed. Alan Gallay (Athens, 1994)