In 1763, following Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, Spain traded Florida for control of Havana, which had been captured by the British.
Wikipedia explains that "The term 'cracker' was in use during the Elizabethan era to describe braggarts. The original root of this is the Middle English word crack, meaning 'entertaining conversation' (as one may be said to 'crack' a joke); this term and the Gaelicized spelling 'craic' are still in use in Northern England. It is documented in William Shakespeare's King John Act II. Scene I. (1595): 'What cracker is this same that deafs our ears/ With this abundance of superfluous breath?'
"By the 1760s, the ruling classes, both in Britain and in the American colonies, applied the term 'cracker' to Scots–Irish and English American settlers of the remote southern back country, as noted in a letter to the Earl of Dartmouth: 'I should explain to your Lordship what is meant by Crackers; a name they have got from being great boasters; they are a lawless set of rascalls on the frontiers of Virginia, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia, who often change their places of abode.'[2] The word was later associated with the cowboys of Georgia and Florida, many of them descendants of those early frontier people who had migrated South."
© Haydn Thompson 2020