moss-back n.
1. (US) someone who hid themselves to avoid conscription during the American Civil War.
Dly Phoenix (Columbia, SC) 1 Oct. 2/1: I am a mossy-back, sir, and I stand here to-day to represent the county of Jones, otherwise known as the free State of Jones. | ||
Burlington Wkly Hawk-eye (IA) 10 June 3/5: The 2nd class are [...] ‘mossbacks.’ They are men who from one cause or another have refused to join either side, and to avoid the conscript acts have ‘laid out’ in the woods. | ||
Americanisms 283: The Mossyback […] was the man of the South, who secreted himself in a remote forest, or an inaccessible swamp, in order to escape conscription. His name was derived from the quaint fancy that he was determined to keep in hiding till ‘the moss should grow on his back’. | ||
Century Dict. 3869/3: moss-back [...] 3. In the southern United States, during the civil war, one who hid himself to avoid conscription [Slang]. |
2. (US, also mosshead) a diehard conservative.
Eve. Star (Wash., DC) 12 Aug. 1/5: The progressionists understand that ‘the whole country has an interest in the result’ [...] while the mossbacks insist on keeping their money for shaving purposes. | ||
St. Louis Clinical Rev. I 92: A ‘bigot,’ a ‘moss-back,’ ‘an old fossil, determined to live and die by the Allopathic practice at all hazards;’ could not and would not renounce the belief and practice of a life time. | ||
Boston Journal 5 Mar. n.p.: Everyone rejoices over the passage of the bill . . . except a few intense mossbacks, who were known during the war as copperheads [R]. | ||
Harper’s Mag. 87 July 305/2: When a blinded conservative is called a mossback, who is so dull as not to perceive the poetry of the word? | ||
Blazed Trail 126: I took her to a dance one night, / A mossback gave the bidding – / Silver Jack bossed the shebang, / And Big Dan played the fiddle. | ||
Nat. Police Gaz. (NY) 22 Sept. 6/1: [headline] abbreviated costumes / Worn By Massachusetts Summer Girls / shock the mossbacks. | ||
True Bills 151: A Rolling Stone gathers no Moss and therefore will not be derided as a Moss-Back. Roll as much as possible. | ‘The Fable of the Old Fox and the Young Fox ’ in||
Goodwin’s Wkly (Salt Lake City, UT) 19 Nov. 4/1: Even old mossy-backed Democrats said: ‘That reminds us of Andrew Jackson, and the reminder is a pleasant one’. | ||
Sat. Eve. Post 15 Dec. 6: Referring to a moss-back a brakeman said: ‘Why, he’s still knitting socks for the soldiers’. | ||
(con. 1920s) Elmer Gantry 419: The hell-howling of moss-backs corrupt the honest liberals a lot more than the liberals lighten the backwoods minds of the fundamentalists. | ||
Sudden 56: Purdie said there was one ol’ mosshead who would mebbe make trouble. | ||
Chicago Daily News 25 Sept. 6/1: The ‘mossbacks’ in Congress, ‘big business’ and the ‘gluttons of privilege’ are his favorite targets [DA]. | ||
AS XXXIII:4 265: [...] mossback. | ‘Pejorative Terms for Midwest Farmers’ in||
New Lang. Politics 267: MOSSBACK a reactionary; one who furiously resists progress of any kind. The word is derived from a sea creature so ancient that it has moss or seaweed growing on its back. | ||
Tales of the City (1984) 56: All the old mossbacks would [...] say how nice it was to know that there were still some decent, upstanding young men left. | ||
Dict. of Invective (1991) 257: mossback. An extreme conservative. | ||
Don’t Look Back 314: [O]nly Satchel Paige could have made Jackie Robinson line up on the side of the baseball mossbacks. |
3. a recluse.
Sportsman’s Gazeteer 700: Mossback.— A settler; a homesteader; a pioneer farmer. (Western). | ||
Adrift in America 249: He was followed to the very verge of the wood, and then the exhausted ‘mossback’ left him to return to the house. | ||
Blazed Trail 66: Regular old backwoods mossback. | ||
Three Hostages in Buchan (1930) 852: I was becoming such a mossback that I had almost stopped reading the papers. |