[Albion Wilde]

I don't believe the etymology in your link. That link is from Britain and appears to take credit for influence in America to offset the lack of influence where it counts. In any event the perpetuation of the word would not have continued without a more common understanding of it's [sic] usage. It also says Redneck means Presbyterian dissenter. The real meaning of Redneck is a dirt poor farmer that is out in the fields all the livelong day until his neck is burned so red that Angels cry and the Devil takes credit.

In both cases, cracker and redneck, I believe you are confusing the eventual usages with the origins. My post identified the origins. Those origins were also found valid by an American scholar from Johns Hopkins, Arthur Herman, who wrote How the Scots Invented the Modern World. The redneck terminology originally referred to a sect of Presbyterian Scots whose pastors wore a red collar with their black robes. Both terms migrated to America with the Scots-Irish, where they eventually took on other, more negative meanings, in similar fashion to the way the term "yankee" was originally applied negatively to the colonist armies by the sneering British, but eventually became a positive.

[higgmeister]

...term "yankee" was originally applied negatively to the colonist armies by the sneering British, but eventually became a positive.

Yankee is positive? Since when?

Seriously, I'm sure you can identify primordial usages of words like water or dirt but the original usage no longer applies if a common compound word was fallow for a few centuries and is then used with a new meaning. The original usage is hardly an anecdote. This is contrasted with a word such as "decimate" that has a clear origin from Imperial Rome.

My Methodist and Baptist, Scots-Irish and Anglo-Saxon ancestors never singled out the Presbyterians as the only true Rednecks.