The dwarf or scrub oak.
1792. The more broken and hilly country (I mean the worst land), [produces] black-jack oak, fir, &c.—G. Imlay, ‘Topographical Description,’ p. 216 (Lond.).
1816. Live-oak has very little [gallic acid], in proportion to the black-oak (quercus tinctoria) or the black jack (quercus nigra) yet the first will last for half a century, and the two last not a tenth of that time.—Analectic Mag., vii. 218 (Phila.).
1817. On the prairie [the timber is], post oak (Quercus obtusiloba), black jack (Quercus nigra), &c.—John Bradbury, ‘Travels,’ p. 257.
1834. I have heard of weeping willows, but I never saw weeping pines and black Jacks (scrub oaks) before I came into South Carolina; these are made so by the moss which here grows from the trees in long pendulous masses, which makes them look like gigantic weeping willows.—Caruthers, ‘The Kentuckian in New-York,’ i. 166 (N.Y.).
1834. I would scold my overseer’s son, who is but twelve years old, if he were to brag on a shot that would hardly knock a squirrel out of a black jack.—H. J. Nott, ‘Novellettes of a Traveller,’ i. 180 (N.Y.).
1846. I noticed in one of the ravines to-day, the scrub-oak, or what is commonly called black-jack.—Edwin Bryant, ‘What I saw in California,’ p. 155 (N.Y.). (Italics in the original.)
1847. We meet the peccan and other trees, among them the black-jack, which is the first I have seen.—‘Life of Benjamin Lundy,’ p. 39 (Phila.).
1856. The gray beech, and the shrubby black-jack oak, with broad leaves, brown and dead, yet glossy, and reflecting the sun-beams.—Olmsted, ‘Slave States,’ p. 383. (N.E.D.)
1862. If the rebel troops become guerillas, they will have to be hung. The black-jacks will be far more fatal to them than yellow jack was to our troops.—N.Y. Observer, June 5 (Bartlett).
1904. A thicket of dwarfed oaks,—“black jack,” as it is called in that section, and which is impenetrable for cavalry.—J. H. Claiborne, ‘Seventy-Five Years in Old Virginia,’ p. 283.
