Today, the word “Yankee” can have several different meanings depending upon where you are and who is speaking. In Bowling Green, Kentucky, it might refer to someone who lives above the Ohio River. In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, it might refer to anyone who lives north of Memphis. In Chicago, they may be referring to a baseball team from New York. In London, it might be a nickname for someone from America. How did the word “Yankee” come to mean so many different things?
The precise origin of the name “Yankee” is hard to pin down. Scholars have identified everything from Native American language to Dutch colonial influence as the beginning of this very American word.[1] What is undeniable is that during the 1800s, in the span of just a century, it took on a completely different meaning. When a young Salmon P. Chase, future chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court and founder of the Free Soil Party, moved to Ohio from New Hampshire in 1820, he encountered a problem. On the frontier, westerners did not care especially for the mass of New Englanders who were immigrating to the region, impressing their refined notions about education, religion, and business upon the locals. They had a name for these somewhat condescending people: Yankees. One of Chase’s older schoolmates in Worthington called him Yankee, “which with them was a reproachful epithet.” Like most good nicknames in American history (like "Puritan"), the term Yankee grew in popularity because it was originally an insult. Chase wasn’t going to take it. “Tom, if you call me Yankee again, I’ll kick you.”[2] Tom called him Yankee once again. And indeed he was kicked.
New Englanders were famous for their ability to import their own culture, politics, and religion into a different region of the country. In the antebellum South, through their programs of education and “moral uplift,” New Englanders brought “Yankee books” to teach in impoverished schools. When they corrected the uneducated in their speech, Southerners called their way of talking “Yankee-isms.”[3] Across the Midwest, and especially in places like northern Ohio, the majority of the population were transplanted Yankees. In southern Indiana, locals called certain white beans “Yankee beans” because they were associated with New Englanders who had even brought their cuisine with them.[4] In western New York, the revivalism of Charles Finney jumpstarted the Second Great Awakening in the so-called “Burned-Over District,” a region filled with former New Englanders hungry for the heart-felt religion of their homeland. Truly, in all of American history, no region of the country injected its way of life so powerfully into another quite like the New Englanders of the 19th century.
Of course, New York City, less than a day’s journey from New England, was filled with Yankees. In Five Points, the most notorious slum in New York, there was a modest diner called “Yankee kitchen.”[5] New York’s most famous preacher in the antebellum period was named Henry Ward Beecher. Not surprisingly, he was born and raised in Massachusetts and Connecticut. Beecher preached often on the Yankee way of life to his Brooklyn congregation, many of whom were also from New England. In a sermon entitled “The Family as an American Institution,” Beecher asked, “Who are they that build colleges? Who are they that found academies? Who are they that beautiful villages? Who are they that plant the public highway, until, like a garden, town reaches, through arms of beauty, town? Who are they that establish the economics that make the state richest? Who are they whose states have, in the worst times, the best credit? It is the Yankees.”[6] One can certainly see why westerners and southerners bristled at the attitude of Harvard- and Yale-educated New Englanders. Beecher was certainly no lover of the Puritans of old, who he saw as oppressive and fundamentalist, and he even pastored on the frontier for a time, but he always remained a proud New Englander.
With the successful Yankee migration across the North in the early 19th century, it is little surprise that Southerners came to lump the entire northern part of the Union with “Yankee-ism.” Before the Civil War, one New York Congressman pretentiously explained that Southerners could not learn how to work a machine “unless some Yankees go down and explain the mode and manner of its use.”[7] When oil was struck in Titusville, Pennsylvania in the late 1850s, igniting the first oil boom in U.S. history, locals marveled at the “Yankee invention” that could extract “black gold” from the earth.[8] As the nation barreled toward civil war, Southerners (and Northerners) associated the moral and social reform of abolitionism with “Yankee tricks.”[9] New Englanders were just extremists trying to push their radical egalitarianism upon the rest of the Union. And the term “Yankee” was not necessarily relegated to men. Josephine Griffing, an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate who traveled with Sojourner Truth in the Midwest, was described as “a moralist in the Yankee tradition, a furious uncompromising woman.”[10] Therefore, in a war waged over slavery and sectional rivalry, the description of Northerners as “Yankees” was derogatory. Southerners lumped the Union into a category once reserved only for those who lived in 3-4 states. This was both a testament to the influence of New Englanders upon the nation and to the division of the country such that Southerners could not dissociate a soldier from Indiana from one from Massachusetts.
The name had sticking power. After the war, the term “Yankee” remained, but sometimes with a bit of qualification. In 1872, in a meeting between Southern and Northern Baptist delegates in Washington D.C., pastor Richard Fuller playfully alluded to the “Yankee enterprise” of his Northern brethren, clarifying that he meant the term Yankee “in no offensive sense.”[11] And Northerners seemed to embrace the title, especially in New York. A leading prizefighter and eventual boss in the Democratic Party was a boxer named “Yankee” Sullivan.[12] New Yorkers were now exporting their “Yankee-isms” in their own way. By 1902, referring to John D. Rockefeller and the Standard Oil Company, the headline of New York World magazine read, “Billion $ Yankee Trust in Europe.”[13]
Indeed, by the end of the nineteenth century, the name “Yankee” had not only transcended geographical but also racial boundaries as well. During the Spanish-American War, Cubans referred to American soldiers as “Yankees.” And when Theodore Roosevelt praised the black regiments who had fought alongside his Rough Riders, he said tearfully, “The Spaniards called them smoked Yankees but we came to know that they were an excellent breed of Yankees.”[14] At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the term “Yankee” denoted a relatively small group of Anglo-Americans in one corner of the young country. By the end of the nineteenth-century, “Yankee” was an American word that even seemed to include men and women of different ethnicities.
[2] Walter Stahr, Salmon P. Chase, 24.
[3] In Beth Barton Schweiger, A Literate South.
[4] Nation, At Home in the Hoosier Hills, 98.
[5] Tyler Anbinder, Five Points, 24
[6] Henry Ward Beecher, Plymouth Pulpit, Volume 1, 425
[7] Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 52.
[8] Darren Dochuk, Anointed with Oil, 80.
[9] “Stephen Douglas, Third Debate: Jonesboro, Illinois, September 15, 1858,” National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/liho/learn/historyculture/debate3.htm.
[10] Nancy Koester, We Will Be Free, 134.
[11] Cuthbert, Life of Richard Fuller, 270
[12] Anbinder, Five Points, 201
[13] Brady, Ida Tarbell, 136
[14] Risen, Crowded Hour, 269
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