Yankee

“ Loading a wagon with a plough, a bed, a barrel of salt meat, the indispensable supply of tea and molasses, a Bible and a wife, and with his axe on his shoulder, the Yankee sets out for the West, without a servant, without an assistant, often without a companion, to build himself a log hut, six hundred miles from his father's roof, and clear away a spot for a farm in the midst of the boundless forest.... He is incomparable as a pioneer, unequalled as a settler of the wilderness. ”

“ I find by all historians, whether ancient or modern, whom I consulted in searching for this work, the fact well recorded, and established beyond all controversy, that the Yankee nation are a set of talking, guessing, swapping and bundling sons of women. ”

“ Father was so Yankee-hearted, When the Spanish war was started, He slipped on his uniform and hopped upon a pony. My mother's mother was a Yankee true, My father's father was a Yankee too: And that's going some, For the Yankees, by gum. ”

“ Indeed Mexico was almost entirely Americanized. The great fondas and sociedads were all under the dominion of Yankees—with Yankee ice, Yankee drinks, signs, manners, habits, and customs, as if the city had been from time immemorial Yankeefied all over, instead of being only occupied a short twelvemonth by the troops. I usually dined in one of these large establishments, and excepting the hall of the eating saloon—from patios to attics—on every angle of the broad flights of stairs, crowded one beside the other, were gaming-tables of every kind and description. ”

“ In short, in the north-east you have the cool, calculating, confident, and persevering Yankee; in the south, the fiery, somewhat aristocratic, bold, and uncompromising American, full of talent, but with his energies a little slackened by his proximity to the equator and his habitual use of slave assistance.
In the central States, all is progressive; a more agricultural population of mixed races, as energetic as the Yankee, but not possessing his advantages of a seaboard. ”

“ There are the venerable and neatly fashioned houses of the old-time Yankee––the peaked roofs and gables, the columns, the cozy verandas, the garden spaces. But the old-time Yankees are gone. The well-kept gardens are no more. Many of the houses are going to ruin. One is an Italian tenement. The others are inhabited by coachmen, chauffeurs, gardeners, mill-hands, and degenerate Yankees. The inn is a mere barroom. ”

“ The wide-awake look of the Yankee was sleepy indifference when contrasted with the intense keenness of aspect that met you here at every step, and you felt at once that you were in company where all your faculties would be few enough for self-protection. This, my first impression of the people, each day's experience served to confirm. Whatever little veils of shame and delicacy men throw over their sharp practices elsewhere, here, I am free to confess, they despised such hypocrisy. ”

“ The Yankee section came to the fight richer and stronger than our Southern section, and beat us into the earth while we did our best. To-day these Yankees are rich in everything, and we are poor in everything but manhood and womanhood, and have less than we began with one hundred years back. ”

“ This original Yankee land, though the smallest section of the United States, has made the deepest impress upon the American character. They have not enjoyed the agricultural advantages of other sections, the bleak climate, poor soil and lavish distribution of rocks and sterility making farming hard work with meagre results, so that the chief Yankee energy has been devoted to the development of manufactures, literature, commerce and the fisheries; this wonderful race who have had to practically live by their wits having admirably succeeded. ”

“ There was to be a happy renaissance; a purging out of Yankee ideas; a blessed home-coming of those good old Bourbon morals and manners which Yankee notions had expatriated. In the cheerfulness of their anticipations they even went the length of throwing their feet high in air, thus indicating how the Villivicencio ticket was going to give "doze Américains" the kick under the nose. ”

“ This, it may be, is the typical Yankee, and without a doubt such can be found; but not every inhabitant of New England is made that way. Yankees are of all kinds, and the abilities, virtues, and short-comings are much mixed in the parcelling out. The Yankee is a man of opinions, and shows great readiness to impart them to others; but the depth or shallowness of these depends on the man. ”

“ The Yankee, that is, the intelligent, laborious inhabitant of New England and of the Northern villages and towns, represents the highest civilization: the best Southern gentleman, that lord of plantations, that cotton, tobacco and slavemonger, at the best is somewhat polished, varnished ”

“ Highland was one of those thrifty Yankee settlements where every house seems to speak the people so well-to-do, and so careful, and progressive in all the means of material comfort. There was not a house in it that was not in a sort of healthy, growing state, receiving, from time to time, some accession that showed that the Yankee aspiration was busy, stretching and enlarging. ”

“ Yankee Doodle American philologists have endeavored to trace the term Yankee to an Indian source. It is not Indian, however, but Dutch. If one might characterize the relations between New England and the New Netherlands in the early colonial period, he would say with Irving that “the Yankee despised the Dutchman and the Dutchman abominated the Yankee.” The Dutch verb “Yankee” means to snarl, wrangle, and the noun “Yanker,” howling cur, is perhaps the most expressive term of contempt in the whole language. ”

“ Wednesday, June 22, 1859.—We are at Warrington’s, a genuine English inn, with nice rooms and a home-like quiet, where the finest salmon, with other luxuries, can be had at moderate prices. Every thing is English but ourselves. I feel that the Yankee in me is about as prominent as the bowsprit of the Great Republic, the queen ship of the metropolis of yankeedom, the renowned port from which we sailed, and through the scholarly air of which my thoughts wing their flight home. ”

“ You are shut up to the shrewdness and sharpness of the Yankee on the one hand, and the liberality of the Californian on the other. Your choice lies between the two, and I have no hesitation in saying, give me the Californian. If he has a farm, and I have none, he will divide with me; but who ever heard of a Yankee splitting up his farm to accommodate emigrants? Why, he will not divide with his own sons till death has divided him from both. Yankees are good when mountains are to be levelled, lakes drained, and lightning converted into a vegetable manure ”

“ At other times it is used jocularly in a patriotic spirit; and in this sense every American is proud to call himself a Yankee. Among the southern blacks, “Yankee” is a term of reproach, associated in their minds with poverty of fortune, meanness of spirit, wooden nutmegs, cypress hams, and such-like chicanes. Sad and strange to say, it is also associated with the whip, the shackle, and the cowhide. Strange, because these men are the natives of a land peculiarly distinguished for its Puritanism! A land where the purest religion and strictest morality are professed. ”

“ The Yankee is the laborious ant; he is industrious and sober and, on the sterile soil of New England, niggardly; transplanted to the promised land in the west he continues moderate in his habits, but less inclined to count the cents. ”

“ Yankee Love is fitful, uncertain, changeful, passional, moody, seldom more than superficial, because the Yankee faculties are all engrossed in the one grand object of American life—dollars and dimes, dash and display. ”

“ Is there nothing available in our peculiarities of climate, scenery, customs, and political institutions? Does the Yankee leap into life, shrewd, hard, and speculating, armed, like Pallas, for a struggle with fortune? ”

“ It is a common proverb in America, that a Yankee will live where another would starve. Their very prosperity, however, with a certain reserve in their character, and supposed steady attention to small gains, renders them not excessively popular with those among whom they settle. They are charged with a peculiar species of finesse, called 'Yankee tricks,' and the character of being 'up to every thing' is applied to them, we know not exactly how, in a sense of reproach. ”

“ And so merrily we'll push about the brandy, oh!
John Bull may toast his fill,
But let the world say what they will,
The Yankee boys for fighting are the dandy, oh!
[Pg 118]
THE "UNITED STATES" AND "MACEDONIAN." (Action 25 of October, 1812.)
How glows each patriot bosom that boasts a Yankee heart,
To emulate such glorious deeds and nobly take a part;
When sailors with their thund'ring guns,
Prove to the English, French, and Danes
That Neptune's chosen fav'rite sons
Are brave Yankees boys. ”

“ Go he must, and if necessary, with the bloodhounds on his track. The scum of Europe and the mudsills of Yankeedom shall never be permitted to advance a step [Pg 30] south of 36° 30′. South of that latitude is ours—westward to the Pacific. With my heart of hearts I hate a Yankee, and I will make my children swear eternal hatred to the whole Yankee race. A mongrel breed—Irish, Dutch, Puritans, Jews, free niggers, &c.—they scarce deserve the notice of the descendants of the Huguenots, the old Castilians, and the Cavaliers. ”

“ They are industrious, frugal, enterprising, regular in their habits, pure in their manners, and strongly impressed with sentiments of religion. The name Yankee, which we apply as one of reproach and derision to Americans in general, is assumed by them as their natural and appropriate designation. ”

“ If that be what constitutes a Yankee, as is popularly supposed outside of New England, then this Yankee of the South is as true to type as the conventional Uncle Sam himself.
A fat mountaineer is a curiosity. ”

“ Gathering “fodder” from a cane-brake as a preliminary—The lonely journey—Changing Yankee’s name—I meet the Federal raiders.
At an early hour in the morning of a bright autumnal day, that memorable year 1864—the saddest of them all—Yankee was roped (not bridled, mark you) , and crocus sacks, four for him, one for Telitha, and one for myself, thrown over his back, and we three, boon companions in diversified industries, scampered off to a neighboring cane-brake—a favorite resort in those days, but now, alas for human gratitude! never visited for the sake of “auld lang syne.” ”

“ I reckon by yo' talk yo' are one of them damn Yankees, ain't yo'?"
In Illinoise a Yankee is some one from the East, but down South he is anybody from north of the Ohio, and though that there war was fought forty years ago some of them fellers down there don't know damn and Yankee is two words yet. But shucks!—they don't mean no harm by it! So I tells him I am a damn Yankee and asts him agin if I can do anything fur him. ”

“ All, however, was ineffectual; even the recent victory at Oyster Bay, which had shed such a gleam of sunshine between the clouds of his foul weather reign, was soon followed by a more fearful gathering up of those clouds and indications of more portentous tempests; for the Yankee tribe on the banks of the Connecticut, finding on this memorable occasion their incompetency to cope in fair fight with the sturdy chivalry of the Manhattoes, had called to their aid all the ten tribes of their brethren who inhabit the east country, which from them has derived the name of Yankee land. ”

“ Persons who come to this country are very apt to confound the old settlers from Britain with the native Americans; and when they meet with people of rude, offensive manners, using certain Yankee words in their conversation, and making a display of independence, not exactly suitable to their own aristocratical notions, they immediately suppose they must be genuine Yankees, while they are, in fact, only imitators ”

“ The Yankees have plundered us with their custom-houses and duties long enough.” An old gentleman here stopped us. “You will do me the greatest favour,” he said to one of our party who knew him, “if you will get me something to do for our glorious cause. Old as I am, I can carry a musket—not far, to be sure, but I can kill a Yankee if he comes near.” When he had gone, my friend told me the speaker was a man of fortune, two of whose sons were in camp at Morris’ Island, but that he was suspected of Union sentiments, as he had a Northern wife, and hence his extreme vehemence and devotion. ”

“ They evidenced the orderly, religious habits of the sons of the Puritans; for, with all his hardness of manner and selfishness of purpose, I am inclined to think that the Yankee is the best manifestation of Northern character. He loves his home, at least, and he reveres his deceased comrades. ”

“ A thorough Yankee—using that word as the English do, to indicate national, not sectional, character—is never satisfied with doing well; he always underrates his gains and his successes; and, though to others he may be boastful enough, and may, even truly, rate the profits of his enterprise by long strings of “naught,” he is always whispering to himself, “I ought to do better.” ”

“ The Yankee—there could be no mistake as to his nationality—turned the head of the log toward the shore, and as it struck the land, began to rise slowly from the water. The sentry kept up his attitude of command so long as his Yankee friend showed only the ordinary amount of bone and muscle, but his eyes opened as foot after foot rose from the water, and the Yankee stood six feet seven in his stockings! A queer looking specimen of the genus homo he was, such as, for the good of the race, nature rarely framed. ”