Yankees

“ 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. ”

“ He turns neither to the right nor to the left, nor heeds the crowd about him, but keeps on the even tenor of his way—though even he has occasionally to jump for it—presenting, in his demeanor and costume, a striking contrast to the more bustling activity of the Yankees, who are elbowing every one, in their anxiety to go a-head. ”

“ The crier dilated upon the wonderful ingenuity of the Yankee and told the people that if they had any old clocks or other things which needed fixing that they might bring them and watch the Yankees fix them. Our first attempt to put this scheme into operation turned out somewhat disastrously. It was Saturday and the people flocked to see the Yankees. When they saw, however, that Yankees are a good deal like other people we narrowly escaped a riot. The attachés of our show got into trouble with the quarrelsome element of the crowd and ended by boasting that they were all Yankees. ”

“ There, on the short well-kept turf, was the miniature croquet-ground where the little Clays, with Honor Beacham as mistress of the revels, and a few other children, the belongings of some of the more important tenantry, were making the most of their holiday, and shouting gleefully to one another in their uproarious play.
Such a “good time,” as the Yankees say, they had of it! ”

“ But those Yankees have the most uncommon ways of putting things together; just as if you took something out of the middle of the earth, and made it fit something on the top of a mountain." [Pg 15]
"Yes, but I don't see what Yankees have to do with the doctor."
"I'll tell you what I was thinking about. I was once at the mountains, forty miles off, where there is a mineral spring. There is where ladies and gentlemen go to drink water, eat all manner of things at the tavern, and get well, when they never have been sick. Iron in the water at the springs! ”

“ I know the Yankees are the Marthas of the nation. They furnish food and fuel to the ship of state, but, my boy, the reservoir of our country's spiritual and mental strength, the Mary of our nation, must always be the South. ”

“ The Yankees relieved us of the burden of a few unprofitable slaves. They slew the best and the bravest of our men. They took our wealth and reduced us to unimaginable poverty and hardship. But, thank God, we saved our women! We returned to them ragged, wounded, footsore, and despairing, and we found them faithful as the stars in their courses. More inspiring than 'pillows' of fire by night and of cloud by day, they led us back to hope and love and prosperity. ”

“ But the Yankees, descended from austere and Puritanic farmers, and accustomed to wring their subsistence from an unwilling soil, possess the sterling virtues of human nature along with a stiff-jointed awkwardness of manner, and a sharp angularity of thought, which renders them unpleasing even to those who respect them most. ”

“ 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. ”

“ About the time that Yankees began to emigrate to Wisconsin a talented French writer, Michel Chevalier, gave the world a brilliant and on the whole favorable characterization of them. "The Yankee," he says, "is reserved, cautious, distrustful; he is thoughtful and pensive, but equable; his manners are without grace, modest but dignified, cold, and often unprepossessing; he is narrow in his ideas, but practical, and possessing the idea of the proper, he never rises to the grand. He has nothing chivalric about him and yet he is adventurous, and he loves a roving life. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Yankees may bluster, but they’ll never fight. The meanest white man at the South is more than a match for any five Yankees. We’ll have them begging to be let into our Southern Confederacy before Christmas. But we won’t receive ’em. No! As Jeff Davis well says, sooner hyenas than Yankees! But we must whip them into decency. And so, before the next Fourth of July, we mean to have our flag flying over Faneuil Hall. We are the master race, my friends! We must show these nigger stealing, beggarly Yankees that they must stand cap in hand when they venture to come into our presence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Brothers, this talk about lost tribes is a foolish talk. We are not lost. We know where we are, and we know where the Yankees have come to seek us. My brother has well spoken. If any are lost, it is the Yankees. The Yankees are Jews; they are lost. The time is near when they will be found, and when they will again turn their eyes toward the rising sun. They have looked so long toward the setting sun, that they cannot see clearly. It is not good to look too long at the same object. The Yankees have looked at our hunting-grounds, until their eyes are dim. ”

“ In the La Prairie cars the Yankees made themselves merry, imitating the cries of the charette-drivers to perfection, greatly to the amusement of some French-Canadian travellers, and they kept it up all the way to Boston. I saw one person on board the boat at St. John’s, and one or two more elsewhere in Canada, wearing homespun gray great-coats, or capotes, with conical and comical hoods, which fell back between their shoulders like small bags, ready to be turned up over the head when occasion required, though a hat usurped that place now. ”

“ Yankees had the habit of building by the roadside, whatever the economic disadvantages of such a situation, because it enabled them to keep in touch with the world—a reason which is by no means frivolous, and for them highly characteristic. ”

“ The question whether or not the Yankees were fun loving cannot be answered by yes or no. If we mean by fun the rollicking joviality characteristic of irresponsible, carefree folk, the answer is no. Many Yankees found their best fun in work or business. ”

“ Gradually these good people became aware that the Yankees were not such a vile pack of demonios as they first believed, and thus whenever guitars were tinkling at the fandangos, or meals laid upon the board, we were kindly welcomed, with the privilege of making as much love, and devouring as many frijoles as may have been polite or palatable. ”

“ The Americans were from Virginia, as I could tell by their accent, and their 'c'y'arn't' and 'sis'r' and 'honey' and 'heap better.' But I have no doubt the English people, in their usual loftily comprehensive fashion, set the strangers down as 'Yankees,' and no amount of explanation could have taught them that the 'Yankees are the New Englanders, and that the name would once have been taken as an insult by a Southerner. ”

“ Perhaps this was the first instance of that quiet way of "speaking for" a place not yet occupied, or at least not improved as much as it may be, which their descendants have practised, and are still practising so extensively. Not Any seems to have been the sole proprietor of all America before the Yankees. ”

“ The Yankees crossed the river and came down heavily on Young’s people, capturing a great many and stampeding the remainder with the exception of one regiment which drew up in line some distance from the road and watched the Yankee chase after their comrades. ”

“ New England Yankees are not always so filled with the Puritan spirit as to reject unlawful means of money-making. Even the Massachusetts common schools and prim Connecticut meeting-houses turn out their black sheep into the world. At Center Harbor, in New Hampshire, I met with an example of the “Yankee spawn” in a Maine man—a shrewd, sailor-looking fellow. ”

“ He used to be a peddler in the States, and is remarkable for an intense ambition to be thought what the Yankees call "cute and smart,"—an ambition which his true and good heart will never permit him to achieve. ”

“ He hoped the Yankees would come down 346with their money and machinery, and have good luck growing cotton, for their good luck would now be good luck to everybody. “Yankees have always made more money among us than we ever made ourselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Americans, and particularly those that call themselves, or are called, Yankees par excellence, have the reputation of putting many questions to people they happen to fall in with; but on this occasion, they are more, even than Yankees, in pouring upon the stranger they meet, their interrogatories. ”

“ He is the kind of man generally represented in our types of a “Yankee”—tall, lean, straight-haired, angular, with fiery, impulsive eyes and manner—a ruminator of tobacco and a profuse spitter—a lawyer, I believe, certainly not a soldier; ardent, devoted to the cause, and confident to the last degree of its speedy success.
The news that two more States had joined the Confederacy, making ten in all, was enough to put them in good humour. “Is it not too bad these Yankees will not let us go our own way, and keep their cursed Union to themselves? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The stars are fading one by one—
What matter? we have still the stripes!
Oh! happy men of Maryland,
Remember! we have still the stripes!
[Pg 66]
FLIGHT OF DOODLES. I come from old Manassas, with a pocket full of fun—
I killed forty Yankees with a single-barrelled gun;
It don’t make a niff-a-stifference to neither you nor I,
Big Yankee, little Yankee, all run or die.
I saw all the Yankees at Bull Run,
They fought like the devil when the battle first begun,
But it don’t make a niff-a-stifference to neither you or I
They took to their heels, boys, and you ought to see ’em fly. ”

“ Some trophy fiend, most probably some girl with the thought of a crazy patch, cut a large piece out of one of these damask curtains; consequently the governor has issued orders that no visitors shall be admitted, and the Yankees have gone down one notch further in the scale where they already, by their own conduct, hold a low position. It is to be hoped that those who come in the future may act so that no more shame will fall on us. ”

“ Those pitiful Yankees might be whipped, kicked, and otherwise punished, to any extent, with reason or without, and there would not be the least danger of any rumpus about it, for fear it might diminish the trade with the south. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Yankees, more speculative to the last, more imaginative and space-free, pressed ever toward the borders of the primitive, drawn by the same lure of wealth quickly and easily acquired which brought so many of them to the prairies of Wisconsin in the earlier days. ”

“ Away from home the whole of our people are known as Yankees, whether hailing from the northern, southern, eastern, or western section of our Union. Being an American, as far as my experience goes, is indeed a passport to civility amongst the inhabitants of all these penal colonies. ”

“ Air—“Root Hog or Die.”
By J. S. Prevatt, Company E, 6th Ga. Regiment.
Now listen to a story that I’m going to relate,
It happened near by Richmond in the Old Dominion State;
’Twas a stampede of the Yankees down the Chickahomi-ny,
Big Yank, little Yank, root Yank or die.
Chorus.
McClellan, Seward and Greeley with all their Yankee cunning,
Will never live to wipe us out, we’re not the stock for running,
And I’ll tell you the reason why,
Dixie will be Dixie, root hog or die. ”