Yankees in Michigan

Yankees in New England and Beyond

7 YankeesinNewEnglandandBeyond New England “Yankees” comprised a true ethnic group in Colonial America . Not only was their culture distinctive, but they themselves were acutely conscious of it. When they began to move westward in the 19th century, they were intent on making their values the values of the entire nation. —John G. Rice, “The Old-Stock Americans,” 1981 T oday when we think of the word “Yankee,” we often think of it simply as a synonym for “American,” or, more specifically, as the nickname for Union Army soldiers during the Civil War, or perhaps even a baseball team based in New York. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however , “Yankee” designated a distinct ethnic group, if by that term we mean a group “with a shared culture and sense of identity based on religion, race, and nationality.”7 Yankees were fiercely proud to be the descendents of the first seventeenth-century English settlers to New England; in fact, the word Yankee most plausibly can be traced to the guttural Indian pronunciation of “English” or “Anglais.”8 Yankees traced their religious roots to the Puritan Calvinism that dominated colonial New England. While Yankee religion would in time be fragmented into a dozen different denominations, most retained the uncompromising seriousness, distrust of innate human goodness, 8 B rian C. W ilson and concern for the social order that marked the old Puritan tradition. Race and religion, as for most ethnic groups, went hand in hand for these people. Well into the nineteenth century, Yankees would continue to celebrate the purity of what one Detroit minister would call their “Puritanized Anglo Saxon Blood.” As for nationality, this too was clear: long after the United States had been established, Yankees maintained a strong sense that New England, not the United States, was “their nation.”9 Indeed, the first secessionist movement in this country did not arise in the south, but in New England in 1814, when, in protest of the War of 1812, delegates to the Hartford Convention proposed that the New England states secede from the Union and form a separate nation. That Yankees were a separate people, Yankees themselves had no doubt. In other regions of the country, too, Yankee ethnicity was widely recognized, if hardly celebrated. Throughout the nineteenth century, Yankees were routinely portrayed humorously as stock characters in newspaper articles, novels, and plays written outside of New England. Ichabod Crane, Washington Irving’s hapless schoolmaster in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” was, from his faintly ridiculous biblical name all the way to his choice of profession , the very embodiment of the stereotypical Yankee. The novelist James Fenimore Cooper, of Pennsylvania Quaker antecedents, had an especially virulent dislike of Yankees, notorious as they were for “pedantry, bad manners , slyness, cant, and self-satisfaction,” not to mention bad cooking and a deplorable nasal twang. “Nothing Yankee agrees with me,” Cooper once wrote, and it is not surprising that most of the villains in his novels hail from New England.10 Perhaps the best indication of the status of Yankees as a widely recognized ethnic group was the fact that the other major “homegrown” ethnic group in the United States—white Southerners—pursued an intense political and cultural rivalry with New Englanders, a rivalry that would ultimately define the nation. According to historian Robert Kelly, “Until they settled their account , American politics was essentially bipolar. The South and Yankeedom (the world of New England at home or transplanted), two expansive and selfconscious cultures struggling for national supremacy, created the nation’s central cultural political conflict and the great crisis that culminated in the Civil War.”11 The fact that Yankees won that contest perhaps explains why today “Yankee” has become generalized to all Americans and lost its ethnic YANKEES IN MICHIGAN 9 ring. Back in the day, however, while the issue was still in doubt, “Yankee” stood for a people apart who cherished a specific regional history and a set of values and aspirations deeply rooted in that history. Yankee Origins Yankees trace their origins to the successive waves of English migration to the rocky shores around Cape Cod, beginning with the landing of the Mayflower in 1620 and reaching its peak with the Arbella flotilla in 1630.12 By 1640, some twenty-one thousand people had made the Atlantic passage and established themselves along the coastline of what had lately come to be marked on maps as New England. The majority of these colonists came from East Anglia, especially the counties of...