A Yankee is an American, or more specifically an American from one of the northern states, or even more specifically, a New Englander. The origin of Yankee is uncertain, but the most plausible explanation is that it is a variation on Janke, a diminutive of the Dutch Jan (John). Presumably, the name was reasonably common among Dutch settlers in the Hudson River valley, and from there became attached to anyone from that part of North America. The evidence for this hypothesis is fascinating in its own right, but it is a bit thin, hence the label of plausible. What is clear, is that the epithet Yankee was in common use by the 1760s.
Yankey, variously spelled, was used as a nickname and perhaps as a surname. For instance, there was a pirate/privateer who went by that name, his real name being perhaps Jan Willems (John Williams). William Dampier, in his A New Voyage Round the World, refers to him while relating events that occurred in 1681:
Capt. Yankes a Barco-longo 4 Guns, about 60 Men, English, Dutch, and French; himself a Dutchman.
(Barco-longo is a type of small, fishing boat. Barcalounger is a brand of reclining chair. It’s amusing to think of a pirate in a Barcalounger, but alas, that’s not the case here.)
And Dampier further says of him:
At the Rio Grande Captain Wright demanded the Prize as his due by virtue of his Commission: Captain Yanky said it was his due by the Law of Privateers. Indeed Captain Wright had the most right to her, having by his Commission protected Captain Yanky from the French, who would have turned him out because he had no Commission; and he likewise began to engage her first But the Company were all afraid that Captain Wright would presently carry her into a Port; therefore most of Captain Wright's Men stuck to Captain Yanky, and Captain Wright losing his Prize, burned his own Bark, and had Captain Yankys's, it being bigger than his own; the Tartan was sold to a Jamaica Trader, and Captain Yanky commanded the Prize Ship.
The pirate Yankey is also mentioned in a series of British government dispatches in the 1680s, sometimes as a pirate, when he was attacking British ships, and sometimes as a privateer, when he was going after the Spanish. One such is a dispatch from Jamaica dated 26 July 1683:
The other pirates, however, made them unite; and so about the middle of May (as I judge) they sailed from Bonaco, a little island in the Bay of Honduras, with seven or eight ships, five or six barques, and twelve hundred men; chief commanders, Vanhorn, Laurens, and Yankey Duch—no English, except one Spurre, and Jacob Hall in a small brig from Carolina. With this force (having hardly agreed who should command in chief) they came, at the latter end of May, on the coast of Vera Cruz, and then put eight hundred men into Yankey's and another ship. These approached the coast, and, by a mistake as fatal as that of Honduras, were taken by the Spaniards ashore for two of the flota. They lit fires to pilot them in without sending to find out who they were, and thus the pirates landed in the night but two miles from the town. By daybreak they came into it, took two forts of twelve and sixteen guns, finding soldiers and sentinels asleep, and all the people in the houses as quiet and still as if in their graves. They wakened them by breaking open their doors, and then a few gentlemen appeared with swords but immediately fled. So the pirates had the quiet possession and plundering of churches, houses and convents for three days, and not finding gold and silver enough they threatened to burn the great church and all the prisoners, who were six thousand in number.
And an order for his arrest was issued on 23 November 1684:
Instructions from Colonel Hender Molesworth to Captain Mitchell, RN, H.M.S. Ruby. You will forthwith sail to Petit Guavos and deliver my letter to the Governor, demanding satisfaction for a sloop of this island unlawfully seized by Captain Yankey. If the Governor justifies Yankey, you will protest against the injustice of the proceedings. If he seems to admit the illegality of the proceedings of the privateers you will consider Yankey as a pirate and tell the Governor that you will treat him as such. But if he lay the blame on the Intendant of Martinique we must carry our complaint elsewhere. If you meet with Yankey on your way you will endeavour to seize him and carry him with you to Petit Guavos. If the Governor justifies him you will deliver Yankey to him; if not, you will bring Yankey here for trial. You will demand delivery of all English subjects engaged in privateering, but not compel it by force.
A dispatch from the Duke of Albemarle to the Earl of Dartmouth, from Jamaica of 8 March 1687/68 tells of Yankey and another pirate attacking a Spanish town:
Yesterday had news that the pirates Yanky and Jacobs had with 84 men fallen upon the storehouses in the bottom of the Bay of Honduras, and that three Spanish men of war came and blocked them up, and landed what men they could to join with the country, who made up the number of 700 men, and raised three breast works, which works were attacked by the pirates and by them taken, killing a great number on the spot and routing the rest, they losing only nine men, and Yanky wounded. The pirates are now in the Bay of Honduras recruiting, intending to fall upon the Spanish ships, one Jones, another pirate, having a ship of force, being joined with them.
And a dispatch from later that year, on 24 October 1687, mentioned him again:
Lieutenant Governor Molesworth to William Blathwayt. Yankey and Jacob could not digest my conditions that their vessels should be broken up, though the majority of his people were for it.
And that dispatch contained an enclosure that identified Yankey by his real, presumably Anglicized, name. It’s not clear whether the parenthetical names are in the original or if they were added for clarity by the editor when the papers were published in the nineteenth century:
Captains John Williams (Yankey) and Jacob Everson (Jacob) to Lieutenant Governor Molesworth. We have suffered much from calms and storms, and have only arrived after much distress off Point Negril. We beg you to consider that if our ships are broken up we shall be left destitute of all livelihood in present and future, and to allow us the use of them. We have neither of us money to purchase an estate ashore. I shall work into Bluefields and thence to Port Royal, but we are deserted by most of our men, and have none but raw hands left, so are afraid to stand close inshore for land winds. Signed, John Williams, Jacob Everson.
There is also a record from 1725 of an enslaved, Black man named Yankee:
YANKEE.—The inventory of the effects of William Marr, formerly of Morpeth, and afterwards “of Carolina, in parts beyond the seas, but in the parish of St. Dunstan, Stepney” (1725), ends with “Item one negroe man named Yankee to be sold.” Mr. W. Woodman, of Morpeth, has the document.
A few years later, we have mention of a Massachusetts farmer, Jonathan Hastings, who is nicknamed Yankey. It’s in a letter from 27 September 1728. Unfortunately, the letter, if it survives, is buried in an unknown archive somewhere, but we do have a 1795 attestation in Massachusetts Magazine to its contents:
One of these letters, dated “Cambridge. Sept. 27, 1728,” the editor has before him. It is a most humourous narrative of the fate of a goose roasted at “Yankey Hastings’s” and it concluds [sic] with a poem on the occasion, in the mock heroic.
So, in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Yankee was used as a name or nickname for several individuals.
And the novel The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves, serialized in the British Magazine in 1760 uses yanky in the sense of a Dutch ship or boat:
Haul forward thy chair again, take thy berth, and proceed with they story in a direct course, without yawing like a Dutch yanky.
But the earliest attestation of Yankee as a generic term for an American comes two years earlier in a letter of 19 June 1758 by Major General James Wolfe to his commander, Field Marshal Jeffrey Amherst during the French and Indian (Seven Years’) War:
My posts are now so fortified that I can afford you the two companies of Yankees, and the more as they are better for ranging and scouting than either work or vigilance.
We see it again in 1765 in Oppression. A Poem by an American. With Notes by a North Briton:
From meanness first, this Portsmouth Yankey rose,
And still to meanness, all his conduct flows.
The note to these lines reads:
“Portsmouth Yankey,” It seems, our hero being a New-Englander by birth, has a right to the epithet of Yankey; a name of derision, I have been informed, given by the Southern people on the Continent, to those of New-England: what meaning there is in the word, I never could learn.
The first known mention of the song Yankee Doodle comes in a 1767 musical play, The Disappointment, by Andrew Barton. The lyrics are not those familiar to us today, but it’s clear that by this date the song was well known. Musical plays of this period featured popular songs of the day, as opposed to tunes composed for the plays, and this one is no different:
Raccoon sings.
AIR IV Yankee Doodle.
O! how joyful shall I be,
When I get de money,
I will bring it all to dee;
O! my diddling honey.
(Exit, singing they chorus, yankee doodle, &c.[)]
And the next year we get another mention of the song, showing that by this point the name was quite common indeed. From a news article about the arrival of a British fleet in Boston, Massachusetts on 29 September 1768:
The fleet was brought to anchor near Castle-William; that evening there was throwing of skyrockets, &c. and those passing boats observed great rejoicings, and that the yanky dudle song was the capital piece in their band of music.
There is a story that Yankee Doodle was composed by a British army surgeon in 1755, but while the story is oft-repeated, sometimes credulously in otherwise reputable sources, there is no evidence to support it.
(I’m not going to delve further into the history of the song, but if you want more, see Oscar Sonneck’s 1909 report on it for the Library of Congress. The source is old, and there may be further evidence that has come to light since, but it’s superbly researched.)
A number of other etymologies for Yankee have been proffered over the years, none with any good evidence, but which also cannot be conclusively disproven. One of these explanations is that of Moravian missionary John Heckewelder, who claimed Yankee came from Yengees, as that is how certain Indigenous peoples pronounced English:
In New England, they at first endeavoured to imitate the sound of the national name of the English, which they pronounced Yengees.
And:
These were the names which the Indians gave to the whites, until the middle of the Revolutionary war, when they were reduced to the following three:
1. Mechanschican or Chanschican (long knives). This they no longer applied to the Virginians exclusively, but also to those of the people of the middle states, whom they considered as hostilely inclined towards them, particularly those who wore swords, dirks, or knives at their sides.
2. Yengees. This name they now exclusively applied to the people of New England, who, indeed, appeared to have adopted it, and were, as they still are, generally through the country called Yankees, which is evidently the same name with a trifling alteration. They say they know the Yengees, and can distinguish them by their dress and personal appearance, and that they were considered as less cruel than the Virginians or long knives. The proper English they [i.e., “the Chippeways and some other nations”] call Saggenash.
3. Quaekels. They do not now apply this name exclusively to the members of the Society of Friends, but to all the white people whom they love or respect, and whom they believe to have good intentions towards them.
Of course, the Indigenous Yengees could have come from Yankee/Janke just as easily as from the word English.
Another explanation, this one unlikely, is that Yankee comes from the Cherokee eankke, meaning slave or coward. This one was proffered by Thomas Anburey, a British officer during the American Revolution, in 1777:
The lower class of these Yankees—a propos, it may not be amiss here just to observe to you the etymology of this term: it is derived from a Cherokee word, eankke, which signifies coward and slave. This epithet of yankee was bestowed upon the inhabitants of New England by the Virginians, for not assisting them in a war with the Cherokees, and they have always been held in derision by it.
Presumably the said war was the Anglo-Cherokee War of 1758–61, but if so, it does not square with Wolfe’s casual use of the epithet in 1758. So, this last one seems highly unlikely.
That leaves us with the Dutch Janke as the most likely, and the most colorful, explanation for the origin of Yankee.
