The history of Yankeedom began in New England with a group of Englishmen and women who believed that the Church of England was totally corrupt (and that they were not) and that they had to separate themselves from it in order to be saved:
‘The first wave of colonists came to Plymouth (which was later absorbed by Massachusetts) in 1620. These settlers were Separatists, but we often call them the “Pilgrims.” English Separatists believed that England’s legally established church was corrupt and irredeemable. They wanted to hold their own private church meetings instead of going to Church of England parishes, but it was not legal in England to start an independent congregation. Facing severe persecution, some English Separatists had already fled to the relatively freer climes of Holland.
‘Some of the Separatists in Holland worried about the corrupting effects of Dutch culture too. In 1620, just over a hundred people sailed to Plymouth on board the ship Mayflower. Upon arrival, the men of the colony signed the Mayflower Compact, committing themselves to the creation of a “civil body politic” that was devoted to “the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our king and country.”’
As Yankee culture matured and crystallized, there would be other outbursts against peoples they believed to be impure. Dixie was one of those peoples they scorned as such, and it helped precipitate the War and Reconstruction:
‘That same year [1860] William H. Herndon [of Illinois, a close friend of Lincoln’s] proclaimed that “Civilization and barbarism are absolute antagonisms. One or the other must perish on this Continent. . . . Let the natural struggle . . . go on. . . . I am thoroughly convinced that two such civilizations as the North and the South can-not co-exist on the same soil. . . . ”
‘ . . . scarcely had the war ended when the Nation announced that Northerners must “colonize and Yankeeize the South, . . . in short to turn the slothful, shiftless Southern world upside down”’ (Grady McWhiney, Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South, U of Alabama Press, Tuscaloosa, 1988, pgs. 260, 269)
For righteous Yankees, the barbaric Southerners either had to be eradicated or transformed into Northerners.
The eugenics movement (genetic purity) in the US was begun under Yankee auspices: Charles Davenport of Harvard was a leader; Indiana passed the first sterilization law; and New York City hosted the Second International Eugenics Congress in 1921.
The violent murders committed by LGBT individuals (against Christian students in Tennessee and Minnesota, and against conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah) are the latest instantiation of the Yankee spirit that restlessly seeks to ‘cleanse’ society of those elements it sees as undesirable. Per Dr Clyde Wilson:
‘The violent rhetoric and assassinations being perpetrated today against conservatives are exact copies of the hate and murder committed against Southerners by abolitionists in the 1850s. They are from the same Yankee culture and personalities.’
From an historical perspective, it is interesting that this Yankee obsession with purity has antecedents in the schismatic and heretical groups that afflicted the early Church in Africa. Groups like the Novatians and Donatists believed that the Church in this world consisted of perfect saints, and all those who sinned were to be expelled from the congregation. Church Fathers of Africa like St Cyprian of Carthage (+3rd c.) and St Augustine of Hippo (+5th c.) rebuked them for these teachings.
‘The presence of those who have sinned does not destroy the sanctity of the Church; the tares do not prevent the wheat from growing. The Novatians taught that the presence of one who had lapsed infects all of society, as it were, and it is then no longer holy. “But with us,” writes St. Cyprian, “according to our faith and the given rule of divine preaching, agrees the principle of truth, that every one is himself held fast in his own sin; nor can one become guilty for another . . .”’ (Saint Hilarion Troitsky, On the Dogma of the Church, Fr. Nathan Williams, translator, Uncut Mountain Press, 2022, p. 470).
‘According to Donatist doctrine, there must be no sinners in the Church. . . . The society of the Donatists approved this requirement; among the Donatists there was no one with any kind of vice. When the Donatists separated, this was a separation of the wheat from the tares . . .’ (pgs. 553-4).
This is the same self-righteous spirit that was present several centuries later in the separatist Pilgrim/Yankee Errand into the Wilderness. But St Augustine rejects it:
. . .
The rest may be read here:
https://www.reckonin.com/walt-garlington/the-yankee-obsession-with-purity
Or here:
https://www.geopolitika.ru/en/article/yankee-obsession-purity
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Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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