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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. Out of that acrimonious struggle between Connecticut and New Amsterdam came the nickname which has stuck to the descendants of the Puritans ever since.

The adoption of the air of Yankee Doodle has been credited to Dr. Shackburg, a wit, musician, and surgeon, in 1755, when the colonial troops united with the British regulars in the attack on the French outposts at Niagara and Frontenac. It was aimed in derision of the motley clothes, the antiquated equipments, and the lack of military training of the militia from the Eastern provinces, all in broad contrast with the neat and orderly appointments of the regulars. Be this as it may, the tune was well known in the time of Charles II., under the name “Lydia Fisher’s Jig.” Aside from the old doggerel verses, commencing “Father and I went down to camp,” there is no song; the tune in the United States is a march. It was well known in Holland, and was in common use there as a harvest-song among farm-laborers, at a remote period.

A late number of the Frankfurter Zeitung furnishes some interesting information in a paragraph which is translated as follows by the United States Consul at Mayence, Mr. Schumann:

“In the publication Hessenland (No. 2, 1905) Johann Lewalter gives expression to his opinion that Yankee Doodle was originally a country-dance of a district of the former province of Kur-Hesse, called the “Schwalm.” It is well known that the tune of Yankee Doodle was derived from a military march played by the Hessian troops during the war of the Revolution in America. In studying the dances of the Schwalm, Lewalter was struck by the similarity in form and rhythm of Yankee Doodle to the music of these dances. Recently, at the Kirmess of the village of Wasenberg, when Yankee Doodle was played, the young men and girls swung into a true Schwälmer dance, as though the music had been composed for it. During the war of 1776 the chief recruiting office for the enlistment of the Hessian hired soldiers was Ziegenhain, in Kur-Hesse. It, therefore, seems probable that the Hessian recruits from the Schwalm, who served in the pay of Great Britain in America during the Revolutionary War, and whose military band instruments consisted of bugles, drums, and fifes only, carried over with them the tune, known to them from childhood, and played it as a march.”