My people never liked Yankees much. Too arrogant, and too much respect for royalty.
And MY people mingled with the Yanks so that the arrogance was softened by southern gentility. However, I refuse to own slaves.
The word is Yankee Tories: the anglophilic dregs of bygone New England elitists (when all Republicans were Episcopalians) who still pine over the Church of England (the kind who swoon over choirs performing the music from Elizabeth’s coronation— yep, they do that at some churches).
The word, Yankee, derives from the french/indian war with Britain, in which the French “l’anglais” was warped by the Huron in their attempts at “english” into...”yengees, or yang-gees”. Naturally, linguists ignore this because they say it is not from “indian origins”— it isn’t, it’s French/Huron.
The name was picked up along the way by coexisting colonists, who continued to harbor anti-Brit sentiments into our American Revolution and proudly self-identified. Washington being a former tory, became a Revolutionary, and many more like him. The tory loyalists fled the new nation after the Revolution, to places like the Bahamas, and other Brit protectorates. The later conflagration in the South, identified these “connected” brit wannabes in the North as— yankees, and properly so.