Swamp Yankee

Swamp Yankee is a colloquial term for rural New Englanders who are mainly of colonial English descent and Protestant background.

Ruth Schell claims that the phrase is used predominantly in Rhode Island by immigrant minority groups to describe a rural person "of stubborn, old-fashioned, frugal, English-speaking Yankee stock, of good standing in the rural community, but usually possessing minimal formal education and little desire to augment it."

Rhode Island is New England's lowest and flattest state by elevation, and the rural hinterland south and west of Providence is characterized ecologically as predominantly temperate deciduous and acidic coniferous forests with low water tables.

[3] Kerry W. Buckley describes President Calvin Coolidge as a swamp Yankee in a 2003 article in The New England Quarterly, defining the term as the "scion of an old family that was no longer elite or monied".

Another theory claims that the term originated during the American Revolution when residents of Thompson, Connecticut fled to the surrounding swamps to escape a feared British invasion in 1776.