When I moved to Virginia I noticed that lots of people have yellowish-orange license plates with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me.” I was not unaware of the origin of the symbol given it was the personal flag of Commodore Esek Hopkins, the first commander-in-chief of the Continental Navy. He flew the flag on the main mast of his flagship, USS Alfred, whenever he was aboard. The flag was designed in 1775 by Christopher Gadsden, South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress and brigadier general in the Continental Army. He gifted it to Hopkins.

The rattlesnake, present in all the original 13 colonies, was a symbol of the unity of the colonies, and had a long history as a political symbol in America; Benjamin Franklin used the animal for his “Join, or Die” woodcut in 1754. The woodcut first appeared along with Franklin’s editorial about the “disunited state” of the colonies and helped make his point about the importance of colonial unity during the French-Indian War in the 1750s. Gadsden extended that idea and intended his flag as a warning to Great Britain not to violate the liberties of its American subjects. The Gadsden symbol was incorporated into the seal of the Continental War Office as well as the Continental Army.

Despite the widespread use of the rattlesnake in the Revolutionary War days, by 1782 the eagle had replaced the rattlesnake as the animal symbol of the United States by declaration of the 2nd Continental Congress.

Gadsden’s flag took on new life on Nov. 8, 1860, when the Young Men’s Southern Rights Club in Savannah spread a banner in Johnson Square for a pro-secession rally. The top of it read: “Our Motto: Southern Rights and the Equality of the States.” Beneath, a rattlesnake twisted above the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”  The connection between the Gadsden symbol and secession quickly spread through the soon-to-be confederated states.

At the start of the Civil War both the Confederate States and the Union States adopted the Gadsden symbol as part of their battle flags. The Confederacy proclaiming the unity of the states that had seceded from the United States and as a warning for the North not to violate their state’s rights and liberties. The North adopted the symbol but soon countered the new Confederate States with scenes of eagles devouring snakes, evoking mythological and religious battles between good and evil. “The Eagle shall bear the Rattlesnake in his beak and rend him with his talons,” declared one especially gorey illustration.

The Boston poet Mary Webb invoked the eagle-snake confrontation in her 1861 poem “Our Massachusetts Dead,” in which she mourned Northern losses: “Our eagle in the serpent’s coil ! / But (bruising, soon, the serpent’s head).” Webb was predicting the Confederacy’s defeat by alluding the Old Testament prophecy from Genesis — a gesture echoed in Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”. When Howe pronounced “Let the Hero, born of woman, bruise the serpent with his heel,” she joined a righteous battle of symbols. A battle that the South quickly lost as images of stomped, stabbed and eaten snakes proliferated in Union illustrations. Confederates gradually relinquished their serpents and instead, they adopted the “Southern Cross” battle flag, what we called the Confederate Battle Flag.

In the 1970s the Gadsden flag started being used by libertarians, using it as a symbol representing individual rights and limited government. In the same time period, the New Left People’s Bicentennial Commission used the Gadsden Flag symbolism on buttons and literature. Tea Party Republican lawmakers claimed the flag in their fight against federal overreach. Far-right extremists carried it in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 (often appearing alongside the Confederate Battle flag). Today, “Don’t Tread on Me” license plates are available from Virginia to Florida to Arizona, with Iowa this year proposing one of its own.

When people choose to display the Gadsden flag/symbol, I wonder how conscious people are of its origins, history, and uses. It seems we are perhaps as “disunited as Benjamin Franklin feared.