Revolutionary Americans adopted native snakes as symbols for their cause, starting with a revival of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “JOIN, or DIE” emblem. In the 1770s serpents slithered across newspaper mastheads. Rattlesnakes coiled on drums and reared on flags. Vipers were carved into early seals of the Continental Congress. And as the Revolutionary struggle progressed, artists chose different American snakes with different symbolic meanings.
This abundance of snakes is striking because in ordinary times British-American culture did not like snakes. That antipathy had deep roots. In Genesis, the serpent is the lead villain, tempting Eve and Adam. Snakes had some godly cachet in the Greek and Roman mythology that gentlemen studied, but classical lore offered plenty of bad examples. Fairly or not, the public image of snakes had not improved much since antiquity.
Indeed, many British scholars of the time believed that humans were instinctively repelled by snakes. The botanist Peter Collinson wrote of “a Sort of Natural aversion in Human Nature against this Creature.”[1] In 1774, Oliver Goldsmith began a chapter on “Serpents in General” with the declaration: “We now come to a tribe that not only their deformity, their venom, their ready malignity, but also our prejudices and our very religion, have taught us to detest.”[2] Enlightenment science was changing the way scholars studied the world, but it did not erase this bias.
The British colonists who settled in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought those cultural connotations of serpents with them. They also spent a lot of effort wiping out actual snakes that they thought threatened their livestock.[3] Yet as they entered a confrontation with the royal government in London and sought to sway public opinion, they adopted vipers as their emblems.
In particular, American politicians of the later 1700s seized on the symbolism of two sorts of snakes—the glass snake and the rattlesnake. These creatures were known for different traits and carried different messages, but they shared an important quality: naturalists wrote about both snakes as American species. That made them apt mascots for the American cause.