In the early years of the founding of the United States of America, the snake became a symbol of freedom from tyranny.
Great Britain made a common practice of sending its felons to the American colonies and Australia. There is an estimate of about 50,000 total convicts sent to the American colonies throughout the 1700s, many of them political criminals.

In 1751, Benjamin Franklin, in a satirical essay in his Pennsylvania Gazette, proposed sending rattlesnakes to England to thank England for sending so many convicted felons to the colonies. Three years Viagra Jelly later, in 1754, Franklin created and printed the first political cartoon: a snake cut into eight pieces, representing the individual colonies, cialis price and wound in a manner suggesting the American east coast. At the bottom were the words “Join or Die,” referring to a common superstition that a dissected snake could live again if its pieces were joined before sunset.

The cartoon was reprinted in newspapers throughout the colonies, sometimes substituting “Join or Die” with “Unite and Live.”
After the French and Indian Wars, England was awash in debt. The colonies seemed like the ideal place from which to raise the money to re-pay the debt, and the English government began a series of small taxes designed to raise the needed revenue from the colonists. These acts increasingly frustrated and angered the American colonists.

In 1774, Paul Revere redesigned Franklin’s “Join or Die” snake as a masthead for his publication, The Massachusetts Spy. The snake, though still separated into eight parts, was stretched to nearly full length and appeared to be fighting a British dragon.

Within a year, the symbol of the snake as a symbol of freedom from British tyranny had caught on all over the colonies. Snakes were printed on flags and banners, pins, buttons, and paper money. The type of snake depicted changed from a generic serpent to a timber rattlesnake, symbolizing the colonies’ ability to strike back.

One of the most famous snake representations of early American history, the Gadsden Flag, portrayed a rattlesnake on a yellow field, the snake coiled, ready to strike, and shaking 13 rattles. Underneath the snake were the words, “Don’t Tread On Me.”

It is believed that the first use of the “Don’t Tread On Me” snake portrayal was on the painted yellow drums of the Marines, who aided the Continental Navy in an attempt to capture two British ships loaded with gunpowder. Later, Christopher Gadsden, a colonel in the Continental Army, gave a “Don’t Tread On Me” flag to Esek Hopkins, the commander-in-chief of the Navy, who used the flag as his personal standard.

The Minutemen cialis professional generic of Culpeper County, Virginia, used a version of the Gadsden Flag, adding the words “Liberty or Death,” a quote from Patrick Henry, famous patriot and organizer of the Virginia Militia.

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