FORTISVEX Gadsden Flag 6x10 Feet Nylon - Made in USA with Brass Grommets

Gadsden Flag History

The Gadsden flag brings together a yellow field, a coiled rattlesnake and a direct warning against interference. In this version, the snake rises above a patch of green ground, with the words DONT TREAD ON ME beneath it. The open space around the central emblem gives the design a striking simplicity, quite different from the stars and stripes that later became the national flag.

Snakes already had a place in colonial political imagery before independence. Benjamin Franklin's Join or Die cartoon, published on May 9, 1754, pictured a snake divided into sections labeled for the colonies or colonial regions. Its immediate setting was the struggle with France and its Native American allies. The image urged cooperation among the British colonies, showing that the familiar snake symbol began in a different political setting from the later Revolution.

As resistance to Britain grew, snake imagery took on new meaning. The Library of Congress's guide to the original newspaper record traces the image's return in colonial newspapers and records an essay signed American Guesser in the Pennsylvania Journal of December 27, 1775. That essay described a rattlesnake and the warning motto on a Marine drum. The emblem was therefore part of a wider Revolutionary visual language, rather than an idea confined to one flag.

A particularly clear record connects the yellow standard with Christopher Gadsden. The South Carolina Provincial Congress journal entry of February 9, 1776, reproduced by Naval History and Heritage Command, describes his presentation of a yellow flag bearing a rattlesnake poised to strike and the warning below. It identified the design with the commander in chief of the American navy. The same naval history identifies it as Commodore Esek Hopkins's personal standard in early 1776.

The surviving correspondence also cautions against treating every Revolutionary ship's colors as identical. In a March 23, 1776 letter reproduced in that collection of contemporary naval documents, John Jay recalled a rattlesnake flag but could not say that the fleet generally used it. This reproduction is best understood as the familiar Gadsden design: a distinctive expression of Revolutionary resistance with a documented early naval connection, rather than a claim to duplicate a particular surviving battle flag.