Its words still resonant today. Though this is less frequent, it is sometimes also referred to as a Hopkins flag, named after Commodore Esek Hopkins. Eventually, he was made a Brigadier General in the Continental Army. He was one of three Marine Committee members deciding to man and outfit the Alfred and its sister ships.
It is historically accepted that the flag was given to Hopkins by Gadsden. Reportedly, Gadsden believed a distinctive personal standard was vitally important for the Commodore to have.
The rattlesnake link Benjamin Franklin is renowned throughout history for his sense of humor. In the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin wrote a satirical commentary in , suggesting the best way to thank the British for their habit of sending all their convicted felons to America would be to send England some rattlesnakes.
This one was not quite as humorous as the first. Franklin used an eight-section cut-up rattlesnake to represent the colonies. South Carolina was the tail, while New England was the snake head. The implied threat behind the slogan is that real harm will come to any person or group who might plan to step or tread on colonial Americans, in the same way that Prime Minister and Lord Frederick North had.
He saw the 13 rattles as conveying how the colonies came together with unity during times of military action. Many earlier versions used the snake and the motto of the Gadsden flag in different variations. By the time rolled around, the symbol of the rattlesnake was not only visible in the newspapers. It could be seen across the 13 colonies on flags and banners, printed on paper money and imprinted on uniform buttons.
The adoption of the symbol was widespread and swift, morphing several times in rapid succession. No longer was it cut up into eight pieces. More recently, a cartoon character called Pepe the Frog, invented by the artist Matt Furie as a kind of slacker humanoid amphibian back in , has been repurposed in shadowy corners of the Internet —maybe ironically, maybe not—as a winky symbol of white nationalism.
Traffic spiked after the September 11th terrorist attacks, Whitten says, and searches and sales also climbed as the Tea Party movement emerged. In , Alabama became the seventh state to approve a specialty license plate with a Gadsden design.
Along the way, it picked up other connotations: strident anti-government sentiment, often directed with particular vehemence at the first African-American President. As the E. Hartvigsen, president of the North American Vexillological Association, says.
Coski is aware that any ambiguity about that flag is unfathomable to those who see its meaning as aggressively racist—and settled. Sentiment against that flag crested last year with the mass shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The accused murderer, Dylann Roof, was an avowed racist who had photographed himself with the Confederate flag; after the murders, South Carolina removed it from the capitol grounds, and mainstream retailers like Walmart and Amazon stopped selling merchandise that featured the design. We have no real context for what that aggrieved postal worker experienced, or for the motives of his Gadsden-fan colleague.
We care about and interpret them on a personal level. More significant, those may be two wildly divergent, but equally fervent, perspectives.
The Gadsden flag is just the latest example that disagreements and ambiguity do not undermine the emotional power of a symbol. But it has also been used to represent the U. Marine Corps, the U. Navy, the U. As a scholar of graphic design , I find flags interesting as symbols as they take on deeper meanings for those who display them.
The beginning of a myth. It seems to begin with a simple illustration accompanying an essay by Benjamin Franklin in , 20 years before American independence. Later, as the American Revolution took shape, the image took on a new meaning. Colonists hoisted various flags, including ones depicting rattlesnakes, a distinctly American creature believed to strike only in self-defense. Christian appeared to be directing his attention toward Micah Fletcher, who was seated in the courtroom gallery. A symbol awoken.
For most of U. The First Navy Jack version resurfaced in on U.
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