Examples Origin Usage. What's hot. So, like they say, don't tread on me. I'm happy. I don't need all the money in the world to be happy. Popular now. Redefine your inbox with Dictionary.
The editorial suggested paying colonists to catch rattlesnakes, which would then be corralled onto ships headed for England. There was something about a beast that slithered and poisoned that appealed to those early Americans. Three years later, Franklin published a political cartoon in The Gazette , depicting Colonial America as a rattlesnake that had been hacked into eight parts, each labeled with the name of a colony.
Historians point to Christopher Gadsden — a slave-owning South Carolinian — as the namesake for the iconic yellow flag. Gadsden, a colonel in the Continental Army, is believed to have gifted the Commander of the Navy with a flag to fly above his fleet. Over time it was adopted by the other armed forces. But by the 20th century, the rattlesnake flag had found favor with extremists: In the late s, Ku Klux Klan leaders embraced it, and in the s, organizers of the radical environmental group Earth First!
In , the flag started popping up at Tea Party meetings across America. In adopting the Gadsden as its symbol, the party redefined the one doing the treading to fit its message: The treader was no longer foreign, but domestic. It was around this time that the Gadsden rattlesnake also slid its way onto laser-etched gun accessories , hats and the arm tattoos of Second Amendment advocates.
In response, the flag became the subject of endless internet memes. With the Gadsden as its logo, gun rights advocates and Tea Partiers were claiming righteousness.
America was years old, and the militia movement was about to score a victory in its decades-long fight against the federal government. By then, anti-government groups were locked in a cycle of violence and revenge with the feds that continues today.
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.
For most of U. The First Navy Jack version resurfaced in on U. Its use remained largely apolitical. In the slogan and the coiled snake saw some commercial use by Nike and the Philadelphia Union , a Major League Soccer team.
Around the same time, though, the flag took on a new political meaning : The tea party, a hard-line Republican anti-tax movement , began using it.
Tis curious and amazing to observe how distinct and independent of each other the rattles of this animal are, and yet how firmly they are united together, so as never to be separated but by breaking them to pieces. One of those rattles singly, is incapable of producing sound, but the ringing of thirteen together, is sufficient to alarm the boldest man living. General Gadsden was a slave owner who spoke publicly of slavery as a crime, yet never turned away from it in his personal life while operating his city businesses and two rice plantations.
Seeing a demand for ship docking space in the late 18th century Charleston harbor, he constructed a wharf just outside the city limits. Gadsden passed away in It was only after his death that his son, and the City of Charleston, designated the wharf as the sole sight for slave debarking and auctioning.
Tragically, the wharf processed approximately 30, captive human beings who were sold into slavery between February of and January of
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