Gadsden, a Continental congressman and brigadier general from South Carolina, designed his defiant yellow flag in 1775 as a nod to Ben Franklin’s “Join, or Die” political cartoon, which presented the American colonies as a segmented rattlesnake. Gadsden became permanently associated with the rattlesnake/ “don’t tread on me” combination when he gave his new flag to Esek Hopkins, the first commander-in-chief of the American Navy. He presented a copy to South Carolina’s state legislature, too, and the Continental Marines flew Gadsden’s flag during the Revolutionary War.
The eagle largely had replaced the rattlesnake as the United States’ national symbol by the 1780s. But Gadsden’s flag took on new life on Nov. 8, 1860, when the Young Men’s Southern Rights Club in Savannah spread a banner across the Nathanael Greene Monument in Johnson Square. The top of it read: “Our Motto: Southern Rights and the Equality of the States.” Beneath, a rattlesnake twisted above the words “Don’t Tread On Me.”
Thousands gathered around the banner to cheer pro-secession speeches, and in subsequent weeks they marched through Savannah with their own homemade variations.
As the news from Savannah spread, so did the flag’s usage.
In December 1860, the Macon Daily Telegraph reported that a rattlesnake flag with “Don’t Tread on Me” had been raised by the Rev. J.R. Willis at a pro-secession rally in Indian Springs, Ga. That same month, Raleigh’s Weekly State Journal reported that a Southern Rights Club in Fayetteville, N.C., had held a meeting beneath “a beautiful representation of a pine tree and a rattlesnake in coil, with the motto, ‘don’t tread on me.’” Residents of Wytheville, Va., reportedly raised their version of the flag on a pole 80 feet high; Taylor’s Bridge, N.C., raised its own 85½ feet, the Wilmington Journal said, on “the tallest sort of a secession pole.”
The use of Gadsden emblems stretched beyond flags, as their association with the Confederacy deepened. In March 1861, the New York Times reported that, in Baltimore, “Cards were in extensive circulation, bearing the flag of the Confederate states, with a rattlesnake wreathed among its folds, sibilantly couchant, and hissing out the warning ‘Don’t Tread on Me.’”
By the end of the year, Confederates were printing envelopes featuring a rattler and the phrase “Don’t Tread on Us.”
The Gadsden flag was not the official “Flag of the Confederacy,” as the Alabama Beacon called it, but several newspapers described it in those terms. In September 1861, when the Cincinnati Daily Press predicted that “Jeff Davis & Co.” might soon invade Maryland and Delaware, it stated that “the coiled snake, and ‘don’t tread on me’ will be sent at the head of the invaders.”