Virginia's Rattlesnake Flag: Coiled and Ready to Strike

By Eugene Scheel

Sunday, June 7, 2009

The green landscape of spring has been dotted lately with U.S. flags and banners, with Memorial Day having recently passed and Flag Day arriving a week from today. On June 14, 1777, the Second Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the flag of the United States.

Driving through Hamilton recently, I saw a flag of yellow and black. It was a rattlesnake flag on display, a rarity now, although it was a popular Virginia banner before and during the American Revolution, signifying resistance to Britain. According to "The Flag: An American Biography," by historian Marc Leepson of Middleburg, military units from Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania also flew rattlesnake banners in 1775.

I phoned the owner of the Hamilton home, a history buff who told me that the flag's yellow field, with its coiled rattler and the words "Don't Tread on Me," was designed by South Carolina's Christopher Gadsden.

Leepson's book notes that Rhode Island's Esek Hopkins, first commodore of the U.S. Navy, flew the Gadsden flag when he commanded the first Continental Navy fleet in December 1775.

Rattlesnakes were common creatures in the colonies, and they became an emblem of solidarity after Benjamin Franklin's "Join, or Die" cartoon of May 1754 appeared in newspapers. His drawing depicted the snake cut into eight sections, with the New England colonies serving as the head and South Carolina the tail. Virginia, at midsection, was the only coiled section. A coiled snake is ready to strike.

Photo: Eugene Scheel

Larry Moison and Jackie Moison holding Gadsden Rattlesnake Flag at house in Hamilton.

The caricature of a cut-up snake was to warn the colonies to unite against the French, with whom they were at war. A decade later, and throughout the American Revolution, several newspapers reprinted the cartoon as a defiant gesture toward Britain.

Franklin, in a December 1775 essay in the Pennsylvania Journal newspaper, even recommended the rattlesnake as a "Symbol of America . . . esteemed [as] an emblem of vigilance. She never begins an attack, nor when once engaged, ever surrenders: She is therefore an emblem of magnanimity and true course. . . . She strongly resembles America in this, that she is beautiful in youth and her beauty increaseth with her age."

Two months later, the London newspaper Morning Chronicle reprinted Franklin's essay, adding: "The Americans have a flag with a snake with 13 rattles on it, in the attitude to strike, and with the motto, 'Don't tread on me.' It is a rule in heraldry that the worthy properties of an animal; on a crest should alone be considered."

Much of what we know about Virginia's rattlesnake flag, and the militiamen who carried it, comes from the diaries of Philip Slaughter of Culpeper County. He began his entries at age 16 in 1775, and continued writing until his death 75 years later.

Slaughter's diaries were never published in full. But the Revolutionary War entries were read in 1887 by his son, the Rev. Philip Slaughter, a prominent Episcopal clergyman, and were taken down, without noting days and months, by publisher and newspaper editor Raleigh T. Green. The original Revolutionary-period diaries are now lost.

The elder Slaughter was a private in the Culpeper Minutemen, a unit of about 250 men initially from Culpeper, Fauquier and Orange counties. (Culpeper then included Madison and Rappahannock counties). As the unit's fame grew after several victories, recruits from Frederick, Loudoun, Prince William and Stafford counties joined.

Among the officers who led them were James Monroe, the future U.S. president and Loudoun County resident; John Marshall of Fauquier, the third chief justice of the Supreme Court; and expert rifleman Daniel Morgan of Frederick, later a brigadier general with his own command.

Slaughter's diaries described the flag, first raised in April 1775. The banner's central symbol was a coiled rattlesnake about to strike. Below were the words "Don't Tread on Me." At the left side was the word "Liberty" and at the right side "or Death" — together, the words sounded by Patrick Henry at the second Revolutionary Convention of summer 1775. At the flag's top was the inscription, "Culpeper Minute Men."

Interviewed in 1844, Slaughter stated that, "The head of the snake was intended for Virginia, and 12 rattles for the 12 other states."

According to Slaughter's diaries, the minutemen wore "hunting shirts made of strong brown linen, dyed the color of the leaves of the trees, and on the breast of each hunting shirt was worked in large white letters with the words, 'Liberty or Death!' " He also wrote that "all that could procure for love or money bucks' tails wore them in their hats. Each man had a leather belt around his shoulders, with a tomahawk and scalping knife." Half the minutemen were armed, he said, mainly with "fowling-pieces and squirrel guns."

On guard duty at Williamsburg, Virginia's Colonial capital, Slaughter wrote that, "Many people, hearing that we were from the backwoods, near the Indians, and seeing our dress, were as much afraid of us for a few days as if we had been Indians."

Slaughter's account is one of the few records available that provides such a full description of the minutemen's attire. The details could be helpful to Loudoun's Revolutionary War Committee, headed by Larry Moison, which is raising funds for a statue on the courthouse green in Leesburg that will show a typical Loudoun soldier.

The Piedmont soldiers became distinguished fighters after victories at Great Bridge, a main approach to Norfolk, in December 1775, and in other main battles of the Revolution: Brandywine, Germantown, Monmouth, Stony Point and the final siege that ended the war, Yorktown in October 1781. They vindicated the words of Virginian Peyton Randolph, president of both continental congresses, who said of the minutemen: "raised in a minute, armed in a minute, fought in a minute, and vanquished in a minute."

The rattlesnake flag was again raised when the minutemen were activated as a Confederate unit during the Civil War, and raised in both World Wars. The flag is now featured on the town seal of Culpeper, as the minutemen first met within its present limits.

Eugene Scheel is a historian and mapmaker who lives in Waterford.

Tagged: history, opinions

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