Few American flags have had two lives as different as the Gadsden flag's. In its first life it was a naval standard, sewn in 1775 for the commander of a brand-new Continental Navy that consisted of a handful of converted merchant ships. In its second, beginning roughly two centuries later, it became one of the most recognizable political symbols in the United States: a yellow banner waved at rallies, stuck on bumpers, stamped on license plates, and argued over endlessly. The design has not changed. A timber rattlesnake coils on a yellow field, ready to strike, above four words with no apostrophe: DONT TREAD ON ME.
The snake before the flag
The rattlesnake was an American political symbol for two decades before Christopher Gadsden put it on a flag. Benjamin Franklin started it. In 1751 his Pennsylvania Gazette ran a satirical proposal that the colonies thank Britain for shipping convicts to America by shipping rattlesnakes to Britain. Three years later, during the French and Indian War, the Gazette printed the woodcut "Join, or Die": a snake cut into pieces, each labeled with a colony or region, with the message that a divided America was a dead one. It is usually counted as the first American political cartoon, and it was revived and reprinted as tensions with Britain grew in the 1760s and 1770s.
By late 1775 the snake had shed the dismemberment imagery and become a single coiled animal. That December, an essay in the Pennsylvania Journal signed "An American Guesser," generally attributed to Franklin, examined the rattlesnake as a national emblem after the author noticed one painted on a Marine's drum, yellow field and all. The snake, he wrote, has no eyelids and so is ever vigilant. It never begins an attack and never surrenders one. It gives generous warning before striking. And its rattles, he counted, numbered thirteen, "exactly the number of the Colonies," none able to sound alone but together producing a rattle "sufficient to alarm the boldest man living."
Gadsden, Hopkins, and the first American fleet
Christopher Gadsden was a Charleston merchant and one of the loudest radicals in the Continental Congress, a founder of South Carolina's Sons of Liberty. In the fall of 1775 he sat on the Marine Committee, the body organizing the Continental Navy around a squadron of hastily armed merchant ships. Congress named Esek Hopkins of Rhode Island commander in chief of the fleet, and Gadsden had a flag made for him: the coiled rattlesnake and motto on yellow, to be flown as the commodore's personal standard.
The flag was aboard Hopkins's flagship, the Alfred, in the Delaware River in December 1775, around the same time Lieutenant John Paul Jones raised the Continental colors on the same ship. The newly formed Continental Marines marched with drums painted yellow with the same snake and motto, which is what caught the American Guesser's eye. In February 1776 Gadsden returned to Charleston and presented a copy to the South Carolina Provincial Congress. The journal entry for February 9 describes "an elegant standard, such as is to be used by the commander in chief of the American navy; being a yellow field, with a lively representation of a rattle-snake in the middle in the attitude of going to strike; and underneath, the words 'Don't tread on me.'" The congress ordered it hung in its chamber.
The Gadsden flag was never the national flag, and it was one of several snake flags in circulation. The First Navy Jack put an uncoiled snake across thirteen red and white stripes. The Culpeper Minutemen of Virginia used a white field with the same coiled snake and motto plus "Liberty or Death." After the Revolution, the stars and stripes took over and the rattlesnake banners went into storage.
A long second act
The flag's revival came in stages. The U.S. Navy reached back to the snake tradition first, directing in 1975 that the striped First Navy Jack be flown for the bicentennial, and again from 2002 to 2019, when every commissioned ship flew it during the war on terror. That was the striped jack rather than the Gadsden design, but it kept the motto in official use.
The yellow flag itself was picked up in the 1970s by American libertarians, who read it as a compact statement of individual rights and minimal government. It spread slowly through that subculture for decades. Metallica put a coiled rattlesnake and the motto at the center of "Don't Tread on Me" on the 1991 Black Album. Then, in 2009, the Tea Party movement adopted the flag almost as a uniform, and it went from niche to everywhere in about a year: town halls, protest marches, gun shows, front porches. Thirteen states, from Virginia to Arizona, have since offered Gadsden flag specialty license plates, some routing the fees to Tea Party-affiliated organizations.
What it means now
Because the flag now signals opposition to government power in general, it turns up wherever someone wants to make that point, and the company it keeps has become the subject of genuine dispute. Some carried it at the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, alongside many other banners, which sharpened criticism from people who see it as a marker of anti-government extremism. Others fly it with no more edge than a "leave me alone" sentiment, or as a piece of Revolutionary history.
The official record treats it as historical. In 2016 the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission handled a complaint from a postal worker about a coworker's Gadsden flag cap. The commission allowed the case to proceed for investigation, as procedure required, while stating plainly that the flag "originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context" and is often displayed to convey patriotic or politically conservative messages, though it noted the symbol can take on other meanings depending on who is using it and where. In 2023 a Colorado charter school briefly pulled a 12-year-old student from class over a Gadsden flag patch on his backpack, citing the flag's political associations; after the story spread, the school reversed itself and the state's Democratic governor, Jared Polis, called the flag "a proud symbol of the American revolution."
That is roughly where the flag sits: a 250-year-old naval standard that different Americans read in different ways, which is arguably the most American thing about it.
References
[1] "Gadsden flag," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsden_flag
[2] "An American Guesser" (attrib. Benjamin Franklin), Pennsylvania Journal, December 27, 1775.
[3] The Charleston Museum, "Gadsden Flag, 1775," collection note on the flag and its presentation to the South Carolina Provincial Congress. https://www.charlestonmuseum.org/news-events/gadsden-flag-1775-so-called-for-its/
[4] Journal of the Provincial Congress of South Carolina, entry for February 9, 1776.
[5] Emerging Revolutionary War, "Don't Tread on Me: The interesting history of an iconic American flag" (2023). https://emergingrevolutionarywar.org/2023/08/30/dont-tread-on-me-the-interesting-history-of-an-iconic-american-flag/
[6] U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Shelton D. v. Brennan, Appeal No. 0120141506 (2016), on the Gadsden flag's origins and contested meanings.
[7] Revolutionary War and Beyond, "Gadsden Flag." https://www.revolutionary-war-and-beyond.com/gadsden-flag.html