Most significant for the development of the American symbol, French authors discussed the phenomenon. Scholars have documented variants of that motif in the folklore of China and the Philippines. Contrary to the legend, however, the separated pieces do not reunite and come back to life.īritish settlers in North America were not the only people who imagined disjointed snakes reforming. As an adaptive protection, their tails can snap off, wriggle, and break into further pieces, distracting a predator and giving the animals time to wriggle away. In North America, these lizards are in the genus Ophisaurus. What we call glass snakes are actually lizards with long thin bodies and no legs or very small legs, making them look like snakes. In reality, of course, glass snakes did not work like that. Some affirm, that if you let it remain where you broke it, it will come together again.” In An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents (1742), Charles Owen accepted how easily the glass snake could shatter but added, “some say, and nobody believes, are capable of Re-union.” Nonetheless, people continued to spread that lore. In A New Voyage to Carolina (1709), John Lawson wrote of this animal: “It is as brittle as a Tobacco-Pipe, so that if you give it the least Touch of a small Twigg, it immediately breaks into several Pieces. The glass snake was also called the brimstone snake and joint snake. That made them apt mascots for the American cause. These creatures were known for different traits and carried different messages, but they shared an important quality: naturalists wrote about both snakes as American species. In particular, American politicians of the later 1700s seized on the symbolism of two sorts of snakes-the glass snake and the rattlesnake. Yet as they entered a confrontation with the royal government in London and sought to sway public opinion, they adopted vipers as their emblems. They also spent a lot of effort wiping out actual snakes that they thought threatened their livestock. The British colonists who settled in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries brought those cultural connotations of serpents with them. The botanist Peter Collinson wrote of “a Sort of Natural aversion in Human Nature against this Creature.” In 1774, Oliver Goldsmith began a chapter on “Serpents in General” with the declaration: “We now come to a tribe that not only their deformity, their venom, their ready malignity, but also our prejudices and our very religion, have taught us to detest.” Enlightenment science was changing the way scholars studied the world, but it did not erase this bias. Indeed, many British scholars of the time believed that humans were instinctively repelled by snakes.

Fairly or not, the public image of snakes had not improved much since antiquity. Snakes had some godly cachet in the Greek and Roman mythology that gentlemen studied, but classical lore offered plenty of bad examples. In Genesis, the serpent is the lead villain, tempting Eve and Adam. This abundance of snakes is striking because in ordinary times British-American culture did not like snakes. And as the Revolutionary struggle progressed, artists chose different American snakes with different symbolic meanings.

Vipers were carved into early seals of the Continental Congress. Rattlesnakes coiled on drums and reared on flags. In the 1770s serpents slithered across newspaper mastheads. Revolutionary Americans adopted native snakes as symbols for their cause, starting with a revival of Benjamin Franklin’s famous “JOIN, or DIE” emblem. This article is a part of our “ Revolutionary Animals” series, which examines the roles of animals in revolution, representations of revolutionary animals, and the intersections between representation and the lived experiences of animals.

Declaration of independence snap art