the dont tread on me flag was created in 1775.
the dont tread on me flag was created in 1775.
when was the dont tread on me flag created?
1775
in late 1775, as the first ships of the continental navy readied in the delaware river, commodore esek hopkins issued, in a set of fleet signals, an instruction directing his vessels to fly a "striped" jack and ensign. the exact design of these flags is unknown. the ensign was likely to have been the grand union flag, and the jack a simplified version of the ensign: a field of 13 horizontal red and white stripes. it is likely that the colonial ships did not use (and could not have legitimately used) the canton of the grand union flag (i.e. the british "union jack") as their jack given its use as a jack by the enemy royal navy warships. despite the probability that the original jack may have been a simple striped flag, since about 1880, this jack has traditionally been depicted as consisting of thirteen red and white stripes charged with an uncoiled rattlesnake and the motto "dont tread on me" ["sic"]; this tradition dates at least back to 1880, when this design appeared in a color plate in admiral george henry preble's influential "history of the flag of the united states". recent scholarship, however, has demonstrated that this inferred design never actually existed but "was a 19th-century mistake based on an erroneous 1776 engraving".
first navy jack
in the 1979 novel "alongside night", an organization called the revolutionary agorist cadre, seeking a second american revolution, welcomes visitors to one of its undergrounds: "the room's only decoration was a modified gadsden flag draped on the wall adjoining the bar and medical areas (opposite the door), a golden field with 'laissez-faire!' in an upper left corner, a coiled rattlesnake facing left with its tongue out, and in the lower right, 'dont tread on me!'" the gadsden flag without the addition of "laissez-faire!" is carried over into the 2014 "alongside night" movie adaptation in which the gadsden flag is used by the revolutionary agorist cadre as well as the traditional anarchist black flag.
gadsden flag