![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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