Rattlesnakes and Rebels: The Confederate History of the “Don’t Tread on Me” Flag

On November 8, 1860, two days after Abraham Lincoln was elected president, the Young Men’s Southern Rights Club in Savannah, Georgia, spread a banner across the Nathanael Greene Monument in Johnson Square. The top of it read: “Our Motto: Southern Rights and the Equality of the States”. Beneath, a rattlesnake twisted above the words “Don’t Tread On Me”. Thousands gathered around the banner to cheer pro-secession speeches, and as reports from Savannah spread nationwide, secessionists raised similar flags throughout the South. Although the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag had symbolized the American colonies’ unified resolve during the colonial era, by the 1860s its message proved so popular among secessionists, the Alabama Beacon referred to it as “the Flag of the Southern Confederacy” while The Morning Democrat in Davenport, Iowa, described the rattlesnake and ”Don’t Tread on Me” pairing as “the Southern Coat of Arms”. Within a year, Unionists were steadily countering with illustrations of rattlers being stomped, stabbed, and eaten by eagles. Northern poets emphasized Jesus’s words in Luke 10:19 (KJV): “Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents.” By the end of 1862 Confederates had lowered their rattlesnake flags and embraced the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. Today, most Americans have forgotten the two-year iconographic battle that Unionists fought against the “rattlesnake lords”. This article uses 19th-century newspapers, supplemented with magazines, books, illustrations, and poetry, to tell the full story of this overlooked episode in American history.

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