History: Join, Or Die

Today, July 4th is hot and I am watching a Glen Beck re-run about the Founding Fathers.  Glen's Founding Fridays shows contain a lot of good history that is little known or taught.

Benjamin Franklin produced this cartoon to help unite the colonists against the French and their Indian allies during the frontier wars.  The men who fought in these skirmish wars that lasted several decades, became the hardened fighters who formed the basis of the militias available after 1776 to fight their former British masters.

From Wikipedia:  "Join, or Die" is a well-known political cartoon, created by Benjamin Franklin and first published in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754.^[1] The original publication by the Gazette is the earliest known pictorial representation of colonial union produced by a British colonist in America.^[2] It is a woodcut showing a snake severed into eighths, with each segment labeled with the initials of a British American colony or region. New England was represented as one segment, rather than the four colonies it was at that time. In addition, Delaware and Georgia were omitted completely. Thus, it has 8 segments of snake rather than the traditional 13 colonies.^[3] The cartoon appeared along with Franklin's editorial about the "disunited state" of the colonies, and helped make his point about the importance of colonial unity. During that era, there was a superstition that a snake which had been cut into pieces would come back to life if the pieces were put together before sunset.^{[citation needed]}
The cartoon became a symbol of colonial freedom during the American Revolutionary War."..."The difference between the use of "Join or Die" in 1754 and 1765 is that Franklin had designed it to unite the colonies for 'management of Indian relations' and defense against France, but in 1765 American colonists used it to urge colonial unity against the British."