Join, or Die

Join, or Die is a political cartoon, drawn by Benjamin Franklin and first published in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. The original publication by the Gazette is the earliest known pictorial representation of colonial union produced by a British colonist in America. It is a woodcut showing a snake cut into eighths, with each segment labeled with the initials of one of the American colonies or regions. New England was represented as one segment, rather than the four colonies it was at that time. Delaware was not listed separately as it was part of Pennsylvania. Georgia, however, was omitted completely. Thus, it has eight segments of snake rather than the traditional 13 colonies. The two northernmost British American colonies at the time, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland, were not represented, nor were any British Caribbean possessions. 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. This cartoon was used in the French and Indian War to symbolize that the colonies needed to join together with the Kingdom of Great Britain to defeat the French and Indians. It became a symbol of colonial freedom during the American Revolutionary War.

At that time, the colonists were divided on whether to fight the French and their Native-American allies for control of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains; in what came to be known as the French and Indian War. It became a symbol for the need of organized action against an outside threat posed by the French and Native-Americans in the mid 18th century. Writer Philip Davidson states that Franklin was a propagandist influential in seeing the potential in political cartoons. Franklin had proposed the Albany Plan and his cartoon suggested that such a union was necessary to avoid destruction. As Franklin wrote:

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