Join or Die Print

oin, or Die is Benjamin Franklin's political cartoon published in his Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754. It's the earliest known pictorial representation of colonial union produced by a British colonist in America. The original was actually a woodcut showing a snake severed into eighths, with each segment labelled with the initial of a British American colony or region. 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.