>What’s up with the yellow picture of a snake cut up into pieces?
“The Confidence of the French in this Undertaking seems well-grounded on the present disunited State of the British Colonies, and the extreme Difficulty of bringing so many different Governments and Assemblies to agree in any speedy and effectual Measures for our common Defence and Security,” Franklin wrote.
“They presume that they may with Impunity violate the most solemn Treaties subsisting between the two Crowns, kill, seize and imprison our Traders, and confiscate their Effects at Pleasure (as they have done for several Years past) murder and scalp our Farmers, with their Wives and Children, and take an easy Possession of such Parts of the British Territory as they find most convenient for them,” Franklin concluded, warning that the British presence in North America was at stake.
Accompanying the article was the “JOIN, OR DIE” cartoon, with a snake cut into eight pieces that symbolized the British colonies. Franklin’s message hit home as the cartoon and article started appearing in other colonial newspapers.
In a 1996 article in The British Library Journal, Karen Severud Cook reviewed the brief, but interesting, historical interpretations of the cartoon. Franklin’s cartoon, Cook said, was also a symbolic map, with the initials next to the snake’s segments in the same order of the colonies and a rough proximity of a coastline.
The story behind the Join or Die snake cartoon
https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-story-behind-the-join-or-die-snake-cartoon