Join, or Die

Join, or Die. (stylized JOIN, or DIE.) is a political cartoon showing the disunity in the American colonies, originally in the context of the French and Indian War in 1754. Attributed to Benjamin Franklin, the original publication by The Pennsylvania Gazette on May 9, 1754, is the earliest known pictorial representation of colonial union produced by an American colonist in Colonial America. It was based on a superstition that if a snake were cut in pieces and the pieces were put together before sunset, the snake would be resurrected. The cartoon is a woodcut showing a snake cut into eighths, with each segment labeled with the initials of one of the Thirteen British colonies. New England is represented as one segment and not the four colonies it consisted of at the time (Connecticut, Province of Massachusetts Bay, Province of New Hampshire, and Colony of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations). Delaware Colony, as part of Province of Pennsylvania at the time, was not listed separately, and the Province of Georgia was omitted completely. As a result, it has eight segments of a snake rather than the traditional Thirteen Colonies. The poster focused solely on the colonies that claimed shared identities as Americans. 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. It later became a symbol of colonial freedom during the American Revolutionary War.

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