Three ships, bearing the earliest Pilgrim Fathers from England to America, had already sailed from England in the year 1606, and these were followed by the historic Mayflower and the Plymouth Rock, in 1620. While these exiles for conscience sake established for themselves a new England in the west, a colony of Scotchmen in the year 1622 took possession of a tract of land which they named Nova Scotia. Maryland, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Jersey, Carolina, Pennsylvania, and other colonies were successively formed by parties of Englishmen—the final outcome of peaceful settlement, or the arbitrament of the sword, being that the greater part of the eastern seaboard, and the country beyond it, came under the sway of the English Crown, until injudicious taxation and ill-advised repression led at length to open discontent and disloyalty, and finally to revolution and the birth of the great Republic of the West.
So long as the Colonists owed allegiance to the British crown, one would naturally have taken for granted that they would have been found beneath the national flag, but this was not altogether the case. In the early days of New England the Puritans strongly objected to the red cross on the flag: not from any disloyalty to the old country, but from a conscientious objection to the use of a symbol which they deemed idolatrous. By the year 1700, though the Cross of St. George was still the leading device, the different colonies began to employ special devices to distinguish their vessels from those of England and of each other.[[57]] This, though it indicated a certain jealousy and independence amongst the colonies themselves, was no proof of any desire for separation from the old country, and even when, later on, the dispute between King and Colonists became acute, we find them parting from the old flag with great reluctance. Fig. [142] is a very good illustration of this; its date is 1775.
In the early stages of the Revolution each section adopted a flag of its own, and it was only later on, when the desirability of union and uniformity became evident, that the necessity for one common flag was felt. Thus, the people of Massachusetts ranged themselves beneath banners bearing pine trees; the men of South Carolina went in for rattle-snakes; the New Yorkers adopted a white flag with a black beaver thereon; the Rhode Islanders had a white flag with a blue anchor upon it; and, in like manner, each contingent adopted its special device.
In Fig. [144], one of the flags of the insurgents at Bunker's Hill,
June 17th, 1775, we see that the Cross of St. George is still preserved, and it might well fly in company with Fig. [67], a flag of the London Trained Bands, except that in the corner we see the pine tree. In Fig. [145] the English emblem has dropped out and the pine tree has become much more conspicuous, and in Figs. [147] and [148] all suggestion of St. George or of the red or blue Ensigns has disappeared. This arboreal device was not by any means a new one to the men of Massachusetts. We find a mint established at Boston as early as 1651, busily engaged in coining the silver captured from the Spaniards by the Buccaneers. On one side was the date and value of the coin, and, on the reverse, a tree in the centre and "In Massachusetts" around it. It must be remembered that at the time there was no king to resent this encroachment on the royal prerogative, and no notice was taken of it by the Parliament or by Cromwell. There was a tacit allowance of it afterwards, even by Charles II., for more than twenty years. It will be remembered that on his enquiry into the matter he was told by some courtier that the device was intended for the Royal Oak, and the question was allowed to drop.
South Carolina adopted the rattle-snake flag at the suggestion of one Gadsden, a delegate to the General Congress of the South Carolina Convention in 1776. On a yellow ground was placed a rattlesnake, having thirteen rattles; the reptile was coiled ready to strike, and beneath was the warning motto, "Don't tread on me." The number thirteen had reference to the thirteen revolted States, as it was originally proposed that this flag should be the navy flag for all the States. As an accessory to a portrait of Commodore Hopkins, "Commander-in-chief of the American fleet," we see a flag of thirteen alternate red and white stripes. It has no canton, but undulating diagonally across the stripes is a rattlesnake. The idea was not altogether a new one, as we find the Pennsylvania Gazette, in commenting twenty-five years previously on the iniquity of the British Government in sending its convicts to America, suggesting as a set off that "a cargo of rattlesnakes should be distributed in St. James's Park, Spring Gardens, and other places of pleasure." At the commencement of any great struggle by a revolting people there is often a great variety of device, and it is only after a while that such a multiplicity is found to be a danger. Hence we find that prior to the yellow rattlesnake flag, South Carolina had, with equal enthusiasm, adopted the blue flag with the crescent moon that we have figured in No. 158.[[58]]
In the year 1775 a committee was appointed to consider the question of a single flag for the thirteen States. This ensign, though it went far towards moulding these different sections into the United States, was a curious illustration of that reluctance that we have already referred to, to sever themselves finally from the Old Country, as the Committee recommended the retention of the Union in the upper corner next the staff, but substituted for the broad red field of the rest of the flag thirteen horizontally disposed stripes, alternately red and white, the emblems of the union into one of the thirteen colonies in their struggle against oppression. We have this represented in Fig. [57]. It was also the flag of the East India Company.
On the final declaration of Independence, when the severance from the Old Country was irrevocable, and the colonists became a nation, the question of a national flag was one of the points awaiting solution; but it was not till about a year afterwards that a decision was come to. The vessels commissioned by Washington flew the flag we have figured in No. [147]; this was approved in April, 1776, and remained in use some little time, as did also the one represented in Fig. [149]. Sometimes we find the cross and pine-tree removed and the whole flag nothing but the red and white stripes. This flag composed of stripes alone was not peculiar to the American navy, as a flag of similar design was for a long time a well-known signal in the British fleet, being that used for the red division to form up into line of battle.