In the early years of the Revolution a number of emblems were in use, which became famous. The standard displayed on the south-east bastion of Fort Sullivan (or Moultrie, as it was afterward named) on the 28th of June, 1776, by Colonel Moultrie, was a blue flag with a white crescent in the upper left-hand corner, and the word "Liberty" in white letters emblazoned upon it. This was the flare that fell outside the fort and was secured by Sergeant Jasper, who leaped the parapet, walked the whole length of the fort, seized the flag, fastened it to a sponge-staff, and in sight of the whole British fleet, and in the midst of a perfect hail of bullets, planted it firmly upon the bastion. The next day Governor Rutledge visited the fort, and rewarded Jasper by giving him his own sword. He offered him also a lieutenant's commission; but Jasper, who could neither read nor write, modestly declined it.
The pine-tree flag, which was a favorite device with the officers of American privateers, had a white field with a green pine-tree in the middle, and the motto, "An Appeal to Heaven." This flag was officially endorsed by the Massachusetts Council, which in April, 1776, passed a series of resolutions providing for the regulation of the sea service, among which was the following:
"Resolved, That the uniform of the officers be green and white, and that they furnish themselves accordingly, and that the colors be a white flag with a green pine-tree and the inscription 'An Appeal to Heaven.'"
The device of a rattlesnake was popular among the colonists, and its origin as an American emblem is a curious feature in our national history. It has been stated that its use grew out of a humorous suggestion made by a writer in Franklin's paper, the Pennsylvania Gazette—that, in return for the wrongs which England was forcing upon the colonists, a cargo of rattlesnakes should be sent to the mother-country and "distributed in St. James's Park, Spring Garden, and other places of pleasure."
Colonel Gadsden, one of the Marine Committee, presented to Congress, on the 8th of February, 1776, "an elegant standard, such as is to be used by the commander-in-chief of the American navy; being a yellow flag with a representation of a rattlesnake in the middle in the attitude of going to strike." Another was a white flag with a pine-tree in the centre under which was a snake. Above was "An Appeal to God," and below "Don't Tread on Me!" The Culpepper Minute-Men adopted a similar device, with the name of their company and the motto "Liberty or Death." Another use of the rattlesnake was upon a ground of thirteen horizontal alternate red and white stripes, the snake extending diagonally across the stripes, and the lower white stripe bearing the motto "Don't tread on me." The snake was always represented as having thirteen rattles—and the number thirteen seems constantly to have been kept in mind: thus, thirteen vessels are ordered to be built; thirteen stripes are placed upon the flag; in one design thirteen arrows are grasped in a mailed hand; and in a later one thirteen arrows are in the talons of an eagle.
The red stripes seemed for a time to be used as often on a blue ground as on a white. A water-color drawing found among the papers of Major-General Philip Schuyler represents the Royal Savage, one of the little fleet on Lake Champlain in the summer and winter of 1776, commanded by Benedict Arnold, as flying a flag which Bancroft, in his History of the United States, describes as "the tricolored American banner not yet spangled with stars, but showing thirteen stripes, alternate red and white, in the field, and the united crosses of St. George and St. Andrew on a blue ground in the corner."