You can tell a lot about people by the flags they fly. Business reporters Anne Quito and Amanda Sherdruk surveyed the flags displayed by pro-Trump supporters at the January 6, 2021, raid on the US Capitol in Washington, DC. They exhibited, not so much a movement, as a sea of hate, fear, and confusion.
There were flags representing the conspiracy theory group Q-Anon. There were “Stop the Steal” flags, Trump as Rambo flags, “Thin Blue Line” police support flags, the Marine Corps flag, and the South Carolina Union Jack. Protestors also waved flags representing the Republic of Kekistand, an ancient Egyptian deity of Darkness. The “Three Percenter” emblem of military extremists mixed in with Old Glory, upside-down American flags, the St. Andrews Cross, the “Come and Take it” flag displaying a canon, various state flags, and even the pro-Christian Ichthys symbol, often called the “Jesus Fish” flag.
Two of them, the white Culpeper Flag and the yellow Gadsden Flag, include a coiled rattlesnake with the motto “Don’t Tread on Me,” once used to represent American opposition to a tyrannical King George III. Lately the symbol has been appropriated by militia groups and the Tea Party, which are opposed to what they consider the oppression of their own government. The rattlesnake idea dates back to before the Revolution when Benjamin Franklin created the “Join or Die” image of a snake cut into segments representing the 13 original colonies.
I remembered a long distance phone conversation I had .with the late maritime historian and naval artist William Gilkerson. He lived in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. Gilkerson was the world expert in the many flags and ensigns attributed to the ships of John Paul Jones. We agreed that no one will ever know what flag Jones flew as he guided the warship Ranger out of the Piscataqua River and into history in 1777. Later, the Ranger as seen in Holland bearing the strange “Serapis Flag,” that was never seen again.
Our conversation turned to the flag Lieutenant Jones hoisted above the Alfred at Philadelphia in 1775, two years before he arrived in Portsmouth, NH. Many illustrations show Jones with a rattlesnake flag with the “Don’t Tread on Me” slogan. Today, flFlag experts (called “vexillologists”) generally believe Jones hoisted the “Grand Union” flag, rather than the “Navy Jack” flag with the rattlesnake.
“We have no idea what the flag was like that he raised on Alfred when he was first lieutenant,” Gilkerson told me. “There’s sort of a consensus as to what flags he flew on his command, but that was not his command.”
In his highly collectible book, Ships of John Paul Jones (1987), Gilkerson cheated a bit. It’s hard to tell what flag is flying in his illustrations of Alfred, but it is definitely not the Navy Jack. His illustration of the Providence, a ship captained by Jones, clearly shows the Grand Union flag. It was a combination of the British flag plus 13 red-and-white stripes.
And that makes sense. Revolutionary Americans still saw themselves as descended from Mother England, rather than violent snake-like terrorists. The first goal of the Revolution was to gain representation and respect as English citizens.
“Modern historians are always looking for the quintessential item for a certain age and there really isn’t one,” Gilkerson told me. Flags communicate meaning, he said, but the same flag can mean different things to different people. Back during the War for Independence, people were loyal to a wide range of causes.
One eyewitness from 1775 claimed Jones definitely did not raise a rattlesnake flag on Alfred. The witness wrote in a letter: “the largest ship will carry at her mizzen peak a Jack with the Union flag, and striped red and white in the field.”
Which is why I was amused by today’s photograph of a man raising the Navy Jack flag outside his home in Texas. The caption says the Navy Jack is traditionally flown from the bow of a ship on patriotic holidays. True enough. But the newspaper also reported that the flag in the photo is a reproduction of the one carried by John Paul Jones on the Bonhomme Richard in 1775. Sorry, wrong ship, wrong flag, and wrong date.
The meaning of a historic flag can be confusing, even when we know which flag we’re talking about. After decades of studying Captain Jones, I wondered if William GIlkerson felt he knew what motivated Jones, a Scotsman, to fight for the American cause.
“I had the feeling that I did get to know him,“ Gilkerson told me. “He was your basic warrior. I don’t think he was particularly patriotic to the future USA at all. In fact, he really liked France. He liked being known as a skillful commander. But he needed a flag to wave and a reason to go fight somebody.”
All too true today, Mr. Gilkerson. All too true.
© J. Dennis Robinson, all rights reserved.
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