The "Join, or Die" snake, a cartoon image printed in numerous newspapers as the conflict between England and France over the Ohio Valley was expanding into war—"the first global war fought on every continent," as Thomas Bender recently has written—first appeared in the May 9, 1754 edition of Benjamin Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette. The image displayed a snake cut up into eight pieces. The snake’s detached head was labeled "N.E." for “New England,” while the trailing seven sections were tagged with letters representing the colonies of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The exhortation "JOIN, or DIE" appeared underneath the image.

Lester C. Olson points out that Franklin might have seen images of snakes divided into two segments that had been published in Paris in 1685, 1696, and 1724 with the similar caption "Se rejoinder ou mourir." The image in the Pennsylvania Gazette followed an article reporting the recent surrender of a British frontier fort to the French army and purported plans of the French, with their Indian allies, to establish a massive frontier presence with which to terrify British settlers and traders. The article ended with the surmise that the French were confident they would be able to "take an easy Possession of such Parts of the British Territory as they find most convenient for them" due to the "present disunited State of the British Colonies" and warned that the French success "must end in the Destruction of the British interest; Trade and Plantations in America."

A longtime advocate of intercolonial union in dealings with Indians, Franklin helped make such a union an important agenda item for the Albany Congress, convened shortly after the snake image was published, on earlier orders from the Board of Trade, the British advisory council on colonial policy, with the goal of establishing one treaty between all the colonies and the Six Nations of Iroquois. As a commissioner to the congress appointed by the governor of Pennsylvania, Franklin was opposed in his efforts to unify the colonies by representatives of some of the colonial assemblies intent on maintaining control over their own affairs.

Robert C. Newbold has speculated that Georgia was probably excluded from the snake image, "because, as a defenseless frontier area, it could contribute nothing to common security." Only three laws had been passed in Georgia since its founding as a colony in 1732, prompting a historian of the colony and state to conclude, "The hope that Georgia might become a self-reliant province of soldier-farmers had not succeeded, and even the early debtor-haven dream had not come to pass." Delaware, Newbold added, "shared the same governor, albeit a different legislature, as Pennsylvania; hence the Gazette probably considered it as included with Pennsylvania."

As with the snake image, the Albany Plan, drafted during the congress, did not include Georgia and Delaware in its proposed colonial union for mutual defense and security, specifying only Massachusetts Bay, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. The segmented snake image was revived in a number of newspapers during the 1765 Stamp Act conflict, again without reference to Georgia and Delaware. In 1774, when the segmented snake image, along with the "Join or Die" slogan, was employed as a masthead for newspapers in York, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania, a pointed tail labeled "G" for Georgia had been added.

The battle at Antietam Creek on September 17, 1862, ended Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s first invasion of the North. The Confederate Army of Northern Virginia faced Union General George B. McClellan’s Army of the Potomac near Sharpsburg, Maryland; by the end of the day, 6,000 Americans lay dead or dying and another 17,000 were wounded. It remains the bloodiest single day in American history.

The Confederate Army fielded two corps (Longstreet’s and Jackson’s), organized into nine infantry divisions and a cavalry division and comprising more than 130 individual regiments, together totaling more than 38,000 men. The Union Army of the Potomac fielded six corps (I, II, V, VI, IX, and XII) organized into 18 infantry divisions and a cavalry division; more than 191 individual regiments numbering some 75,000 federal troops fought in the battle at Antietam. (An exhaustive list of every corps, division, brigade and regiment, along with the officers that commanded them—known as the order of battle—can be found in Stephen Sears’ Landscape Turned Red: The Battle of Antietam, pp. 359-372.

Union General Ambrose Burnside’s IX Corps held the left side of the Federal line south of town, where a single bridge spanned Antietam creek. Burnside’s men spent hours attempting to cross the narrow bridge in the hopes of flanking the Confederate line on the western bank. (The flanking maneuver, in which the attacker attempted to get around the side of the defender’s line and attack it at right angles, formed a critical part of Civil War military tactics. Because a flanked line was extremely vulnerable to enemy fire, and because it could not level its own return fire very effectively, Civil War commanders repeatedly tried to flank their opponents while trying to avoid having their own lines flanked.)

Though Antietam creek was shallow enough to be forded at several places, Burnside focused his corps’ attacks on the lone bridge near the Rohrback farm—a bridge that would later bear his name, thanks to his troops’ bloody attempts to cross it. Because the bridge was only twelve feet wide, a relatively small number of Confederate defenders was able to prevent Burnisde’s entire corps from crossing for hours. Beginning at around 10 a.m., two Georgia regiments held off attacks by some 12,500 Union soldiers.

Finally, at around 2 p.m., two Northern regiments hand-picked for their toughness and promised a ration of liquor after capturing the bridge, attempted to cross at a run. The 670 men of those regiments charged down the hill facing the bridge and fanned out behind cover on the eastern banks; the Georgian defenders, exhausted and nearly out of ammunition after three hours of fighting, began to withdraw. In a rush, color-bearers led the two units across the bridge and finally secured a foothold on the western shore. More than 500 Federals and 120 Rebels had died in the fighting there. George McClellan, commanding general of the Union forces at Antietam, later received significant criticism for the uncoordinated attacks along the Federal line, for not pushing to cross the creek more quickly, and for failing to exploit the crossing effectively. Most observers judged the battle at Antietam a draw; McClellan had ended Lee’s invasion of the North, but the rebel army remained an effective fighting force. Lincoln and others viewed the battle as a lost opportunity to end the war.

Burnside’s ineffective leadership at the bridge during led McClellan to write to his wife little more than a week later describing him as “very slow” and “not fit to command more than a regiment.” McClellan’s evaluation may have been correct; nevertheless, McClellan’s own performance at Antietam led to his removal by Abraham Lincoln on November 7, 1862. The Army of the Potomac’s next commander would be none other than Ambrose Burnside, who led the Union forces in the even more disastrous and lopsided defeat at Fredericksburg that December.