Liberty or Death — The Rattlesnake

"Give me liberty, or give me death!" Patrick Henry closed with those words on March 23, 1775, before the Second Virginia Convention at St. John's Church in Richmond, arguing that the colony should raise a militia. Lexington was four weeks away. No transcript was taken; the speech as it is known was reconstructed by his biographer William Wirt in 1817 from the memories of men who had been in the room.

The rattlesnake below it belongs to the same year. Christopher Gadsden of South Carolina put a coiled rattler on a yellow field for the Continental Navy's first commodore, Esek Hopkins, and it flew as the fleet sailed in early 1776.

Franklin had argued for the snake in 1775: it never strikes first, and never surrenders.

Three stacked words in heavy navy serif fill the top of the sheet — Give me, liberty, death — with "or give me" set small between two rules. Below them the rattlesnake coils in red, mouth open, rattle raised, on a tuft of red grass lifted from the Gadsden flag. Type above, emblem below, a navy border around both. The red and navy on white land it squarely in the flag's palette without a single star.