Joint Snake
political cartoon by Benjamin Franklin, 1754
Origins:
The joint snake, also known was the glass snake and the brimstone snake, can be found in print as early as 1709. Originally reported in the Carolina colonies (though similar folklore can be found in other countries including China and the Philipines), it was described by John Lawson in A New Voyage to Carolina (1709):
It is as brittle as a Tobacco-Pipe, so that if you give it the least Touch of a small Twigg, it immediately breaks into several Pieces. Some affirm, that if you let it remain where you broke it, it will come together again.
The above would be repeated word-for-word by John Brickwell (The Natural History of North-Carolina, 1737). This would be corroborated by Charles Owen in An Essay Towards a Natural History of Serpents (1742).
These stories were shared across Europe and found a foothold in French emblems, in which a popular motif were snaked cut into two pieced with mottos like “Nec mors nec vita relicta [Neither death nor life abandoned]” and “Se rejoindre ou mourir [Rejoin or die].”
On May 9, 1754, the joint snake would find its most famous depiction in a political cartoon published by The Pennsylvania Gazette, by Benjamin Franklin. Join, or Die (clearly taking inspiration from the French emblems) depicts the American colonies as individual joint snake segments, in the attempt to urge unity in the face of the French and Indian War. A popular idea, it would be adapted across several mediums, with the original reutilized to symbolize colonial unity for the Revolutionary War.
As the Revolutionary War years went, the joint snake was quickly replaced with a rattlesnake and stronger language (e.g. "Don't Tread On Me"). Still, it lived on in in folklore. Per The American Universal Geography, Or, A View of the Present State of all the Empires, Kingdoms, States, and Republics in the Known World, and of the United States of America in Particular. In Two Parts (1802), by Jedidiah Morse:
The joint snake, if we may credit Carver's account of it, is a great curiosity. Its skin is as hard as parchment, and as smooth as glass. It is beautifully streaked with black and white. It is so stiff, and has so few joints, and those so unyielding, that i can hardly bend itself into the form od a hoop. When it is struck it breaks like a pipe-stem; and you may, with a whipe, break it from the tail to the bowels into pieces not an inch long, and not produce the least tincture of blood. It is not venomous.
Of course, the joint snake doesn't actually break into multiple pieces, only one (as found in the French emblems); it also isn't a snake at all. As stated in the Transactions of the Edinburgh Field Naturalists' and Microscopical Society (1898):
But one of the most extraordinary myths regarding animals is that of the American "joint-snake," usually supposed to be the Ophisaurus ventralis, or glass-snake - a footless lizard allied to our blind-worm.
[...]
But I have since found that the myth of the joint-snake is a matter of popular belief in the United States, and in fact a few years ago my children, to whom I had told the Yankee tale to amuse me, pointed out to me an article in 'Harper's Young People' in which the legend of the joint-snake was related apparently as an actual fact! That is, I suppose, scientific education for the young!!