May 9, 1754, Franklin published a political cartoon depicting a rattlesnake with the admonishing title, “JOIN, or DIE.”

To Loyalists, the serpent represented Satan, deception, and the spiritual fall of man, proving the treachery of revolutionary thought. To Patriots however, the snake depicted wisdom, vigor, and cohesiveness, especially when the colonies united for a common purpose

. Franklin’s cartoon was resurrected as a potent call for colonial unity against Great Britain, ultimately giving momentum to the religious controversy that would soon follow when Loyalists and Patriots began writing their opinions on what the snake symbolized.

The mutability of the laws of the States is found to be a serious evil. The injustice of them has been so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most stedfast friends of Republicanism. I am persuaded I do not err in saying that the evils issuing from these sources21 contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects.

That no Act, Imposition, Law or Ordinance, be made or imposed upon us, at present or to come; but such as shall be made or imposed by consent of the Body of Freemen or Associates, or their Representatives legally assembled:

ble and clearly defined in the spirit of that declaration which rests the right to govern on the consent of the governed, but because I foresaw that the wickedness of the North would precipitate a war upon us. Those who supposed that the exercise of this right of separation could not produce war, have had cause to be convinced that they had credited their recent associates of the North with a moderation, a sagacity, a morality they did not possess. You have been involved in a war waged for the gratification of the lust of power and of aggrandizement, for your conquest and your subjugation, with a malignant ferocity and with a disregard and a contempt of the usages of civilization, entirely unequalled in history. Such, I have ever warned you, were the characteristics of the Northern people--of those with whom our ancestors entered into a Union of consent, and with whom they formed a constitutional compact. And yet, such was the attachment of our people for that Union, such their devotion to it, that those who desired preparation to be made for the inevitable conflict, were denounced as men who only wished to destroy the Union. After what has happened during the last two years, my only wonder is that we consented to live for so long a time in association with such miscreants, and have loved so much a government rotten to the core. Were it ever to be proposed again to enter into a Union with such a people, I could no more consent to do it than to trust myself in a den of thieves.

The issue then being: will you be slaves; will you consent to be robbed of your property; to be reduced to provincial dependence; will you renounce the exercise of those rights with which you were born and which were transmitted to you by your fathers?

What are we to think of history? when in less than 40 years, such diversities appear in the memories of living persons, who were witnesses?”[2]

This raises the question: If historians can’t remember these things, why do we require 18- year-olds to know them? These tests stress small bits of information that are impossible to remember in the long term. Historians know something deeper. They know how to evaluate historical documents, how to look at conflicting sources and come to a reasoned judgment—in other words, how to be a citizen in a cacophonous democracy. That is the value-added of studying history and that is what we give short shrift to in our high school history classes.

The knowledge-based economy doesn’t require students to be walking encyclopedias who can recall a piece of information. It requires the ability to sort through conflicting information and come to a reasoned conclusion. We need tests that help us do that.

In November 1630, John Baker was “whipped for shooteing att fowle on the Sabboth day”; and in June 1631, it was ordered that Phillip Ratliffe should be whipped, have his ears cut off, and be banished “for vttering mallitious and scandulous speeches against the goumt. & the church of Salem.

The inattention paid in the official record to women or indigenous land compels us to force open gaps and bring alternative narratives to light. Without this work, John Winthrop’s will be the only story told in textbooks about this country’s colonial history.

The Puritan freemen may have the loudest voices in the archive, but theirs are not the only narratives being told.