Appeal to Heaven flag
A white flag with a green pine tree and the motto “An Appeal to Heaven”, flown from 1775 by the schooners George Washington fitted out to intercept British ships, and made the colours of the Massachusetts navy in April 1776.
Meaning
Colonel Joseph Reed suggested it in a letter from Cambridge of 20 October 1775 to Colonels Glover and Moylan: “What do you think of a flag with a white ground, and a tree in the middle, the motto ‘AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN’”. It became familiar on the seas as the ensign of the cruisers commissioned by General Washington, the House of Representatives’ history “Our Flag” says, and English newspapers of the time noted it. Ted Kaye of the North American Vexillological Association counts six schooners that flew it in 1775, and says it was the maritime flag of Massachusetts from 1776 until 1971. Massachusetts law still sets a naval and maritime flag of a white field with a green pine tree on each side, without the motto. Since 2021 the flag has been carried by some political groups and has been at the centre of public controversies, the Associated Press reported in May 2024.
Origin and history
Reed’s idea was taken up quickly. In January 1776 the London Chronicle described the flag of a captured provincial privateer kept at the Admiralty office: a field of white bunting, a green pine tree in the middle, and the motto “An appeal to Heaven” on the other side. The Tartar, reaching Portsmouth from Boston on 6 January 1776 with the crew of an American privateer, brought her colours too, reported as “a pale green palm tree upon a white field with this motto: ‘We appeal to Heaven.’” Commodore Samuel Tucker later wrote that his wife made the banner he fought under in the schooner Franklin, equipped by Washington’s order, in January 1776: a white field with a pine tree of green cloth she bought herself. Preble collected all three in his history of the flag of 1872.
In April 1776 the Massachusetts council, regulating its sea service, resolved that the officers’ uniform be green and white “and that the colors be a white flag with a green pine tree and the inscription ‘An appeal to Heaven.’” Two flags of the Massachusetts squadron were shown at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876, the historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes.
What does the Appeal to Heaven flag mean?
The motto is John Locke’s, from his Second Treatise of Government (1690): a people with no judge on earth to right them have, in his words, “a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment.” CNN’s account of the flag in 2024 traces the phrase to that passage. Locke’s example is Jephthah in the Book of Judges, who had no court on earth to judge between Israel and the Ammonites and so “was forced to appeal to heaven” before leading out his army. The pine tree, the same account says, became a symbol of American resistance after the Pine Tree Riot, one of the clashes between colonists and the Crown before the Revolution.
How the form changed
The tree and the words varied from flag to flag in 1775 and 1776. Reed asked only for a tree; the Massachusetts resolution named a green pine; the Tartar’s prize, as the English papers reported it, had a pale green palm and the words “We appeal to Heaven”. The London Chronicle’s privateer flag had the motto on the side opposite the tree. Massachusetts’s naval and maritime flag today is the tree alone, white field and green pine, with no words.
Where you’ll see it today
whatdoesthissymbolmean.comFlag of MassachusettsMassachusetts law keeps a white flag with a green pine tree as its naval and maritime flag.Read next
- Next in Historical flagsFlag of the Soviet UnionThe state flag of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics: a red flag with a gold hammer and sickle and a gold-edged red star in the upper corner by the pole. It was set by the constitution of 1924 and came down over the Kremlin for the last time on 25 December 1991.
- The same shape in Hanukkah symbolsDreidelA four-sided spinning top played with at Hanukkah. Its Hebrew letters, nun, gimel, hei and shin, stand for “a great miracle happened there”; in Israel a pei replaces the shin, for “a great miracle happened here”.
See also
Grand Union flag, Jolly Roger, Blackbeard’s flag, Calico Jack’s flag, Bartholomew Roberts’s flag, Emanuel Wynne’s flag.
Sources
- Our Flag: Origin and Progress of the Flag of the United States (Preble 1872), George Henry Preble, Our Flag. Origin and progress of the flag of the United States of America (Albany: Joel Munsell, 1872), Internet Archive, pp. 141–142, and notes to plate VI
- Our Flag (H. Doc. 100-247), section 2, House Document 100-247, Our Flag: “Early American Flags” and “Historical Flags”, U.S. House of Representatives (via NPS History), Early American Flags
- How a flag with Mass. Revolutionary War roots became a banner of the far right, Gary Fields, Lisa Mascaro and Farnoush Amiri, The Associated Press, published by WBUR News, 24 May 2024, WBUR (The Associated Press), article text
- Massachusetts General Laws, chapter 2, section 3, Massachusetts General Laws, Part I, Title I, Chapter 2, Section 3: Commonwealth and naval and maritime flags; design, The General Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, § 3
- Second Treatise of Government, John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690), Project Gutenberg ebook 7370, Project Gutenberg, Chapter III, Sect. 21; Chapter XIV, Sect. 168
- The history behind the controversial ‘Appeal to Heaven’ flag, CNN, 31 May 2024, as syndicated by ABC 17 News, CNN (via ABC 17 News, KMIZ), article text
- How Betsy Ross Became Famous, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “How Betsy Ross Became Famous: Oral tradition, nationalism, and the invention of history”, Common-place, Common-place: The Journal of Early American Life, article text
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Researched, edited and approved by Rory Hansen before publishing. Last reviewed October 14, 2026. How we research
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