What Does the Appeal to Heaven Flag Mean? The Real History

In the fall of 1775, before there was a United States Navy, George Washington had a practical problem. His small fleet of armed schooners off the Massachusetts coast needed a way to recognize one another at sea. The answer was a white flag with a green pine tree and four words beneath it: "An Appeal to Heaven."

Two and a half centuries later, the same flag has been called everything from a patriotic heirloom to a far-right dog whistle. The real history is short, well documented and worth knowing before you accept anyone's spin about it.

What does "An Appeal to Heaven" mean?

The phrase comes from John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690), one of the most influential books the Founders read. Locke argued that when people suffer injustice and there is no earthly judge left to hear their case, they are left with an "appeal to Heaven": the right to resist tyranny and leave the outcome to God.

For the colonists in 1775, that was not abstract philosophy. It described exactly where they stood. They had petitioned the Crown and been rebuffed, and in August 1775 King George III declared the colonies to be in open rebellion. Patrick Henry had put the same idea in blunter terms that March: "An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!" The motto on the flag was a one-line summary of the American case for independence, a year before the Declaration made it official.

Where did the Appeal to Heaven flag come from?

The design traces to a letter written in October 1775 by Colonel Joseph Reed, Washington's military secretary, to the officers fitting out the general's first armed vessels. Reed asked them to settle on "some particular colour for a flag," and suggested one: "a flag with a white ground, a tree in the middle, the motto 'Appeal to Heaven.'"

Reed noted it was already the flag of the "floating batteries," armed scows that had launched on the Charles River near Boston that September. It went on to fly over the schooners commissioned under Washington's authority as commander of the Continental Army, a small squadron historians often call "Washington's Cruisers," which preyed on British supply ships. In 1776, the Massachusetts General Court adopted the pine tree and the appeal to Heaven for the colony's own navy.

Why a pine tree?

The eastern white pine was a symbol of New England long before 1775. Pine trees appeared on Massachusetts coins as early as the 1650s. They were also a point of real friction with the Crown. Under the "Broad Arrow" policy, the largest white pines in the colonies were marked and reserved for Royal Navy ship masts, and colonists who cut them faced penalties. In 1772, resistance to that policy boiled over in New Hampshire's Pine Tree Riot.

So the tree was a deliberate choice: a homegrown symbol of the colonies, and of a resource the British claimed as their own, flying over ships built to fight the British.

Why is the Appeal to Heaven flag controversial now?

For most of the 20th century, the flag was a historical curiosity. That began to change in the 2010s, when evangelical author Dutch Sheets popularized it in Christian conservative circles, including in his 2015 book An Appeal to Heaven. Sheets has presented the flag to political figures including House Speaker Mike Johnson.

Some people carried the flag at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Then, in May 2024, The New York Times reported that the flag had flown at Justice Samuel Alito's New Jersey beach house in 2023. Alito said his wife chose the flags flown at the home. Within days, the coverage had settled on a single frame: a revolutionary-era banner had become a symbol of insurrection and "Christian nationalism."

That frame left out an awkward fact. The same flag had flown in front of San Francisco City Hall since Flag Day 1964, as part of a display of historic American flags. Nobody called San Francisco a nest of insurrectionists for six decades. The city quietly took the flag down only at the end of May 2024, after the Alito story broke, saying it had been adopted by a group that does not represent the city's values.

The flag did not change that week. The story told about it did.

Critics, including religious-studies scholar Matthew Taylor, argue that the flag's modern revival carries a specific religious and political meaning that its 1775 version did not. That is a fair debate about how some people use it today. But a symbol is not owned by its worst-behaved users, and a flag that flew on Washington's warships and outside San Francisco City Hall for 60 years is hard to credibly recast as a fringe emblem. Law professor Jonathan Turley has likewise argued that the "Christian nationalist flag" label does not fit.

Is it offensive to fly the Appeal to Heaven flag?

No law restricts it, and most people who fly it do so for its Revolutionary War history. If you fly it alongside the Stars and Stripes, the U.S. Flag Code applies to the American flag: no other flag should be placed above it on the same staff, and on the same halyard the U.S. flag goes at the peak.

Appeal to Heaven flag: quick facts

• Also called: the Pine Tree Flag, the Washington's Cruisers flag
• First flown: 1775, on the Charles River floating batteries and Washington's armed schooners
• Proposed by: Col. Joseph Reed, Washington's secretary, in an October 1775 letter
• Motto source: John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)
• Official use: adopted for the Massachusetts navy in 1776

Want more of the story behind America's founding symbols? Read our explainer on what "molon labe" means, and if you want to fly this one properly, see our flag pole buying guide.

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