10/21/2026
“In the aftermath of the affair the pine tree became a symbol of the resistance to royal authority…”
A 1722 law prohibited New Hampshire settlers from cutting down any white pine trees more than one foot in diameter. Those trees, the law declared, belonged to the king for potential use in naval construction. For decades the law was honored in the breach and rarely enforced. But after John Wentworth was appointed royal governor of the colony he decided to crack down on violations. In April 1772 royal authorities arrested sawmill owner Ebenezer Mudgett of Weare, New Hampshire, and charged him with breaking the law.
New Englanders had long resented the so-called “pine mast laws” as infringements on their livelihoods and their liberties. The night of his arrest, after being released on bail, Mudgett and about 20 other townsmen disguised themselves and broke into room in the local inn where the sheriff and his deputy were staying. Mudgett and his colleagues seized the two men, beat them, then ran them out of town before a jeering crowd of onlookers. Mudgett and eight others were later arrested and charged with rioting and assault. A sympathetic judge gave them nominal fines as their punishment.
In the aftermath of the affair the pine tree became a symbol of the resistance to royal authority, and the so-called Pine Tree Riot may have helped inspire the Boston Tea Party. During the Battle of Bunker Hill, New England Continental troops flew “pine tree flags”—red battle flags with a pine tree on the upper left.
In October 1775 George Washington commissioned a pine tree flag for the American navy. Washington’s design was a pine tree on a white field, above which appeared the words “An Appeal to Heaven.” The phrase, frequently used by the revolutionaries, appeared in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government. “For whenever violence is used, and injury done, though by hands appointed to administer justice,” Locke wrote, “war is made upon the sufferers, who having no appeal on earth to right them, they are left to the only remedy in such cases, an appeal to heaven.” The scripture cited by Locke in support of his argument made clear his meaning: an appeal to heaven for victory in war. In other words, when there is no just temporal authority to whom the oppressed can appeal, their final option is to take up arms and appeal to heaven.
The images are the Bunker Hill Pine Tree Flag and Washington’s naval Pine Tree Flag.
