Nearly two years before the Boston Tea Party, a lesser-known uprising against British tyranny in Weare, New Hampshire, helped light the flame of independence – and gifted the nation an enduring symbol of liberty.
In the early morning hours of April 14, 1772, Ebenezer Mudgett, a 45-year-old sawmill owner, wiped soot across his face until he no longer looked like himself, along with a few dozen other townsmen in the room. No words were spoken. None were needed.
At dawn, the men followed Mudgett to the Pine Tree Tavern, where Benjamin Whiting, the Sheriff of Hillsborough County, and his Deputy John Quigley had stayed the night. They didn’t know it yet, but these officers of the Crown were about to face the wrath of Americans who refused to bend the knee to a ruler an ocean away.
Mudgett made his living turning New England’s great pine forests into lumber at his sawmill. Among the most treasured trees was the white pine, with magnificent specimens hundreds of years old growing to enormous heights and thickness.
American millers viewed the great bounty of this New World as their own. But under the Broad Arrow Policy, King George I declared all white pine trees larger than 12 inches in diameter to be the property of the English Crown – reserved for the masts on Royal Navy ships. The King’s surveyor simply made three slashes on the trunk (the broad arrow) of the tree to claim it.
For Americans like Mudgett, those trees were a livelihood – the difference between a mill that survived and a mill that failed.
In Weare in 1772, a laborer might earn two shillings a day. Mudgett’s household likely existed on a few dozen pounds a year in mixed coin, boards, and store credit. The Admiralty counted white pines as worth around 135 pounds for a great mast delivered on the Thames River.
That money, however, went to the shipper. The miller was paid nothing because the presumption was that he never truly had a title to the property. He was merely a subject allowed to harvest whatever the King did not want. The Royal Navy’s need, defined in London, superseded the need of any individual American.
On April 13, Whiting and Quigley arrived with a warrant after it was discovered that Mudgett’s mill was violating the Broad Arrow Policy – stealing what the King insisted belonged to him. They arrested Mudgett and released him on the promise that he would post bail the following morning. But Mudgett and the people of Weare were not about to sit quietly and let the Crown take whatever it pleased.
Between 20 and 40 men joined Mudgett in his righteous anger. Their faces blackened, their breath visible in the cold, they began their walk to the Pine Tree Tavern just before dawn on April 14.
The men moved together, boots on frozen ground, no lanterns, no talk. They inched through the door of the inn and into a narrow hall. Mudgett then burst into the Sheriff’s room.
“Bail is ready,” he announced.
The crowd of men then began to beat Whiting with tree branch switches, shouting as they grabbed his arms and legs. Quigley was pulled from his room and received the same treatment. Both men were then forced to ride out of town through a gauntlet of jeering townspeople.
A posse was eventually gathered up to punish the townspeople, but the court cases resulted in only light fines. The authorities likely feared further unrest.
While the Pine Tree Riot isn’t taught in most history classes today, it undoubtedly deserves a place in America’s founding lore. The refusal of Mudgett and his band of patriots was about more than just disobedience of one royal edict.
By defying the Broad Arrow Policy, they were rejecting the presumption that their right to property began and ended with the King. They were rejecting the presumption that the King’s permission was required before a man could build a future for his family, the presumption that the King’s decrees, on whatever subject, were the very definition of justice.
This was something uniquely and exceptionally American. For all Western history, owning property was almost exclusively reserved for the nobility and a select few elites. The colonies were the first place where the common man, no matter the conditions of his birth, could hope to have land to call his own. This was the birth of the American Dream.
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Three years later, in October 1775, General George Washington’s army was starving outside Boston. Powder was scarce. Uniforms were mismatched. Congress had not declared independence. The colonies were still arguing about reconciliation. Washington commanded an army whose recruits did not yet know if they fought for a new nation or simply for less oppressive colonial rule.
Washington needed a symbol. Something above Congress – something the men already understood. Something that spoke to the rights Heaven had granted long before any legislature was formed. Something which refused the presumption that rights are gifts or indulgences from the elite.
Washington chose a flag with a white pine tree and the words “AN APPEAL TO HEAVEN” emblazoned above it. He took a symbol already revered by millers, farmers, and tradesmen and raised it to national purpose. The tree had become the emblem of ordinary citizens refusing the presumption that the Crown owned their future.
Washington ordered that the banner be hoisted on the masts of the first American naval vessels. The symbol was taken from the Pine Tree Riot, the words borrowed from John Locke’s Second Treatise, where Locke wrote that when earthly authority becomes lawless, the people retain the right to appeal to God.
Washington recognized a starving army could endure hunger, but it could not survive doubt about the origin of its rights.
The Pine Tree Flag was a declaration. It told the world that the American Revolution was about more than merely taxation or forms of representation – it was about a man’s right to own his labor, to build, to worship, and to hope – all rights that government cannot justly take, but also rights which the weak or the frightened often choose to surrender.
The Pine Tree Flag flew over schooners that seized British supply ships and kept the Continental Army alive through the winter. It flew over men who had no guarantee of victory.
The flag was also a reminder that the Crown’s presumption – that rights were to be granted and revoked at the whim of a monarch – had already been rejected by millers in New Hampshire before it was rejected by Congress in Philadelphia.
Today, the Pine Tree Flag reminds us to ask ourselves what new masters claim dominion over us – over the rights and freedoms we hold sacred. These masters come not in the form of kings or armies, but rather “experts,” administrators, and distant authorities who speak as though rights are indulgences granted by institutions rather than endowments granted by God.
The Pine Tree Flag evokes questions that have not aged: Who owns your future? Who owns your labor? Who owns your conscience? Who owns your hope?
Ultimately, the flag reminds us that rights are not permissions – they are an inheritance from Almighty God.
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