By Mark Maloy - Posted at Emerging Revolutionary War Era:
Where do our rights come from? The answer to this question is at the heart of the pine tree flag that was flown by soldiers and sailors during the Revolutionary War. The Founding Fathers were very clear about where they believed rights came from. In the Declaration of Independence, the Founders say that their “unalienable rights” were “endowed by their Creator”. This was a distillation of hundreds of years of religious and enlightenment thought and writing. Because their rights came from God, the role of government was not to provide rights, but to protect their natural rights from people or governments that would infringe them.If a government were to attempt to subvert a people’s natural rights, who could the people appeal to for justice? At that point, the only recourse is an appeal to God or Heaven to protect their natural rights.
The actual phrase comes from a passage in John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government (1689): “And where the body of the people, or any single man, is deprived of their right, or is under the exercise of a power without right, and have no appeal on earth, then they have a liberty to appeal to heaven, whenever they judge the cause of sufficient moment . . . And therefore, though the people cannot be judge, so as to have, by the constitution of that society, any superior power, to determine and give effective sentence in the case; yet they have, by a law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men, reserved that ultimate determination to themselves which belongs to all mankind, where there lies no appeal on earth, viz. to judge, whether they have just cause to make their appeal to heaven.” [emphasis added]
As war between American colonists and British regulars began in 1775, the colonists stressed that the need for war was to defend their natural rights, or the “rights of Englishmen.” Supporters of the patriot cause developed numerous flags and banners that highlighted the cause for which they were fighting. These banners which flew from ships, forts, and carried into battle often included symbols and motifs as well as words and phrases. There were rattlesnake flags with the words “Don’t Tread on Me”. There were regimental flags with Latin phrases. Many included stars and stripes, though a standard American national flag was not developed by the Congress until 1777. Among the banners and flags created in the early days of the conflict that demonstrated the justice of their cause, was an “Appeal to Heaven” flag.